World class by Mark Sherry
Area woman competes in Hawaii’s Ironman
I
t is the Super Bowl of triathlons, and local resident Amy (Christopherson) Fuhrmann can now say she has participated in it—the Ironman World Championship in Kona, Hawaii. Fuhrmann qualified for the World Championship with her secondplace finish in the 35-39 age division for females in last year’s Madison triathlon. It was her first Ironman event.
In early October of this year, Fuhrmann headed to Hawaii a week ahead of the Oct. 12 World Championship to continue her preparations for the event. Fuhrmann said she kept her goals fairly modest— first, she just wanted to finish; second,
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she wanted her time to be somewhat close to what it was in Madison the previous year and was hoping to finish in the top 25 among the 88 or so participants in her age/gender division.
It was a successful experience on all those points and more for Fuhrmann. She wound up finishing 19th in her division with a time of 10 hours, 45 minutes. Over 600 women started the event and Fuhrmann placed 117th among them. “Overall, I’m really happy,” she said as she recently recounted the experience. Her time was within eight minutes of what she had done in Madison, and her swim time was faster than Madison and faster than
the top U.S. woman who competes as a professional. “I enjoyed the day,” she said.
A standout swimmer at Kiel High School and later at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, it might not come as a surprise that she excelled in the 2.4-mile swim in Kailua-Kona Bay. But this experience was new to Fuhrmann as she had never competed in an ocean swim before. On top of that, the surf conditions were reported to be the worst they had been in 10 years. While some competitors actually got sea sick, Fuhrmann said she was not affected by the swim conditions on the day of the race and had only felt it a bit during her practice swims the week before the event.
