Faces of Nice: Inspiring Age Groupers Headline 70.3 World Championship

There are more than 6,500 athletes set to race in Nice, France, at the IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship on Saturday and Sunday, meaning there are more than 6,500 unique stories to be told. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to single out each individual athlete to share their journeys, but IRONMAN always makes sure to highlight a handful with their world championship ambassadors.

This year in Nice, there are many incredible stories. Slowtwitch has already covered Rob Sears, a visually impaired triathlete from the U.K., who took to the stage at the race expo on Friday. Alongside Sears were four other athlete ambassadors, all of whom spoke about their paths to the 70.3 worlds.

We will get to those four stories, but first, we had the opportunity to sit down with Alisa Goughnour, a 66-year-old athlete from San Luis Obispo, Calif., who is racing in Nice on Saturday after recovering from a heart transplant. Like Sears’s story (and so many others), Goughnour’s is a remarkable tale of perseverance and the refusal to give up — two traits that helped lift her to a spot at this year’s world championship.

From 17% Heart Function to the 70.3 Worlds Start Line

Goughnour started racing triathlon in the late 1980s. Her first few races were local triathlons. Eventually, she participated in a relay at the famous Wildflower Triathlon, which wasn’t far from her home in San Luis Obispo. That was her introduction to long-course racing, but she says she didn’t have plans to complete a full-distance race on her own. When she “accidentally,” as she says, qualified for the 1990 IRONMAN World Championship in Kona, however, she changed her mind. (Back then, athletes could qualify for Kona at half-distance races.)

She raced Kona and continued to compete in IRONMAN events for years (including an outing at the inaugural 70.3 World Championship in 2006). In 2008, everything came to a screeching halt when her doctors diagnosed her with arrhythmogenic right matricular cardiomyopathy, a heart disease that weakens and enlarges the right ventricle and can lead to irregular heartbeats or arrhythmias.

Although the diagnosis was news to Goughnour in that moment, her medical team informed her that her heart had likely been dealing with it for up to 12 years and getting progressively weaker over time.

“Once they told me that, when I looked back at my races, I was like, ‘They nailed it,'” she says. She could recall moments in training and racing over that span of years when she would, for no apparent reason, struggle to maintain her normal pacing or intensity.

“I always wanted to blame a lack of training or my nutrition or not sleeping,” she says now with a laugh. Unfortunately, shining light on the problem came with an order from her doctors: no more triathlon.

“That was the end of triathlon life number one,” Goughnour says. She spent more than a decade not training. She would walk, she says, and she did go to the Grand Canyon at one point to hike the Rim-to-Rim trail, but her days of being an athlete were finished.

At the time of the diagnosis, her heart was still strong enough to not cause any life-threatening issues, but over the years, she had routine checks to see where it stood. In 2021, one of these tests showed a drop to 17 percent heart function. That was life-threatening, and so she was put on the transplant list.

The wait time for a transplant can be a long one. That was not Goughnour’s experience. Just two weeks after she was put on the list, she got a call from the medical team at Stanford telling her they had a heart that was a match for her. Still processing the information that she needed a heart transplant at all, she turned it down, passing it on to someone else on the list.

“I said, ‘You know, I would love to be able to do it now, but I just can’t,'” she says. She assumed that would give her more time to plan for the eventual surgery, but just two weeks after that, she received another call. This time, she said yes, and her husband, Eric Benson, drove her north to Stanford. Halfway there (it’s around three hours from San Luis Obispo), the hospital called and said to turn back — they had tested the heart and it wasn’t a viable option for her.

“I said, ‘Okay, dry run, that’s alright,'” she says. Only a few weeks later, they called Goughnour once again. They had yet another heart, and this time, she made it to the pre-op room — only for the helicopter that was flying the heart in to be unable to land due to poor weather. Luckily, the wait for call number four wasn’t too much longer, and after spending the night in the hospital, Goughnour finally went in for the operation.

When on a transplant list, getting the surgery may seem like the finish line, but for so many people — including Goughnour — it’s a long and bumpy road to recovery. Her kidneys failed after the surgery and she spent months on dialysis. She contracted a virus from her new heart that led to severe weight loss and other issues. She had to have a feeding tube down her throat for six months.

Goughnour got her new heart in December 2021. She didn’t go home until June 2022. It was a long, tiring haul, but after countless setbacks, she was finally in the clear. Eventually, she started exercising. It wasn’t much at first. She would jog for 30 seconds and then walk “for however long” it took to feel good before jogging another 30 seconds.

“It felt hard because I hadn’t done any running for so long,” she says. “But my energy felt good.”

With careful, slow work, Goughnour built up her mileage. She added some indoor trainer rides as well, even though she could only push her easiest gear.

“I worked at it little by little,” she says. “I didn’t know if I would be bale to race again or not. In the back of my mind I thought that maybe I could get there.”

It took two years, but in Aug. 2024, she found her way back to competition. She even made the podium in her age group.

“I thought, ‘OK, maybe I can do this,'” she says. With growing confidence, she signed up for Wildflower, the event that ignited her passion for long-distance racing. After that, she raced a string of 70.3s, eventually qualifying for Nice at 70.3 Los Cabos in Mexico.

Now, Goughnour is in Nice, accompanied by Benson, and ready to compete at the 70.3 World Championship once more.

Saturday may not be her fastest race (she says a hip injury from a recent bike crash is going to make the run “hurt in the end”), but that doesn’t really matter. She spent years sidelined from the sport she loved, but she is now the early stages of her second life of triathlon — a life she intends to enjoy no matter how fast or how slow she takes it.

Ambassador Panel — Gregory Schaefer

As promised, here are the stories of the four athletes who joined Sears on stage at the ambassador panel in Nice on Friday. First up is Gregory Schaefer, a 51-year-old triathlete from Fort Lauderdale, Fla. An 18-time IRONMAN finisher and two-time competitor at the IRONMAN World Championship, Schaefer’s athletic resume presents as someone who is the epitome of health and fitness. That really was the case for him before a life-altering diagnosis rocked his world.

In 2022, competing for the second time in Kona, Schaefer finished two hours slower than his previous go on the Big Island. Many athletes would consider this to be no big deal — a disappointment, maybe, but just an off day. Schaefer said that he knew it was more than just a poor performance.

“I got back to my hotel room, called my wife and said, ‘I think something’s wrong,'” Schaefer recalled on Friday. After returning home and undergoing medical tests, he got the news: at 48 years old, he had early-onset Parkinson’s disease.

Parkinson’s is a progressive brain disorder that leads to the breakdown of nerve cells in the brain. As Schaefer pointed out, there is no known cure at this time.

“Exercise is the number one thing to slow the progression,” he said. That is quite convenient for someone who has finished IRONMAN races many times over. But, just because exercise helps doesn’t mean it is easy. Schaefer described how the disease has affected him, explaining that the right side of his body has a lot of “rigidity” that can make it hard to train and race.

“This might be the last [race],” he said. “There [are] a lot of bad days.”

He still has a spot on the start line in Kona next month, but he said he will be playing that by ear and seeing how the race in Nice goes on Sunday. He closed out his time on the expo stage by saying he completes every race “with purpose” nowadays.

“When I was healthy, I never thought about why I was doing this,” he said. Now, though, he does it for his wife and two sons. “I try and make them realize that we’re all going to face really difficult moments in our life. […] I want my kids to look back when they’re my age and say, ‘My dad never quit and he persevered through tough times.’ And that’s really my purpose now.”

Ambassador Panel — Megan Davis

Seated next to Schaefer on the panel stage was Megan Davis, a 30-year-old fitness influencer and entrepreneur from the U.K. who runs a women’s performance apparel brand called Aesene. As Davis said on Friday, she has been a keen endurance athlete for a while now, but she is relatively new to triathlon and IRONMAN events.

Davis’s big focus with her social media presence and Aesene is women empowerment, particularly in sports.

“What I’ve seen over the last, like, five years is more and more women getting into endurance sports, and I think it’s so important that [we share our experiences] as women going out and trying these things.”

Davis said she was inspired to try her first 70.3 after seeing a female friend complete an IRONMAN. After watching her friend, she said she thought, “Well, maybe I can do that.”

Davis said that is one of the main goal of Aesene, as they endeavour to “put women on a pedestal and tell their stories.”

Ambassador Panel — Marine Leleu

Another athlete who spoke at the panel on Friday was Marine Leleu, a French endurance athlete and social media personality who, like Davis, wants to inspire more women to do hard things. Leading by example, Leleu has quite an impressive resume.

She has swum across the English Channel, which is a feat in itself, but she didn’t stop after that, nor was it the start of her journey. Her 15-hour, six-minute swim from England to France (a trip that is a minimum of 21 miles, but almost guaranteed to be longer do to strong currents) was sandwiched between an 87-mile run along the English coast and a 180-mile bike ride to Paris.

This was all part of an incredibly daunting and difficult event called Enduroman. Leleu completed the challenge in 2018, stopping the clock in 69 hours and 52 minutes, which was a female record at the time. On Friday, she was asked to give advice to the women in the crowd listening.

“Do it for you,” she said. If a challenge — whether it’s a days-long event like Enduroman, a 70.3, a 5K or anything else — speaks to you, do it, she said, no matter what anyone else says or thinks. She acknowledged that these events can be scary, but her second piece of advice was to “Just try.”

Trying is what got her to an Enduroman record, and it will be what lifts other women to their own personal records and adventures.

Ambassador Panel — Lacey Zuck

Finally, there was one more woman on stage on Friday: Lacey Zuck. An Iowa-based triathlete, Zuck almost passed away during childbirth five years ago when delivering her twin girls (who arrived prematurely at 34 weeks). She suffered an amniotic fluid embolism, which she said on Friday has a very high mortality rate.

Miraculously, it was Zuck’s years of body-building that may have saved her life. Her doctors told her that her “body was able to hold its own” during the trauma it experienced thanks to her accumulated muscle mass. After the incident, though, she said she had “no muscle” to speak of.

Even so, just 34 weeks (yes, 34 weeks once again) after giving birth and surviving the embolism, Zuck ran a pair of half-marathons on back to back days in an event called the I-35 Challenge that sees runners complete a race in Kansas City one day and Des Moines the next. This was an incredible achievement for someone who was near death just months earlier, but Zuck said she willed herself to the finish line.

“My body failed at the one thing it’s supposed to do,” she said, replaying a mantra she had while training for the runs. “It’s not going to fail me at this.”

Another thing she decided when recovering was that she wanted to do an IRONMAN. She had never done a triathlon before, she said, but out of the blue, she came up with the idea to try one.

“It looked like the toughest thing I could find,” she said. Now, she is in Nice, not just competing at any triathlon, but at a world championship.

“[My daughters are] learning from [my] example, which is my proudest moment.”

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