Girl Power

It’s already seventy degrees and it’s not even eight-thirty in the morning, the air heavy with the promise of an oppressive July day. Down a weeded path to Queechy Lake in Canaan, New York, a group of female athletes gather. A few dance to Eminem’s “My Band,” which blares from the speakers of a parked car, while others casually zip into wetsuits and smooth on sunscreen. Some set their bikes on the rack or jostle for space to place their running shoes and towels in the transition area.

Out of this diverse group—tall, short, stocky, thin, young, middle-aged, quiet, outspoken—steps the ringmaster, personal trainer Joanna Ezinga, also of Canaan. “This is what it’s like when there’s only a dozen people,” she barks. “Can you imagine what it’s going to be like with hundreds of people on the day of the triathlon?”

The group, which has dubbed itself the Scorpions, after a yoga posture from their warm-up routine, hustles down to the beach, cracking jokes and singing a military-style cadence:

        Scorpions are looking good
        Just the way I knew you would
        Scorpions are looking fine
        Run, bike, swimming all the time

With such camaraderie among the athletes, it’s no wonder that the “sprint”-distance triathlon—half-mile swim, twelve-mile bike, and three-mile run (Olympic-distance is a little more than twice as long)—is the fastest-growing sport for women, according to USA Triathlon, the governing body of the sport. Ezinga notes that while many women start triathlon training in order to lose weight, they stay for the reduced heart rate; the increased muscle mass, lung capacity, and energy; and even the elimination of menopause symptoms. They also reap a sense of personal fulfillment that’s hard to match.

 
Ezinga, who grew up in the pre-Title IX era—before the government mandated equal opportunity for girls in school athletic programs—never imagined she’d become a serious athlete, let alone a personal trainer. She earned a master’s in educational psychology, and dabbled in a few careers, including in medical and continuing education and as a producer of a premium granola. After the birth of her second son in 1982, she took up a friend’s challenge to run in the two-mile Mother’s Day Race in Lenox, Massachusetts. She was hooked immediately.

 
Eventually, Ezinga began training for her first marathon and remembers the many hours of grueling workouts. Even more so, she recalls what it was like to achieve her goal. “For a whole year after, when something would happen, I’d say, ‘You’re a marathoner. This is nothing. You can do this.’ I hate the clichés about women’s empowerment, but when we work really hard and dig really deep, it transforms us.”

In 1992, Ezinga discovered triathlons and didn’t look back. Now, at age fifty-seven and in better shape than most women half her age, she’s finished more than twenty-five races, often in the top percentile for her age group—the race packets, times, swim caps, and numbered bibs are all in a filing cabinet in her home office. “I go back and look at them and analyze my performance,” she says. “It’s been difficult realizing that I get slower as I get older, but that’s a reality for all of us. My goals now are to increase my distance to Olympic [distance], and to be more planning-minded in my training.”

A few years ago, Ezinga attained her personal training and triathlon certification, and set up a “tri’” program for women who may not be naturally gifted athletes but who want to work hard and get fit. Her twelve-week course takes a step-up approach to improving the mechanics of running, biking, and swimming, and teaches safe warm-up and cool-down routines, cross-training and strength building, good eating habits, and mental preparation.

 
Athletes in her program train, on average, six hours a week, and practice as a group twice a week. They are required to participate in at least one competition per season. In the program’s first year, the women were reserved about approaching each other outside training time. But in 2008, with so many returning triathletes and a unique chemistry among the group, the Scorpions became a tightly knit team.

 
The members range from a nineteen-year-old Polish student to a mid-thirties single mother of twins, an author in her late forties, and a fifty-one-year-old physician’s assistant. Some were serious athletes in their youth. Some have no athletic background to speak of. Others just want to try something new. Ezinga thrives on their inexperience and curiosity.

“It’s tremendously satisfying to work with people who are essentially beginners,” she explains. “I don’t know what creates that spark, but once it’s there, unless it’s protected and nurtured, it’s going to go out. I want to grow it into a flame.”

The flame is inextinguishable in Dianna Brooks, a tall, muscular, straight-talking fifty-one-year-old. “Of course. That’s the point,” she states when discussing the fact that training can be difficult. And when a photographer observes, “You guys are amazing,” Brooks quips, “Why, because we’re old?”

Yet for all her sass, Brooks softens when discussing her teammates. “They are amazing, every one of them,” she says. “To find people with like thinking and motivation, it’s very empowering.”

Brooks grew up in New Jersey in the 1960s and had to fight for opportunities in athletics, which offered the team environment that her home-life lacked. She joined the Navy and played on their basketball team for four years; then, in a rare feat for a twenty-seven-year-old, she earned a basketball scholarship from Portland State University. After school, Brooks married, had a son, and became a physician’s assistant. Serious athletics fell by the wayside.

Following a painful divorce, she found herself yearning for the family atmosphere of sports and joined a rugby team. She also started swimming and running. “I was thirty-nine, and I didn’t have a coach or anything. I just put two and two together that someday this could be triathlon,” she comments.

Brooks moved to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to be closer to family, and took a job at Berkshire Medical Center. Now clad in a gray Spokane Hoopfest T-shirt and jeans, and fidgeting on the sofa of the suburban home she shares with her partner and three dogs, she recalls attending Ezinga’s triathlon seminar earlier in the season. “Jo said, ‘Anyone can finish a triathlon,’ and I thought, I am so in. The next day I sent her a check, and as soon as I started training, I signed up for the Danskin,” the oldest and largest all-female triathlon race in the country.

She competed in four races in 2008, and finished first in her age-group at the Crystal Lake Triathlon in Averill Park, New York. She credits much of her success to Ezinga. “The amazing thing about Jo is that she attracts or wants to work with people who have body image issues, or who used to be athletes but then had families and didn’t have the time to practice,” Brooks observes. “She makes us feel proud to be who we are. To get a bunch of middle-aged women into a pool in nothing but a bathing suit and goggles—that’s a feat. She gave us confidence before we even started that we were going to finish.”

Brooks also draws strength from an important lesson learned at the Danskin. “I hadn’t seen the finish area in advance, and I wasn’t sure how much longer I had left. I was so tired,” she explains. “One of the guys who was handing out water along the way said, ‘Leave nothing in the tank, athletes.’ That became my goal. If you leave nothing in the tank, if you’ve given everything you have, it doesn’t matter what your time or where you place. We’ll carry these skills and this mindset, this strength, forever.”

Athletics also have played a key role in the life of Sara Aubois, a self-professed “total tomboy” and collegiate middle-distance swimmer, who in the 1990s helped the University of Rhode Island achieve two relay records in the 400- and 800-meter freestyle.

After graduation, while working out with a local masters (adult) swim team, Aubois met several triathletes, and her competitive fire reignited. She began running and biking and entered her first tri’ at age twenty-eight.
 

A couple of years later, dissatisfied with her life and her work as an environmental consultant, Aubois started fresh in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. She enrolled in the nursing program at Berkshire Community College (BCC) and became the assistant coach to the age-ten-and-under swim team at Simon’s Rock College in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

In 2007, Aubois had a dream that she was competing in a triathlon. The next morning, she spied an ad for Ezinga’s seminar in the BCC catalog and took it as a sign. But a month later, Aubois and her teammates were bike training on Pecks Road in Pittsfield. At an intersection, Aubois saw an SUV approaching … and realized the driver wasn’t stopping. “I couldn’t move fast enough,” she says. “I remember thinking, I’m going down. And then I was lying in the street.”

Among other injuries, Aubois suffered a partial tear of the anterior cruciate ligament of the left knee and a separation of the right shoulder. The shoulder healed within a few months; the knee, however, took the better part of a year. Nevertheless, Aubois wasn’t deterred from getting back in the proverbial saddle. She draws her knees up under her chin, tucks a strand of chlorine-bleached hair behind her ear, and asserts, “I’m very competitive. I’ve always been a ‘Suck-it-up, don’t-be-a-Sally’ kind of person. I don’t treat my swimmers like ‘No pain, no gain,’ but I treat myself like that.”
 

She isn’t kidding. Despite the accident, the months of recovery, and weight gain from associated medications, Aubois continually beats herself up for her perceived lack of progress. “I used to be a pretty decent runner; I’ve done 5ks [3.1 miles] in forty-two minutes. I hate running now. I’m not in the shape I was in before. It’s frustrating.”

In 2008, Aubois not only competed but also took on the role of assistant swim coach for the Scorpions. She plans to continue coaching for upcoming seasons but is thrilled to have finally taken part in the Danskin and even cuts herself some slack in analyzing her performance. Most of all, she savored the competitive rush that stayed with her long after the finish. “Danskin isn’t like other tri’s,” she says. “You’d cheer people on even when they were passing you. After I was done, I waited for the very last person to finish. She had the same goal as the winner, the same goal as me. Staying for the last person was more fun than doing it myself.”

Mary Vasquez-Slack has never met a challenge she didn’t want to pummel into submission. Entrepreneur? Check. Inventor? Check. Wife and mom? Check and check. Skydiver, accomplished home chef, philanthropist, jewelry maker? Vasquez-Slack is not the type to let an opportunity to try something new pass her by, and she does it all with a room-lighting smile on her face.

Although she hails from the West Coast, Vasquez-Slack has lived in Pittsfield for most of her adult life. She made a name for herself in the business community by founding My Virtual Secretary, an office-assistant service. She never had the urge to be a professional athlete, but played softball as a kid and later coached her sons’ baseball team. But after falling into some unhealthy habits, including smoking and snacking on junk food, she put on weight and developed stress-induced asthma. Knowing she had to make a change, Vasquez-Slack chucked the cigarettes and started walking in 2004.

Three years later, Ezinga contacted her about some administrative work. It was a magical moment. “As she explained what she was doing, I was hooked,” Vasquez-Slack affirms. “I loved that it was this twelve-week package and that the goal was competition. Even though I’d never done anything like it before, I thought, Wow, I could do a triathlon. There was no question in my mind.”

Vasquez-Slack eased into her first year of the program, with the goal of simply completing a race. But in 2008, she quickly realized that her goals needed updating. “We were training, and I was at the back of the pack, watching all these people pass me. I realized I needed to change my mindset. It wasn’t enough just to finish anymore. I had to start competing with myself in order to get better.”

Vasquez-Slack committed to her exercise logs and consulted a nutritionist. At forty-five, she feels she’s never been more in tune with her body and calls the triathlon experience a “whole lifestyle change.” As for her main goal—the Danskin—she can’t stop gushing about it, from her time (1:44:56, which includes shaving eight minutes off of her previous personal-best swim time) to the sea of purple swim caps that accompanied her in her age-group to the smiling photos of her snapped along the way to the thousands of supportive spectators who cheered her on.

“I’m amazed that I keep getting better at things that haven’t been my strong suit,” she summarizes, her sunny face growing serious. “I know I’m not a strong swimmer, yet I manage to swim the entire length, even in my inefficient way. I don’t love running, so I have to look for distractions while I’m doing it. And I’m overweight—I know that. But just because I’m overweight, you can’t make assumptions about me. The whole process has really changed my perception of myself.”

Her lips stretch into her trademark grin. “I feel like a badass.”

It took a little longer for Annette Santiago to realize her badass potential. A New Yorker by birth, she played tennis during high school, but the city environment combined with a sedentary lifestyle in adulthood led to significant weight gain.

After moving to Lanesborough, Massachusetts, Santiago took up walking. “I was alone one day, and I was one hundred and ninety-five pounds,” she remembers. “I couldn’t make it all the way around the track. I set a goal that the next time I would make it all the way.” Later, she started running, and when she got up to six laps around the track, she signed up for her first race.

Through exercise and healthy eating, Santiago, a forty-three-year-old mother of two and a social worker in Pittsfield, lost more than sixty pounds. In search of a new challenge, she and her co-workers signed up with Ezinga. “At first I just wanted to train and not compete,” she says. “I really just wanted to become more fit. I didn’t know how unbelievable it would feel.”

The first step was getting past a longstanding fear of water caused by two near-drowning incidents in her youth. Although she came home in tears after several early triathlon practices, two months into the program, Santiago was able to swim without fear.

She competed in three local races, including the Pittsfield Y-Athlon, during which she could feel the presence of her father, who had passed away earlier in the year, around her. “He was with me the whole time. I felt thankful that he had given me the fight and will to continue, the drive to stick with it. When I finished the race, I said thank you to him. And I finally mourned his death, which I hadn’t done before.”

Santiago had another “angel” during the race: Aubois, who didn’t compete, but swam alongside her friend. “I felt a real peacefulness in the water,” Santiago explains. “I don’t know if it was because of my father or because Sara was swimming next to me, but I wasn’t afraid. I focused on her swim cap so I wouldn’t go off course, and I felt so strong.”

While Santiago acknowledges that the time commitment for triathlon training brought out her maternal guilt, she’s already looking ahead. She’s taken up yoga to help improve her flexibility, has joined the masters’ swim team at Simon’s Rock, and regularly runs up to six and a half miles. But the biggest inspiration to continue is her teammates, about whom she effuses with words like incredible, amazing, and unbelievable.

Santiago pauses thoughtfully, rubs a hand over the perfectly smooth olive skin of her forehead, and gazes out the picture window of her living room. “I think if I could convince someone to do this, if I could put into words what this whole experience was for me, so many more women would do it. Not only do you become fit, but it brings you so much deeper. I see things differently now. Nothing seems impossible to me.” [AUGUST 2009]

Robin Catalano is a contributing editor to Berkshire Living.

THE GOODS

Ezinga Fitness
Canaan, N.Y.
518.781.3017
www.ezingafitness.com