Runner’s personal journey culminates in Ironman

TAUPO, NEW ZEALAND — When Active Soles employee Kate Arnold entered the water of Lake Taupo with more than 1,000 seasoned triathletes March 7, she had more than a few misgivings.

The 2015 Ironman in New Zealand was Arnold’s first ever triathlon, and she had never competed in a swimming race before. When the starting canon went off, Arnold found herself practically drowning in people swimming over and around her.

She made it to the halfway point in half the time she had expected of herself.

“I think that I was just so scared that I swam as fast as I could,” Arnold said.

But finishing that first leg of the Ironman — and the whole triathlon — had less to do with the fear of drowning and more to do with the fear of giving up on the life she had worked so hard to build.

When Arnold was 22 years old, she was 60 pounds overweight. She ate at fast food restaurants multiple times per week and smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. She suffered from chronic migraine syndrome and an autoimmune disease.

And she was taking classes to help her deal with drug and alcohol addiction, as well as matters of domestic violence.

“I just was the worst, unhealthiest person on the planet, I felt like,” Arnold said. “Who I wanted to be and who I was were just not even close.”

But when both her parents died of cancer, after a life of excessive alcohol consumption, she knew her life had to change.

“I was like, ‘alright, that’s not gonna be me,” Arnold said.

So she became addicted to running instead.

In the past five years, Arnold has run six half-marathon races and two full marathons, plus many training miles in between. She finished her first bicycle race, the Fireweed 100, last year. She has also adopted a vegetarian diet and started the weekly Happy Run event with her husband, Lance Arnold, and Active Soles owner Anne Thomas.

And now she’s an Ironman finisher.

But Arnold had to make some sacrifices to become the person she is now. Her friends, who told her she couldn’t make the changes she wanted, had to be out of the picture.

“I totally had to let ‘em go, it was just too much negativity,” Arnold said.

So she surrounded herself with inspiring people, “people who did crazy things.”

“You look at them in awe and think … if they can do that, I can do something,” Arnold said.

One of those people is now her husband.

When Arnold met Lance, she said, he was a “top-of-his-game triathlete” who had won many team canoe sailing races, one of which was the 2006 Na Holo Kai race in Hawaii.

“I was just in awe of who he is and who his friends were,” Arnold said.

And she decided she wanted to live a life like his.

The couple lived in Colorado for a few years, then moved to Hawaii in 2010, where the Wisconsin-born Arnold found a new appreciation for locally grown food and the environment.

Later that year, the Arnolds moved back to Colorado to work for a ski patrol, unsure if they wanted to give up the “ski bum” lifestyle. But the chronic pizza and beer diet they took up there, she said, was a step in the wrong direction.

“I gained like 30 pounds back super fast,” Arnold said.

It wasn’t just a physical regression that she was concerned about, however. The “spiritual progress” she had made in the process of becoming a physically healthy person seemed to be at risk, too, in their Colorado community.

“My spiritual path is really important to me,” Arnold said. “(It) was a huge reason why I was able to give up drugs, drinking and smoking.”

So in 2012, they moved to Alaska to “start over,” Arnold said. They returned to Colorado for a brief period of time before deciding to stay in Alaska for good in 2013.

And after all, the Last Frontier had “a whole new playing field” of super athletes Arnold had never seen before.

Willow ultrarunner David Johnston, she said, was one of them.

“That guy’s unreal,” Arnold said. “One day I asked him … ‘what about your injuries?’ and he said ‘you just run through the pain, and then you forget about it.’ And I was like, ‘oh my gosh, that’s crazy.’”

But sure enough, that advice got Arnold through a tough 15-mile training run that ultimately helped her on her way to the biggest thing she had ever done.

As did a story Arnold’s friend, Julie Estey, told her on a 20-mile run at 10 below this winter.

Estey spoke of her experience in the Yukon Quest sled dog race, during which she sustained a serious knee injury — and finished.

“I didn’t think about running at all, I thought about her story and how tough she is and how people find that strength,” Arnold said.

Personally knowing people capable of such great strength, she said, fueled her fire to finish the Ironman.

But so did the more than 100 people who tracked her online throughout the race. Between Arnold’s husband; her boss (Thomas); her coach, Jessica Kelley, of Evergreen Endurance in Seattle, Washington; Estey and Johnston; mountain runners Ben and Christy Marvin and Matias Saari; and the Happy Runners, Arnold said, the support she felt throughout all 14 hours, 14 minutes and 30 seconds of the Ironman was overwhelming.

Now, and in the future, Arnold said she hopes to offer that kind of support in return.

“I don’t think I’m special — it’s just an Ironman. But at the same time, it was a huge accomplishment for me, and I want people to know that they can do that,” she said.

Arnold finished 822nd out of 1,131 New Zealand Ironman entrants, 90 of whom did not finish the race. She finished 16th out of 20 female entrants in the 25-29 age group.

Contact Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.