SM 62-year-old completes 17-hour race with two minutes to spare
With a mere two minutes and four seconds left on the clock, Santa Monican Peggy McDowell- Cramer plunged across the finish line Saturday in the 141-mile Ironman race held in Hawaii.
McDowell-Cramer is 62. The Ironman World Championship, which competitors must finish in 17 hours or less, includes a 2.4-mile ocean swim, a 112-mile bike race through the island’s interior and a 26.2-mile run. Finishing the trek is one of the highest accomplishments in the racing world.
Though she’s competed in and finished the race before, the local minister and mother of two had new obstacles to contend with this time. For the first 40 miles of the race’s bike portion, McDowell- Cramer felt faint and thought she might pass out.
“I got on, and my legs said, ‘Not today, it’s not happening,’” she said. “I just felt sick and I wanted to go to bed, which is not good if you’re on top of, or in front of, a wheel of any kind.”
But McDowell-Cramer pushed forward. Race helpers dumped water over her head. She put ice in her hat. And she continued riding.
Then, in the 13th or 14th mile of the run — the last of the three legs of the race — she ran into another snafu.
“Now it’s dark,” said McDowell- Cramer, who lives with her husband Pat, a real estate investor, in a shaded house north of Montana Avenue on 17th Street. “And Hawaii is dark, dark... it’s dangerous when you can’t see.”
To cope with the darkness, McDowell-Cramer ran along the white line on the edge of the roadway. To the left, cars occasionally whizzed by. To the right, a precarious drop-off awaited even the slightest misstep.
During a lapse in traffic, with no light at all, McDowell-Cramer lost sight of the white line guiding her and plowed into a cone marking off the race path.
“I slid into (the ground) and, you know, it hurts but I thought, ‘Does everything work? It does. Good. Get up,’” said McDowell-Cramer, who carries a muscular 5’3” frame but describes herself as a “Laura Ashley kind of feminine person.”
“That is so fine — clean, clean, just, ‘Oh yes I’m clean.’ That is a great feeling.”
Bruised, exhausted and bleeding, McDowell-Cramer finally neared the finish line. She passed her daughter, Hillary, who shouted for her to “crank it.” She passed fellow Ironman competitors who had already finished and then returned to cheer on the others. Everything went by her in a blur.
When she finally reached the fan-laden “chute” and plunged across the finish line, everything was surreal, McDowell-Cramer said.
“They sort of guided me in, because you’re kind of loopy by the end. You’ve narrowed your focus by the end and outside influences don’t really (register).”
Friends from the Los Angeles Triathlon Club snapped photos, her physical therapist congratulated her, she was given a shirt, a medal and a small statue. Finally, McDowell-Cramer headed to the medical tent. She was told the injuries weren’t bad and to simply go home and wash off.
Despite having the 17-hour race behind her, McDowell-Cramer said she didn’t have the slightest urge to celebrate.
“I reached in my bag and got out a bar with protein and carbohydrates, and I started the recovery,” she said, saying the next item on her agenda was a long shower.
McDowell-Cramer placed 14th in the women’s group, ages 60 to 64. A total of 1,700 people competed in the event, ages 18 to 80 years, and roughly 25 percent were women. At 76, Richard Albrecht of Michigan was the oldest person to complete the race. He did it in 16 hours, 8 minutes and 49 seconds. The event was held on the west coast of the big island of Hawaii and was centered around Kailua-Kona.
Now back in Santa Monica, McDowell-Cramer, who was born in Atherton, Calif., and turned to a career as a Presbyterian minister in 1981 after years of teaching sports sociology to college students, is on the recovery path and planning her next competition. She heads to New Zealand later this year for her 100th race. Six of the races have been Ironman events.
Training, she said, is rather simple. Lots of biking, running and swimming, but also a healthy dose of weight lifting and plenty of stretching.
“You just ramp up slowly,” she said. Though she wasn’t a competitive athlete in her youth, McDowell-Cramer began synchronized swimming after graduating from the University of Oregon. She was first asked in 1992 to compete in a sprint-distance triathlon with her sister and she won, despite using a clunky mountain bike “with a kick stand,” she said.
“Doing well is what spurred me on,” she said. “I thought, ‘I like this.’”
Asked if she’ll compete in next year’s Ironman event in Hawaii, McDowell-Cramer said, “I don’t know about next year yet. I’m not locked into, ‘I have to do this every year to be a wonderful person.’”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on October 23, 2003. Read the original PDF.