80-year-old becomes oldest women to complete an Ironman triathlon

Natalie Grabow's triathlon training begins with a wake-up call between 5:30 and 6:30 a.m. She eats breakfast, finishes a strength and stretching routine, then starts her workouts.

In a given week, she will run up to four times, swim three times and get on the exercise bike in her Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, home four times. Her longest bike workout, every Saturday, can last up to six hours.

All that work helped Grabow endure the world's most prestigious triathlon competition on Oct. 11 in Kona, Hawaii, where over the course of 16 hours, 45 minutes and 26 seconds, Grabow finished the 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride and 26.2-mile run at the Ironman World Championship.

She didn't win, yet she set a record.

At 80, she is the oldest woman ever to finish the grueling, 140.6-mile competition, often held in windy, humid conditions.

To Grabow, the race was no different than her previous 10 finishes at the Ironman World Championship. Yet in the month since her finish, Grabow has fielded interview requests from international media outlets and sparked headlines that have crossed over from triathlon's niche audience into the mainstream.

"Honestly, I'm kind of puzzled by the whole thing, but I think 80 must sound really old to people," she said. "That's the only thing I can figure. I don't feel old. So to me, it just was a race."

But she is not just another finisher.

"I don't think there is any kind of road map for Natalie's accomplishment," said her coach, Michelle Lake. And it isn't hyperbole; the age-grading formula the world championship uses to award qualifying spots does not even have a standard for women older than 80 because "there have not been any finishers," the organization said.

The oldest finisher of an Ironman World Championship remains Hiromu Inada, who was 85 when he finished in 2018.

"I sometimes find it difficult to believe that the woman going way too fast on her bike and running mile after mile like 'The Little Engine That Could' is my mom," said Amy Rousseau, one of Grabow's two daughters, who was yelling out splits and pace times for her mother last month along the course in Hawaii.

"She looks so small but clearly is so mighty."

Grabow is still racing as an octogenarian in part because she is making up for lost time.

As a child, she said she wanted to join the boys in her neighborhood as they played sports such as baseball, but opportunities for women in sports were few or fledgling. Title IX, the landmark 1972 legislation that formally created opportunities for women to compete in sports equal to men, was still nine years from passing when Grabow graduated from high school. Instead, she joined her high school's cheerleading team and poured her competitive instincts into studying, graduating from Bucknell University with a degree in math. Hired out of college in the late 1960s by Bell Labs as a software developer, Grabow worked on a project dubbed the "picture phone" -- a telephone with a screen.

After five years at Bell, she left to raise two daughters with her husband, Paul, a telecommunications executive. When she returned to working in software development, 16 years later, she had found new outlets for her competitiveness.

Crunched for time to work out while raising two children and working, she began running during her lunch break in her early 40s. She took up 5- and 10-kilometer races, then half-marathons. In her 50s, as injuries mounted from running, she was interested when friends said they were starting triathlons.

There was just one problem.

"I was embarrassed that I had never learned to swim as a kid," she said.

In 2004, she took part in a triathlon where she ran and biked, and a daughter, Amy, handled the swimming leg.

"I just loved it," Grabow said. "I loved the whole atmosphere, all the people, the excitement. So I said, 'I gotta learn to swim.'"

She learned in 2005, when she was 59. The same year, she competed in her first solo triathlon at a shorter, "sprint" distance.

Realizing she could train for hours on the bike without being injured she gravitated toward the longer-distance competitions, and within a year, in 2006, the 60-year-old Grabow qualified for the full Ironman World Championship. Upon arriving in Hawaii and seeing some of the world's fittest endurance athletes, she felt like an impostor.

Yet Grabow more than belonged. Her time placed third among women ages 60-64, and faster than a dozen women three decades younger. Just a year after learning to swim, she had finished the 2.4-mile swim in Kailua Bay in 1:30:19, the third-fastest time in her division.

It was the first of 11 finishes at the Ironman World Championship. She could have stopped years ago, but Grabow describes herself as motivated by the discipline and structure that her training requires.

"If I didn't race, that would be OK," she said, "as long as I can move every day."

She likes how challenging herself during a morning workout makes the rest of her day's problems feel more manageable. High-school friends she vacations with have come to expect Grabow to get in a daily workout, no matter their locale.

Fighting off nerves and getting enough sleep are still challenges now, she said, but experience has taught her to relax during races. (That concentration, her daughter said, was aided by her father's longtime practice of handling the logistics of travel and equipment for years as Grabow participated in triathlons closer to New Jersey, and for nine of her mother's 11 Ironman World Championship trips to Hawaii.)

As Grabow has aged, her training has changed to compensate, said Lake, her coach. A weekly strength session at a local gym was recently added into her routine. Though Grabow prefers cycling on roads, she trains almost entirely indoors now to limit her risk in traffic. To reduce the risk of injury, her weekly running mileage now tops out at around 18 miles, which is only a fraction of the mileage many runners train at to complete a full marathon. And it made Lake and Rousseau glance at the clock on Oct. 11 when Grabow transitioned from the 112-mile cycling leg to the 26.2-mile run.

The Ironman World Championship uses strict time cutoffs for completing the swim, bike and run portions. Failing to finish inside the allotted time limit can stop a competitor midrace. When Grabow began her run, she and her supporters knew she had about seven hours until the cutoff.

Grabow made it comfortably, about 15 minutes ahead of the cutoff, because what she didn't have in weekly mileage, she made up for in mental toughness and grit, Lake said. Even after a stumble just feet from the finish line, when her shoe caught the rug, she quickly popped back up.

"We knew when she started the run that she would get it done," Lake said. "She is also very competitive, and we should be proud to be this way. Successful people and athletes are competitive not only with others but with herself."

Lake told Grabow after her finish that she was about to gain notoriety for her accomplishment. Grabow waved off the notion, only for it to become true. She has even been recognized while shopping near her home.

"I don't know how they recognize me," she said. "It's so funny. It's all very, very strange."

She is also bemused at the notion that her accomplishment, at 80, has provided "inspiration for others." Competing, she said, is just what she loves.

"You shouldn't have a preconceived idea that, 'OK, you don't do a triathlon when you're 80,'" she said. "If you keep your body healthy and start early and stay healthy, then if you're lucky, you can keep doing it, and there's no time limit."

"My husband uses a walker, and he can't as much as he would want to move. He can't. So there are limitations that as much as you want to do it, but I've been blessed with the ability to do what I do. Yes, I have to be very careful that I don't get injured and do the things that I can do to stay healthy. But for me, it comes naturally. I want to do this. You know, some people want to paint or knit or read books. This is my passion. This is what I love. When I get up in the morning, if I have a hard bike workout, I'm very excited about that."

Grabow already has two races on her schedule for the summer of 2026. Why? It helps that she had heard of another woman who, at age 82, had completed a different triathlon competition.

"That's a goal out there for me that I would like to maybe match someday," she said.

The 80-year-old Ironman triathlon finisher who isn't slowing down: 'This is my passion'