About 30 women gather in a room at the Ashland Recreation Center. They arrive in dribs and drabs, and every time the door opens, the hearts of Denise Perez and Yoli Casas leap and Casas keeps saying, we’re going to need more chairs.
Neither had any idea how many would show, though Perez had been getting the word out, the word being “triathlon.” As in, “come and train for one.” Over time, Perez had learned to anticipate the most common reactions beginning with, “No way,” followed by: “Are you crazy? I don’t swim,” “I can’t run,” and: “No one sees me in a bathing suit. Ever.”
“I didn’t even know what a triathlon was (when I first started),” Jalecia Johnson, one of the women in the room, tells me later. “I had to Google it.”
Johnson is no longer a neophyte. She ran her first triathlon in the fall of 2008, the same year she ran a half-marathon and decided, four broken toe nails and three hours later, she never wanted to do that again. Last year, she ran another triathlon, as well as a 10K and a 5K. Johnson, 37, was 207 pounds when she started training. She is at 170 now, a self-described girly-girl also known as The Terminator.
The women sit around the edges of the room, eyes traveling around the circle to take in the group. Nearly all are Latina. Most are in their 40s and quite a few are overweight. Bellies. Hips. Curvy and curvier. An unlikely bunch to be contemplating a race that begins with a half-mile swim, a 12-mile bike race and 3.1 mile run.
Which is exactly why Perez invited them.
Six years ago, Perez, who is 5 feet tall, weighed 180 pounds. Four years ago, she ran her first triathlon. In the months between, she met Celeste Callahan and Yoli Casas. I’ve met Callahan. I sat across from her at a restaurant and she spoke with such intensity, I expected her to burst into flame. She ran the New York City marathon in 1980, the first woman from South Dakota to do so. She has won or placed in national and international multi-sport competitions. This year, Callahan is aiming for another Ironman, a 2.4 mile swim, 112-mile bike race, a marathon. She turns 68 this year.
In 1997, Callahan founded CWW, a nonprofit introducing women to athletics, including triathlons.
“I never understood the concept of redemption until I started working with these women,” Callahan says. “Now, every time one of them crosses the finish line for a goal she has set, I am redeemed for all the times I was told, ‘No, you can’t do this. It’s too hard.’ “
And so when Perez crossed the finish line at the Denver Tri for the Cure, a convert was born. “It’s absolutely life-changing,” Perez says. “My first thoughts crossing the finish line were, ‘Where are the other Latinas, and how can I share this with them?’ “
She went to Casas, CWW’s head coach and director. Casas, who is of Peruvian descent, agreed a great need existed. Here is a community, a culture, Casas tells me, that is less likely than the general population to be physically active and more likely to suffer from diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease.
Together, Perez and Casas created an offshoot team for Latinas with the support of CWW. They call it Las Hermanas. The sisters.
Every woman in that rec room signed up. Rebecca Trujillo, who joined last year and lost 30 pounds in training, arrived with her two sisters. They signed up, too. “When I finished my first triathlon last year, I literally bawled, ‘I did it. I did it,’ ” Trujillo says.
“It’s about more than learning the correct swim stroke or running form, Perez says. “The first day of training, we had three women crying because they could not put their faces in the water. We’ve had four training sessions since and they haven’t missed one. I had a call from a woman who wanted to know if there was a swim practice. I told her yes and then she said, well, I don’t think I can be there. Why not, I asked her and she said, ‘Because I don’t think I can put on my bathing suit.’ I told her to bring her stuff and that she could just watch. She did. A half hour later, she was in that bathing suit and in the pool. The hardest part is showing up.”
That evening in the rec center, each woman introduced herself. They said they wanted to be good role models to their children or they wanted to compete at higher levels or they wanted to overcome their fear of water or they just wanted to be healthy, to feel good about themselves. Some cried.
It was what Callahan calls “walking naked into a group” and it took me awhile to figure what I was hearing was yearning. What Chance Two Crow, the young poet, would call bone shaking. For community. For transformation. The expression of hunger manifested and the courage required to act upon it.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
