Steve Mendel comes across as a thoughtful man, but when I asked him about his fitness transformation, he blames his wife entirely.

“I came home from work one day and she said, ‘Honey, we’re going to run a half marathon.’”

Naturally Steve pointed out that he couldn’t run one mile let alone 13.2 of them back-to-back. But Kathi had a plan. ‘You start off walking a bit and running a bit and then you get there.’

And much to his surprise, she was absolutely right.

After completing a couple of half marathons, Steve got sidetracked again. In those days, he was used to riding about 10-15 miles on his bike at the weekends and thought it was a good workout. Then a friend asked him if he ever went running after his bike ride. Intrigued, he decided to try it one day and was astonished how uncoordinated he was. 

“It took me a good 3/10 of a mile to not feel like I was stumbling around.”

The next week, it was a little better, but still a shock. He tried again, and somewhere along the line became interested in triathlon. 

He started swimming with a group of masters swimmers and also approached a well-known coaching team to help him get his first triathlon under his belt. 

There are different levels of triathlon, from the Sprint (750m swim, 20km bike ride, 5km run) up to the Ironman (2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike ride, 26.2 mile run).

“That was another funny thing,” he recalls. “This coaching team interview you first to see if you’re a good fit, and I told them I wanted to do the Woodlands Ironman.”

The coaches asked him what his triathlon experience was, and Steve said “none.”

There was a long pause.

They clearly thought I was nuts

“They clearly thought I was nuts,” he recalls, “But they agreed to take me on if I promised to do exactly what they told me to do.”

During his first Ironman, Steve suffered 3rd degree sunburn while on the bike, and remembers a time when a younger female athlete running near him said “Who said this was going to be fun?” He finished within the time limit and hasn’t looked back since. 

When asked about his goals for 2022, he says,

“Fitness is now such a part of my life, it really helps my state of mind. I usually work out about 6 days a week, and I really feel it if I miss a session.”

He loves the detail of how to become better at each of the three disciplines. “People are so helpful and inspiring. I really want to become a better swimmer, there’s so much more to it that I realized at first.” 

The next big goal is to medal in his age group for the Ironman, as that will qualify him for the world championships in Kona, Hawaii.

Steve will be swimming his favorite race at the National Senior Games this year in Fort Lauderdale – the 100m and 200m individual medley. You may also see him in the triathlon, though it conflicts with some of his other swimming interests.