Carlsbad's Ironwoman By T.J. Murphy
Carlsbad resident Michellie Jones loves to keep her life down to earth by walking her dogs and mowing the lawn. In the meantime of these pursuits, Jones continues to prove she’s one of the best triathletes in the world.

You should know that if you live your life in Carlsbad, it’s not unlikely that you’ve been in line somewhere—perhaps the checkout at the grocery store or seated in a village café—where there was a blonde woman in front of you with the strength of a powerfully lean, 5-foot-ten-inch frame balanced by an engaging Australian accent and a warm sparkle in her eyes. Her name is Michellie Jones. She and her husband, Pete Coulson, live in Carlsbad most of the year where they masterfully execute the family business: Coulson acts as her manager and coach, and Jones trains and races for the swim-bike-run sport of triathlon. Her office spreads from the confines of their home to the Carlsbad Swim Complex, and to the roads and trails of North County and beyond. Although you would never register it from her shy and truly humble countenance, Jones is inarguably one of the best endurance athletes in the world, and perhaps the greatest triathlete of all time. It was last year, in a performance at what is largely considered the greatest race in the sport, the Hawaii Ironman, where Jones made a dazzling final argument for why she should be considered in such sacred light.

Before 2004, in the course of more than 15 years of being a professional triathlete, Jones had accumulated a record that is difficult to fathom in terms of sheer excellence. With her focus on what is called short-course triathlon, she had gathered an Olympic silver medal, two ITU World Championships, countless first-place victories at the major races of the sport, like Escape From Alcatraz in San Francisco, World Cup titles gathered from around the globe, and the Chicago Triathlon, the largest triathlon of all. For example, at the Escape from Alcatraz, participants swim 1.5-miles from Alcatraz to San Francisco, then an 18-mile bike to and around Golden Gate Park, and then a challenging eight-mile run on a wicked course in the Golden Gate National Recreation area. The race, which is televised nationally, draws a stable of the fastest triathletes in the world. Jones has won the June event eight times.

The Olympic silver medal also deserves explanation. The primary reason Jones only has one Olympic medal is that triathlon was only recently added to the slate of the Games, making its inaugural appearance at the Sydney Olympiad in 2000.

Ironically, it was the Olympic Games that spurred Jones to unleash her talents on the one branch of the sport that she hadn’t touched: the Ironman. Recognized as the event that catalyzed swim-bike-run into a sport, the Hawaii Ironman is very much a long-distance event: 2.4 miles of swimming, followed immediately by 112 miles of biking, and finished off with a full marathon, 26.2 miles of running. For elite women, the Ironman will take somewhere in the region of nine hours to complete. The popularity of the Hawaii Ironman (which was first held in 1978) has spawned a global series of Ironman races ranging from Ironman Brazil, Ironman New Zealand, Ironman Germany and Ironman Arizona. Since the beginning of her career, Jones had specialized in what is known as the Olympic-distance: 1500 meters of swimming, 24 miles of biking and 6.2 miles of running. Under her husband’s guidance (Coulson is a former professional bike racer), Jones engineered her physiology and technical skills around the distance that elite women finish in the range of two hours even.

“I’ll never do an Ironman,” Jones had answered whenever questioned about moving up to the ultra distance race. It was the most devastating moment in her career that led Jones to change her mind, and ultimately re-write the sport.

The triathlon course selected for the 2004 Athens Olympic Games was thought to be a strong one for Jones. Since the Olympic version of triathlon and the qualifying races leading up to it were what is classified as “draft-legal”—meaning that during the bike portion you can take aerodynamic advantage of riding directly behind a racer in front you, subtracting the massive energy cost that air resistance incurs—a flat course will allow weaker bicyclists theopportunity to stick with the leaders throughout the 40 kilometer leg. Jones is strong on the bike, so on a flat course an entire parade of weaker cyclists can “suck” off her wheel, forcing Jones to do all the exhausting work at the front. The weaker riders then have a chance to race Jones down to the wire. The Athens course featured a tough bike circuit, so a strong rider like Jones can build up a lead on weaker competitors. A great runner too, Jones could then be in a good place to stride her way to a top finish. Maybe even a gold medal.

In the buildup to 2004, Jones and Coulson prepared furiously. But strangely, all the vast achievements and obvious talents of Michelle Jones were overlooked by the Australian Triathlon Federation. They did not name her to the team with the discretionary spot they had to give. The reigning silver medalist would not be going to Athens.
“I was devastated,” Jones stated. “I had to answer to sponsors; I had to answer to Pete. We’d put so much into it.” The disillusionment had Jones sincerely considering retirement.

Ask any long-time triathlon journalist what Michellie Jones says in a post-race press conference following a victory, and you can be confident they’ll talk about the credit she gives to her husband. During the years of her domination of the women’s short-course racing scene, it was rare that she could point to Coulson when she talked about him. That’s because watching his wife race has long been the second most devastatingly stressful experience for him. It has, in fact, caused him to cancel numerous trips in which he did plan to watch Michellie race.

The most stressful experience? Not being able to watch at all, Coulson stated. “Staying home is worse than being there,” he stated with a smile. “At home I have no idea at all what’s going on.” Picture Coulson pacing by the clock, knowing about when the race is going to be over, waiting for the panic attack that hits him when the phone rings. “My heart races at 300mph,” he admitted.

When Coulson does watch the race in person—like the 2000 Olympics—he openly suffers. In Sydney, Couslon watched from a VIP box that had the swim portion of the race displayed on a large video monitor. “Yeah, I had to watch the swim,” he stated. “It was on a big screen. Made me sick to my stomach.”

In other words, while Jones seems almost happy-go-lucky with her training and her racing—she has always seemed almost curiously relaxed, the secret of which one finds out is that she arrives at a race in pitch-perfect condition resulting from Coulson’s pay-attention-to-detail coaching—Coulson is wired. He has developed a reputation in the sport as being the consummate pro when it comes to preparing his athletes. If you’re being trained by Pete Coulson, you can expect that when you wake early in the morning he will have been up for hours preparing your bike and training gear for the day’s tasks. No detail is overlooked, and every plan has a backup plan. Jones reported, “Pete loves to spend time tinkering with bikes in the garage, trying to exact more performance out of everything.”

Coulson picked the brains of the best athletes and coaches in the world to compose Jones’ training plans. After the 2004 Olympics fell through, he would repeat this strategy after his wife surprised him (and the rest of the triathlon world) when she said yes to the Ironman.

“What happened then tells you a lot about Pete,” stated fellow Australian Chris McCormack, a former men’s ITU World Champion who finished second at the 2006 Hawaii Ironman. “When they decide to take on the Ironman, what does Pete do? He consults with the best. He goes to eight-time Ironman World Champion, Paula Newby-Fraser.”

“Short-course triathlon required a 16-year learning curve,” Coulson explained. “We didn’t have that kind of time. So we figure, let’s go to the best: Paula Newby-Fraser.” Under the arrangement, Newby-Fraser would create the long-range training plans and Coulson would implement them on a day-to-day basis. The team would re-engineer Michellie’s body and mind for the rigors of the Ironman, with target on the Ironman World Championship, also known as the Hawaii Ironman.

The Hawaii Ironman is held on the Kona coast of the Big Island, famous for its vast, relentless lava fields, scorching sun and merciless winds. It’s a cruel place to hold a race of any kind, particularly one that travels 140.6 miles. Because of this, and because the island itself evokes an overwhelming feeling of nature’s power in the shadows of Mauna Kea, at 13, 796 feet the island’s tallest volcano, the Hawaii Ironman has a rich history of cracking the best of athletes. Winning Hawaii seemed to almost always require an athlete to suffer through years of torturous attempts in rite of passage. Because of this history, few believed that Jones would be anywhere near the front of the race in her first attempt in 2005. The Ironman also seemed to deal out special agonies for those migrating from the short-course world: Names like Kate Allen, Chris McCormack, Simon Lessing and Spencer Smith—world champions (and in Kate Allen’s case, an Olympic gold medalist) a dozen times over, they could successfully make the jump to the Ironman distance (winning races in the series) but flailing when the took their shot in Kona. Great speed funneled through Ironman training did not equal a Kona crown.

Jones was one of the sports great exceptions. In 2005, she fearlessly led for most of the race until Switzerland’s Natascha Badmann, pursuing her sixth Hawaii Ironman win, passed Jones early in the run. The pass was not a surprise: Jones had been injured during the summer and was unable to train appropriately for the run. Yet the Australian held on well enough to finish second, a stunning achievement and ominous of the future. In the months preceding the 2006 Hawaii Ironman, the word circulating through the San Diego triathlon community was that Jones was not only healthy and training at full bore, but was looking stronger than ever. Coming into the race, many shed any caution concerning her lack of experience, and picked Jones to win. In addition to the rumors surrounding her preparation, there was the fact that Jones and Coulson, under the guiding light of Newby-Fraser, were quick studies. In addition to the Hawaii Ironman, Jones had also raced (and won) Ironman Florida in 2004 and Ironman Arizona in the spring of 2006. From each race, Jones assimilated critical information. “In each Ironman I’ve done, I’ve learned so much,” she stated. “In my first Ironman I consumed too many calories. I got the pregnant stomach look. But it was great. I learned a lot about what I really need out there. Not long after that I raced a half Ironman in which I bonked bad. If you don’t mess things up, you don’t learn what you need to learn."

On her way toward winning the Hawaii Ironman this past fall, Jones put it all together. Conditions were not the worst that the race has seen, but neither were they the most becoming. An earthquake measured with a magnitude of 6.5 had rocked the island one week before the October 23 event, and the waters of Kailua Bay continued to well and tumble on race morning. Rain showers would occur frequently throughout the day, and the subsequent sun would cook up huge bursts of humidity. In the afternoon, when the elite athletes would be running their marathons, a sun unhindered by cloud cover would throttle the field with scorching heat. By way of comparison, stand-alone marathons are typically started as early in the morning as possible to protect runners from a day’s high temperatures. In Hawaii, the pros are running at the worst possible time.

Jones came out of the water in good position, with two American women—Joanna Zeiger and Gina Kehr—charging to the lead at the beginning of the epic bike segment. But Jones stormed past them by the 10-mile mark and would never look back. With proper training having been throttled into her legs, there would be no replay of the 2005 edition of the race in which Jones struggled with the run and forfeited the victory.

“My husband Pete said to me, ‘Even in your worst moments of the run this year you never looked as bad as what was your best moment last year.’” The stopwatch supported Coulson’s observations. Jones established a stride that was clocked at 6:45 pace through the first five miles, then she locked into a 7:30 rhythm. Jones looked unphased by the punishing heat, thanks in part to the disciplined ritual she practiced in the aid stations along the course, where racers can obtain water, drinks, food and ice. Pouring water over her head and keeping her body hydrated and energized, the miles flowed beneath her smoothly and it became clear to the crowd at hand that nothing less than a complete meltdown could steal the title from her.

“I eased off in the final miles of the marathon a bit because I was afraid something might happen,” Jones said after the race. “I didn’t believe I had it won until I crossed the finish line.”

Cross the finish line she did, the first woman of the race to do so and the first Australian woman to ever win the coveted crown. At the finish line, Coulson, choked up with emotion, greeted his equally teary-eyed wife, and the two radiated with happiness. Was there a feeling of redemption having taken the greatest title in the sport, after being snubbed for a spot on the 2004 Olympic team? Jones, ever the professional, refrains from making direct negative statements.

“I get a ring!” Jones exclaimed after the race with a brightly lit smile. “And it was great to win on my mother’s birthday.”

Expect Jones to take another crack at it in 2007, and expect Jones to again be a heavy favorite in the women’s race. In the meantime, keep a lookout in Carlsbad for “MJ,” doing what she likes to do between training sessions and races. “I like to keep it real,” she stated. “I like to mow the lawn, walk the dogs, vacuum the house, and ride horses.” Know that part of what the blonde Australian keeps real is that she’s one of the best athletes in the world, real now and apparently real for some time to come. •