second year in a row<\/a>, Jordan Callahan took first for women with a time of 1 hour, 13 minutes and 37 seconds; 2015 champion John Bursell took the men\u2019s crown at 1:04:30.<\/p>\nCallahan beat out Jamie Bursell (1:20:08) and April Rezendez (1:18:06) for the title. She credits her family\u2019s newest addition with the win.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, we got a dog, so we\u2019ve been doing a lot of running,\u201d Callahan said.<\/p>\n
Callahan led the pack on the entire course, which starts with a 750-meter swim in Auke Lake, and continues on a 19-kilometer cycle to the Mendenhall Glacier and back. Racers finish with a 5K out-and-back run on Auke Lake Trail, the finish line beckoning from the University of Alaska Southeast.<\/p>\n
Rezendes has finished second or third several times in the Aukeman but hasn\u2019t yet taken the top spot. She jokes that people tell her every year that it\u2019s her moment, but she\u2019s yet to get over the hump. Callahan is formidable competition.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know I can\u2019t catch Jordan,\u201d she said with a laugh.<\/p>\n
John Bursell led nearly the entire way but had to overtake a newcomer Adam Moser out of the swimming leg. Bursell is known as a strong cyclist.<\/p>\n
\u201cEach of the legs went well. The transitions went well and everything went as planned. I didn\u2019t feel quite as fast as I wanted on the bike,\u201d Bursell said.<\/p>\n
Aaron Morrison finished third at 1:11:22. Justin Dorn finished second at 1:07:56.<\/p>\n
Knowing Bursell\u2019s strength in the saddle, Dorn made a push to overtake him on the cycle to the glacier.<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew John was going to be really fast on the bike. He\u2019s a really good biker, so I was thinking I would just spend it all on the bike and see if I had anything left for the run,\u201d Dorn said.<\/p>\n
The former Gatorade state high school soccer player of the year said his strength is the run. Though he went \u201cas hard as he could as long as he could\u201d he \u201cjust didn\u2019t have it\u201d to catch the seemingly ageless Bursell in the end.<\/p>\n
A full list of standings can be found with this story at juneauempire.com.<\/p>\n
\u2018I just wanted to move\u2019<\/span><\/p>\nBursell and Callahan\u2019s names are first on the record sheets, but last place finisher Jenny Smith proved a winner as well.<\/p>\n
A 54-year-old mechanical engineer with the Coast Guard, Smith finished her first Aukeman as a very different person than she was two years ago.<\/p>\n
The mother of four has lost 76 pounds since October 2015. It was then, when visiting with an old college friend who Smith hadn\u2019t seen in 25 years, that something changed inside her.<\/p>\n
She said the friend, who she used to play softball and field hockey with, was talking with her \u201cjust like old times, like we were athletes out on the field.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cShe had stayed super fit. Did triathlons, did century rides, did marathons, all this stuff. And we were talking, and at that time I was well over 250 pounds \u2014 I had had four kids or whatever \u2014 way out of shape, but the way she was talking to me it was just like old times, like we were kids, just like when we were athletes on the field. Something just clicked inside, like \u2018That\u2019s who you are. That\u2019s who you really are,\u201d Smith said.<\/p>\n
So about a month later, she started training for a bike race her friend would be participating in in less than a year. She gave herself 42 weeks to ride 42 miles and lose 42 pounds.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just started in the gym, little by little. Half hour on the bike ratcheting up the difficulty until I could go pretty hard,\u201d Smith said.<\/p>\n
She ended up losing 46 pounds on the way to that race. That was last September. Smith wasn\u2019t done setting goals and set her sights on the Aukeman.<\/p>\n
She started with a phone app for run training called Couch to 5K and began training at the pool, breaking the challenge down into discrete mini-goals. She focused on distance, not time. She got up to 1.5 miles on the swim and did the Only Fools Run at Midnight run.<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew I could do all the distances, it\u2019s just a matter of putting it all together and I looked up the old times for everybody and I\u2019m like, \u2018Oh god, you know, I don\u2019t even know if I can make the slowest on that,\u2019\u201d Smith said. \u201cBut I kind of said, \u2018OK, I can swim it in less than a half hour, I can ride it in less than an hour, I can run it in maybe less than an hour, so let\u2019s shoot for two and a half hours.\u201d<\/p>\n
She made that goal, crossing the finish line to cheers and high fives at 2:22:01. How did she feel when she got there? \u201cOh, like a champion,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just wanted to make it, you know? So many people get in a rut and they just think they just can\u2019t. Or they look at somebody who\u2019s pretty athletic and they think, you know, \u2018I could never be that.\u2019 But I didn\u2019t have to be that athletic, I just wanted to move.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n <\/p>\n
\u2022 Contact Kevin Gullufsen at 523-2228 or kevin.gullufsen@juneauempire.com.<\/b><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was a case of the usual suspects at this year\u2019s Aukeman sprint triathlon. For the second year in a row, Jordan Callahan took first for women with a time of 1 hour, 13 minutes and 37 seconds; 2015 champion John Bursell took the men\u2019s crown at 1:04:30. Callahan beat out Jamie Bursell (1:20:08) and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":30572,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-30571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30571"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30571\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30571"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=30571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}