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Mile 45 of her first 70.3, in hail and headwind, Chris Ijiomah is one of the last riders on the course. A voice keeps calling out: “Athlete. Athlete, pull on over. Athlete, you can’t proceed.” She keeps looking around to see who they mean. Then it lands. They mean her. She is being pulled from the course in front of everyone, and she is being called an athlete in the moment she feels least like one.

Chris is a registered nurse at a Level 1 trauma center, a mother of four, and she commutes multiple hours a day. She grew up swimming, played water polo in college, raced triathlon in her twenties, and then disappeared from sport for twenty years. Two years ago she walked out her front door and ran for eight minutes. She still remembers reaching for the door handle. Twenty-four hours after the DNF, sore and humbled, she told her husband she wanted to go back. He said, “Of course you do,” and showed her the bike tires he had already been researching.

This is an honest conversation about failing where people can see you and choosing to return anyway. Chris says out loud what most women leave out: that she trains without a coach because a family of six has a budget, that some mornings the alarm goes off four times and the workout does not happen, and that after the race she sat at a restaurant table and told her four kids she felt like she had failed them. She is grounded in what is actually true about her life, and she goes anyway. Her advice for the mom watching from the sideline: give yourself permission to have the big goal. It is not selfish. It is not unachievable.

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