After eight hours of swimming, cycling and running, a struggling Russell McCleskey could have quietly pulled the plug and nobody would have blinked an eye.
But that would have been the easy way out and there’s one thing you should know about the Langhorne resident: He doesn’t do anything easy.
Thus, two or three miles into the 26.2-mile closing run segment of last Sunday’s Peasantman Steel Distance Triathlon (two bike miles longer than a traditional Ironman event) in Penn Yan, N.Y., the 47-year-old McCleskey took a deep breath, lifted his head and went on to complete the remarkable event.
So when it comes time to oversee swim training sessions for the Bucks County Triathlon Club and offer advice, his reputation precedes itself.
Prospective Ironman candidates pay attention to what McCleskey has to say because he’s proven time and again that adversity is just another obstacle to achieving one’s goals.
Getting through 2.4 miles of swimming, 112 miles of cycling and a marathon of running doesn’t start with the feet, the knees or the lungs.
It begins between the ears.
“I’ve always said, the race doesn’t start until you jump off the bike,” he said in a recent telephone interview. “Your legs can get wobbly.
“Peasantman was a challenge for me. I came off the bike, started running and my legs felt good, breathing felt good. But my stomach was upset.”
That’s when the moment of truth arrived. This was the USA Triathlon national championship race, so giving up was not an option.
“Everytime I tried to run my stomach was sloshing,” he said. “It was the first time in a triathlon that I was ready to throw in the towel.”
But he didn’t.
“I walked about two and a half miles,” he recalled. “One of the nice things about a small race like that, you get a chance to really recognize people.”
Just briefly interacting with fellow competitors put McCleskey’s mind back in a better place.
“One of the guys came up to me and said, ‘hey, what’s going on? You hurtin’?’ I told him my stomach hurt. He went like, ‘no, no. Just stay with it. I’m having the same problem, just stay with it.’
“Another athlete I knew came up and said, ‘Russ, stay with it. Drink nothing but water. Eventually your stomach will come back.’+”
In McCleskey’s words, “dang it, it did.”
It wasn’t his best day but he did manage and after about six miles or so he was able to run pretty much full-out again.
Advice to others in the same shoes?
“Trust your training, trust your body,” he said.
Despite the rocky start to the marathon leg, McCleskey went on to win his age group in this prestigous event.
That qualified him for the World Championships in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates next year.
Whether he goes or not really doesn’t matter. He’s done three Ironman competitions already and that makes him a respected figure in the Bucks County area and beyond.
His influence starts at the local level with the Bucks County Triathlon Club. The training and events coordinator oversees the swimming development crew.
“One of our biggest draws is our weekly Wednesday swim (in the Delaware River),” he said. “Just celebrated our 15th anniversary.
“Some days I get to be the hero and set up the buoys. Do new swims that they never thought they could do. Other weeks I have to be the bearer of bad news that the weather is not going to cooperate.”
The South Carolina native was a high school cross country whiz and hoped to continue that pursuit at Furman University. It didn’t work out quite the way he wanted and after graduation, there was the common step back from competition.
“As I got older, I kind of fell away from exercise,” he said. “I was at a point where I wasn’t healthy. Decided to get back into running.”
He met his future wife, Wendy, a Flemington, N.J. native, while the two of them were working in local theater. That’s what pushed him north.
Eventually it led him to triathlon and a position with a major construction equipment company.
“Originally, I met a lot of folks at the Bucks County Roadrunners, a really fantastic group of people,” he said. “There are beautiful places to run around here. But my body couldn’t keep up with the high volume of running I used to do when I was younger.
“Some friends said instead of running every day, maybe you should mix in some other stuff, like biking, low-impact stuff. And swimming, too. It sounded like a sport (triathlon) I heard one time.”
Wendy and Russell have two children: Maddie, 18, will be competing in her first big triathlon – Escape the Cape – soon. Tucker, 13, is a budding computer whiz with designs on developing programs.
Russell was once director of the Bristol Riverside Theater and Wendy was his master electrician. Together the two have created some bright stage lights with an Ironman determination of their own.
>Race calendar
Sunday
Run Out of the Darkness 5K, 8 a.m., Perkasie. Contact www.runtheday.com
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