It’s been 50 years since Judy Collins participated in her very first triathlon, the Mission Bay Triathlon, inspired by a headline of a woman who loved to sweat.
Sweat.
“I wasn’t even allowed to say that word in my house,” says Collins, a long-time Coronado resident.
In 1973, men were the ones who sweat, women perspired, she says.
But she was motivated by a swimmer who lived in Coronado named Flo Squires, a woman who was featured in the local paper with the headline: “Flo Loves to Sweat.” Squires was trying to qualify for the Boston marathon.
And when Collins first saw that word in the same sentence as a woman’s name, it changed her whole life.
She went from lap swimming at the Coronado pool and jogging around the island, to being the founder of an international race that involved running 26.2 miles, swimming 2.4 miles and biking 112 miles.
Collins and her husband John created the Ironman Triathlon.
And it started with just that one headline. “It was just a strength word to me,” she says.
Collins, now 85, has participated in over 30 triathlons since then – so many she can’t even remember the exact amount. And she still credits Flo Squires.
“Without her, John and I never, ever would have gotten involved in the sport,” Collins says.
The start
Collins didn’t play sports growing up, or have any interest in athletics. She was the girl who never took P.E. and was never picked for a team, Collins says with a little smile.
As an adult, she jokes she was basically peer pressured into joining an adult swim club when the coach, a retired Navy Frogman, saw her entering the Coronado recreation center and told her to get in the pool.
“Apparently, that’s just what I needed,” Collins recalls, laughing. She was 34. Then she started running to help improve her swimming. John, then in the Navy, would bike to work daily.
Slowly, they started training for a triathlon without even realizing.
When Collins saw Squires announce plans to participate in the Mission Bay Triathlon, she figured her family could do it as well.
Two days later, on September 25, 1974, the entire Collins household of four ran, swam and cycled all around Mission Bay. Their two children were then aged 12 and 13.
“I fell in love with run-bike-swim events that night,” Collins says.
It’s the feeling of running with a herd. We’re all doing the same thing. We may not know each other – we certainly make instant friendships on the course, and I just love it.
“It’s the feeling of running with a herd. We’re all doing the same thing. We may not know each other – we certainly make instant friendships on the course, and I just love it.”
And the idea for the Ironman Triathlon was born.
Collins says she loves this sport because anyone can do it.
“I represent lots of other people in the world who aren’t good at team sports. It’s too hard to get together with a team, and you have to be good and all this stuff; and yet, I could bike, and I could run, and I could swim and imagine a sport in which you could do pretty well in three things, and be in!” she adds, clapping her hands together. “That’s all you have to do, is just to have the knowledge. To me, it’s such a welcoming thing.”
Building a triathlon
Their family was relocated to Oahu in 1975 when John got a new assignment and, by 1978, they had put together the triathlon course.
Collins and John had been participating in the Waikiki Roughwater Swim and the Honolulu Marathon since they arrived on the island in the mid-1970s.
With two of the three triathlon events already on the island, all they needed was the bike portion and route.
It was a night of joy.Judy Collins
“John had the idea for the bike leg, and it fit almost perfectly to go around the island,” Collins says. “It was a night of joy.”
They had all the events, they had the location, they just needed a name to make it official.
Collins remembered a runner at the Pearl Harbor shipyard who had the same speed no matter the race distance. He put one foot in front of the other and never stopped, keeping a steady pace. His nickname was Iron Man.
“The marathon clinic coach in Honolulu told us to find our long-distance pace. Find the pace where you feel you can keep going forever,” Collins says.
So on February 18, 1978, the Hawaiian Ironman Triathlon had its first race.
Fifteen men signed up. Twelve made it to the finish line.
The Ironman Triathlon
Collins was the only woman that signed up for it, but illness intervened.
“I didn’t want to not make it, because they’d say women couldn’t do it,” Collins says. “It was the hardest thing of my life, but by the day [the Ironman] happened, I could not lift my head. I never even saw [the course].”
Collins had gotten surgery around a year and a half before the Ironman Triathlon debuted, and she said she had the best year of her life, breaking all of her personal records and training incessantly for the big day.
Then a fever developed. And when the day came, she was just too sick to run, bike or swim.
But in 2003, at just shy of 65-years-old, Collins finally found the year to train and participate in Ironman Revisited, an event to help raise money for the Challenged Athletes Foundation.
She finally completed her Ironman.
It was a woman’s idea. I am the woman who dreamed it up.
Collins has done a hundred other events in her 85 years of life, even to this day, running a half marathon with her daughter in June. But she’s only done the event she founded once. “It was a woman’s idea. I am the woman who dreamed it up,” Collins says with fervor. “But, I would never have done a triathlon but for another woman who wanted to join the track club to qualify for Boston.”
