Tricats return with bag of trophies

Yet the Arizona club triathalon team was able to return from the national collegiate championships last weekend in Lake San Antonio, Calif. with a national champion in their ranks and a third place finish overall.

Senior Jeanne Anne Krizman took home the women's title in the collegiate race. Her time of 2 hours, 18 minutes, 23 seconds beat the old record by 12 minutes.

"I knew I had a good shot going in," she said. "I thought I could at least finish in the top 10."

Krizman brought home her second NCAA title, as she was a member of the champion UA women's golf team last season, but it wasn't easy.

"It's a really tough course," she said. "The run and bike ride are all basically uphill.

"The swim was really brutal. I got kicked in the lip, and there were so many people that I thought I was going to drown."

"It was really hot, and a really demanding course," senior Seton Claggett said.

The heat was so bad that sophomore Shea Whitham needed to be hooked up to three IV's after the race.

"It was dehydration, I think," Whitham said. "I was about to pass out."

The Tricats competed in two events, the half-Iron Man on Saturday and the collegiate race on Sunday.

As a team, they finished the collegiate race with a time of 14:25:15 seconds, not far behind first place Colorado (14:12:23), which Claggett said was exactly what they had intended to do.

In the half-Iron Man, senior Nancy Conway qualified with her time of 5:39 for the presitigious Hawaiian Iron Man Race, which is to be held in October.

"It'll be my biggest one ever," Conway said.

The half-Iron Man is the more grueling of the two races, as it consists of a 2 km swim, a 100 km bike ride and a 20 km run, as opposed to the 1.5 km swim, 40 km bike ride and 10 km run of the collegiate race.

"Next year we definitely have a good shot at it (winning the title)," Battaglia, a grad student, said. "This year we put it ourselves on the map."