With twin transplant, triathlon is a done deal

She saw whales while jogging on the beach. She swam with sea turtles in the Pacific. She snapped a couple of pictures of her friend while biking through the Hawaiian countryside.

Monique Mendoza finished a triathlon Sunday, two years after having a double lung transplant. But that’s not what she wanted to talk about.

Mendoza wanted to talk about how the sun felt on her skin, what it was like to walk on lava rock, the way the doves cooed as she ran past.

“Have you ever seen a dove up close? They have the most incredible light blue eyes,” she told The Times while recovering from her 5-hour-10-minute swim-bike-run on the Big Island.

Mendoza, 30, a college student from Rancho Santa Margarita, suffers from diabetes and cystic fibrosis. In 2004, after years of feeling her body weaken and thinking she might die any day, she had her mucus-clogged lungs replaced by surgeons at USC University Hospital in Los Angeles. In September, she began training for the Lavaman Triathlon on Waikoloa Beach.

She went there with low expectations. Just finish, she told herself. The night before the race, she was so anxious she got only about five hours’ sleep, a far cry from her pre-transplant days when she was so sick she would sometimes sleep half the day.

The 25-mile bike ride was the hardest part, she said. She struggled less with the 1-mile swim and the 6-mile run. “I think I was fourth from the last, but I don’t care,” Mendoza said.

Other than a bad headache, she said, she feels great, and she’s thinking about training for another one.

“I was kind of sad when it was the last two miles of the run, because I was just enjoying it so much,” Mendoza said. “It was like a swim, bike and a run with God. Without God, and all the people praying for me, I wouldn’t have made it.”

william.heisel@latimes.com