Fort Lee’s Own Ironman: Elliot Albirt

For many people, swimming 2.4 miles and then biking 112 miles, only to follow that up by running a full, 26.2-mile marathon may not sound like much fun. But for one Fort Lee resident, who’s set to compete in his first full “Ironman” distance triathlon Sunday in Lake Placid, N.Y., nothing sounds like more fun.

Elliot Albirt, 33, a Fort Lee resident for the past eight years, is competing in the 2011 Ironman Lake Placid Sunday in the Adirondack Mountain village where the 1980 Winter Olympics took place.

In fact, the transition and finish line of the Ironman competition are on the Olympic speed skating oval. The 2.4-mile swim takes place in Lake Placid’s Mirror Lake, and athletes complete the 112-mile bike ride through the Adirondack Mountains, according to race organizers. And then there’s the marathon—a 26.2-mile race on a two-loop course.

Albirt, who participated in a training camp at the site in late June, says he’s ready.

“It was kind of intense,” Albirt said of the weekend he spent doing loop after loop on the running and biking courses and swimming in the lake. “It was tough, but a big confidence booster as far as doing it and getting through it and feeling good.”

Albirt started running just a few years ago. It wasn’t long after that that he competed in his first half marathon. But after realizing that just running wasn’t really doing it for him, he joined Team in Training, an endurance sports training program that raises money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, and started training for triathlons—his second ever being a “half iron” distance in 2009. He said he decided then that he wanted to do a full Ironman before he turned 35.

On Sunday, Albirt will beat that goal by a couple of years.

“I don’t know why I picked 35,” he said. “I think because I was 30 at the time. But I’ve really taken to the sport.”

Back in 2009 he said he knew he wasn’t yet ready to commit to the “full iron” distance, so last year he went to Lake Placid to cheer on some friends and volunteer at the event—something that gave him a better chance of getting into the highly exclusive and competitive race in 2011.

“I pretty much knew I was going to sign up for this year,” Albirt said. “But then it just clinched it seeing everyone and cheering everyone on. Some people were disabled athletes running on prosthetic limbs. If you have some desire to do it, seeing all that is very inspiring.”

Albirt’s personal goals for Sunday’s race are threefold—as they are for any endurance race, he’s quick to point out—and relatively modest.

The first goal is to “take it all in, have fun and finish,” he said.

The second goal is what Albirt calls his “happy goal:” finishing the race in less than 16 hours. His third goal, which he calls his “ecstatic goal,” is to finish in less than 15-and-a-half.

“But if I don’t hit those marks, and I finish before midnight, I will still be very happy with my performance because things can happen that slow you down,” Albirt said. “If I hit my ideal times from training, I’ll be in that 15-and-a-half to 16 range.”

Albirt, a full-time contract employee who doesn’t yet have a spouse or kids—something he said would make training for such a competition nearly impossible—said a lot of that training has taken place over the past several months in and around Fort Lee: on 9W in both directions for bike training and running along the Hudson River in Palisades Interstate Park. For swimming, which Albirt admits is his weakest event, he had to join a gym and train in a pool.

“The sport is great,” he said. “It’s a big time commitment, and it can be a little expensive. But it is just a lot of fun.”

He added that perhaps because he’s not expected to win his age group or be on the winners’ podium at the end of the grueling day Sunday, he may approach the sport a little differently than others, “but the day I’m not having fun training and racing is probably when I’ll think I should find a different sport to enjoy or maybe take a little time off.”

But he said he doesn’t envision that happening any time soon because he’s having so much fun.

“There are people who do other sports like golf that are constant fees and very expensive to do, and this is the equivalent for me,” Albirt said. “I don’t golf.”