About a month before last summer's Iron Girl Triathlon, Melissa Emery was beset by debilitating fatigue.
She had taken part in the Columbia event's debut in August 2006, a year after turning 40 and finding herself in the throes of a midlife crisis. Completing her first swim-bike-run event proved she could handle the demanding preparation and physical exertion, so she continued to push herself.
But when she started to bog down last summer, Emery wondered: "Am I training too much?"
She soon learned that the training regimen wasn't the culprit. Ovarian cysts detected in January 2007 after a routine checkup had grown rapidly, and Emery had developed extensive endometriosis, a condition in which the uterine lining grows outside the uterus. A full hysterectomy was scheduled at the end of August. Despite having trained for several months, Emery found herself awaiting surgery and watching the race from the sidelines.
"By that point, even cheering on my friends was painful," the Columbia resident said.
Now, nearly a year later, Emery is back. A biopsy revealed no sign of cancer, so she began her yearlong recovery with a dogged determination to enter the race again. With images of Olympic athletes in Beijing striving for seemingly unreachable heights as a backdrop, Emery is preparing to do the same Sunday, when the third Aflac Iron Girl Columbia Triathlon takes place in Centennial Park. About 2,200 participants are expected, organizers said.
"Dara Torres making the U.S. women's swim team at age 41 proved to all of us what determination is," said Emery, who acknowledges staying up to watch the late-night broadcasts from China. "Age is still an obstacle, but she has opened up a whole new world for older athletes."
As inspirational as watching Torres compete with much younger Olympians has been, Emery said the impetus behind her mission to get fit was more personal: the deaths of her parents, five months apart, in 2004 and 2005. Both smoked and led unhealthy lifestyles, the Towson native said.
Emery's husband, Chuck Moan, had died of leukemia in 2000, so the emotional strain from the personal losses had piled up.
"I knew I didn't want to end up like my parents had, so I thought, 'I can swim, I can run, I can ride a bike,'" said Emery, a human relations technology analyst for T. Rowe Price. A year later, a triathlete was born.
