Karen Holland Completes The Austin, Danskin Triathlon
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- Annuitants & Former ExPats
Author: Karen Holland
Released 24 July 2006
I am Karen Holland, and my husband Jay Holland and I retired from Aramco two and a half years ago. We spent 22 years in Dhahran and have retired to the small town of Bastrop, Texas.
On June 11, 2006 I was fortunate enough to join 3,000 other women in The Austin, Danskin Triathlon. I am writing this to encourage other women from Aramco to step forward and participate in one of these events. A few months ago I read an article in the Aramco Expats Newsletter about a woman, my age, who had recently completed a mini Marathon and it gave me the courage I needed to "give it a try".
The Danskin Women’s Triathlon Series is an eight-city triathlon with nearly 165,000 participants since it was founded in 1990. It was developed to honor all female cancer survivors and to build cancer awareness. The Triathlon includes a half mile swim, a 12 mile bike ride and a 5K run. Last year a friend of mine participated in it for the second time and she was encouraging several of us to join her this year.
Four of us joined her this year and we are all grateful for the experience.
We all started training last summer, just to get the feel for it, but the real training started 8 weeks before the Triathlon.
We started just a little at a time and then began adding to it very slowly until we were ready for the big event. It was an adventure for all of us. It was not just the day of the event, but the experiences that we encountered along the way. The swim for example is an open water event and held at Dekker Lake. This gave me the excuse to go out and train in lakes I never even knew existed. I found myself riding a bike great distances on roads I never would have tried before, and I will never look at these roads again in the same way as I did before.
I never realized how many hills there are out there, or how to climb them on a bicycle. Then I found myself running everywhere we went, even down by the beach and at several different parks. It gave us the excuse to just get out there and do it. One of the most important parts about training for an event like this is to get a friend or two to train with you. You need the other people to encourage you to go out and do it, and you know that you would not want to let them down. It helps to share the anticipation and the fears that you may accumulate upon the way.
The day of the Triathlon starts very early, and the most exciting part of the whole day was when all 3,000 women, dressed in swimming suits, stand ready to start the race before it even gets light outside.
We heard all the speeches and about all of the companies that helped sponsor the race, and then they had all of us join in singing the Star Spangled Banner. It was a moment that I will remember for the rest of my life. Then the race began with the 21 Breast Cancer Survivors. They were in the first wave of swimmers in their pink bathing caps. This is a race to the finish line, but it does not necessarily stress winning and losing, for every woman that finishes the race become a Triathlete and earns a ribbon to proclaim this accomplishment. On the back of the ribbon is written this simple phrase: "The woman that starts the race is not the woman who finishes the race." The friends that we made and the people that we met along the way made it all worth the time and effort that we put into it.
I hope that this will give a few other people out there the courage to try one of these events. No matter how large, no matter how small the event you try for, it will be an experience you will not soon forget. It gives you the satisfaction that you can do it, and you are a better person for having put out the effort to accomplish it.
Karen Holland, Sherry Armstrong, Barbara Albright, Janet Blackwell, Cynthia Cannon