Triathlete Wendy Heldt tackles life’s challenges one step at a time
Wendy Heldt’s legs felt thick as she stumbled off her bike and got ready for her 26.2-mile run.
The triathlete had already swum 2.4 miles and biked 112, and felt unusually lethargic as she began the final leg of the Ironman Triathlon World Championship in Kona, Hawaii.
“All of the sudden I’m dealing with this adversity, and I’d never had this experience in a race before,” the 52-year-old Appleton woman says. “I was feeling a little defeated.”
Triathlons didn’t typically overwhelm Heldt, who won her the 50-54 age group and almost set a course record in the 2007 Wisconsin Ironman to qualify for the October 2008 Kona race. She’s a fierce competitor, as her husband, Andy, has witnessed.
“When you go out biking with Wendy, and see another biker in the distance, she goes into catch mode, you find yourself riding harder because she wants to see who it is,” he says. “Your ride went from a nice casual ride to a hard ride.”
When riding with a group, Wendy will let a new biker charge a hill ahead of her once, Andy notes. The second time she lets that biker know she’s good at hills. The third time, that biker had better be ready for an uphill battle.
“The joke is that if someone pushes on a hill, they don’t understand that Wendy’s with them,” Andy says.
Successful novice
Athletics have long been part of Heldt’s life, but she’s relatively new to triathlons. She played basketball in high school, ran track and cross country at Salisbury University in Maryland and was a competitive biker for a time.
Injuries, career and kids all played a factor in competition getting set aside for a several years. Then she befriended a group of bike riders who were also triathletes, and the YMCA Pilates instructor entered her first triathlon in 2004.
