An Iron Will

Mickie Shapiro, a 63-year-old triathlete, would like to make one thing clear: She’s not crazy.

Sure, she’s one of the oldest women competing Saturday in one the world’s most grueling athletic events, the Ironman Triathlon World Championship in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii. And if all goes as planned, she will be subjecting herself to about 15 hours of extreme exertion: swimming 2.4 miles, bicycling 112 miles and running 26.2 miles.

It’s a tough race for tough people. But, Shapiro says, that doesn’t make the Ironman a test for oddballs.

“Unfortunately, I think we’re looked at more as freaks or that we are different, and we’re not. I’m not,” said Shapiro, a marriage, family and child counselor from Costa Mesa. “This just sort of evolved.”

Shapiro’s evolution began slowly. A dancer when she was young, she had given up most physical activity to focus on tending the home for her husband and four children.

In the mid-1970s, Shapiro’s 5-year-old daughter took an interest in running and, at first, Shapiro merely watched. But a few years later, wanting to protect her daughter on training runs when they were out of town, she started running with her daughter. After one run, Shapiro said, she was hooked.

“That’s why I say I’m an accidental athlete,” she said.

Shapiro made a rapid road-running progression from 5Ks to 10Ks and marathons, getting so deeply into the sport that she once ran to the local Department of Motor Vehicles office to pick up her “MS RUNR” vanity license plates.

Then in about 1982, while recovering from a minor running injury, she started swimming. “I remember getting in the pool,” Shapiro said, “and seeing those four concrete walls and saying, ‘I don’t like this. If I’m going to do this, I might as well do a triathlon.’ ”

So she did. Shapiro participated in a short triathlon in Seal Beach but continued to concentrate on recreational running. She also was riding her bicycle occasionally, and after spending an entire day riding 100 miles to San Diego with two friends, getting lost and a bit dehydrated on the way, she had a triathlon epiphany: “I said, ‘My God, I can do Ironman.’ ”

About four years later, in 1989, Shapiro proved it, finishing the Hawaiian Ironman Triathlon in 14 hours 45 minutes.

Her success was a testament to perseverance. She had overcome some major speed bumps in previous years. During a triathlon in 1985 in San Diego, a truck hit a barricade, pushing it into the path of Shapiro’s bike. She had to be taken by helicopter to a hospital and had a concussion, broken ribs and a broken collarbone.

Shapiro broke her collarbone crashing on her bike two other times in 1985. But after each injury, she pressed on and ultimately reached her Ironman goal.

Then she gave up triathlons for about five years, burned out by the grind of the three-discipline sport. But she wasn’t at all sedentary. She ran marathons all over the world--Israel, Berlin, London, Holland, New York, Boston, Chicago--pushing her lifetime marathon total to more than 30.

Eventually, Shapiro found that she missed the unique challenge of the triathlon and got back into the sport. She did some shorter races, including the 1996 world championships in Olympic-distance triathlon, but inevitably her attention returned to the Ironman.

In the spring of 1997, she finished the Ironman Australia and was preparing to tackle the Hawaiian race again that fall. But on a June training ride on East Coast Highway in Corona del Mar, Shapiro was hit from behind by another cyclist.

Shapiro required eight days of hospitalization to recover from a concussion, broken ribs and collarbone and a punctured lung. She also suffered retro-amnesia, meaning she couldn’t remember the accident or events that happened several minutes previously.

She remembers waking up in her hospital bed thankful to be alive. She reluctantly backed out of her entry in Ironman Canada two months later, but finished it in 1998. She also qualified for the 1998 Hawaiian Ironman, started the race but didn’t finish because she couldn’t complete the bike portion before the 10 1/2-hour cutoff.

Strong head winds slowed her pace to five mph in places and she missed the cutoff by 12 minutes. “There were people getting blown off their bikes,” she said. “I felt like Mary Poppins out there.”

This year, her goal is to finish. Whatever the result, Shapiro, who also counsels athletes and teaches a sports psychology class through UC Irvine extension, plans to continue racing at the Ironman distance for the foreseeable future.

“This gives me a zest for living, an excitement, an avenue to express myself,” she said. “That’s what it really is--an avenue to be free, to be me.”

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Iron People

Thirteen Orange County athletes are among the 1,500 competitors entered in the Ironman Triathlon World Championship on Saturday in Hawaii:

Jack Boyster, Laguna Beach, 52

David Buffington, Santa Ana Heights, 45

Sally Crawford, Laguna Niguel, 51

Johnny Estrada, Tustin, 41

William S. Flanagan III, Laguna Niguel, 30

Michele Frey, Costa Mesa, 49

Patrick Gleason, Huntington Beach, 38

Jim Jennings, Laguna Niguel, 50

Chris Johnson, Laguna Niguel, 49

Keith Meter, San Clemente, 28

Rick Olson, Capistrano Beach, 43

Tina Pauley, Tustin Ranch, 29

Mickie Shapiro, Costa Mesa, 63