Emerson Kiefer has come a long way since he started going to the triathlon club at UMass, where he had just finished five years of college swimming and was getting a masters degree.
“Initially, I would get out of the water and get passed by a bunch of people on the bike,” he said, “which was fun, because you get to see the whole race, but … part of that was the gear. I was riding the bike I had as a young kid; it was a hybrid bike.”
Kiefer, 25, of Hartford is more experienced now and also better equipped. On Aug. 8, at the USA Triathlon championships in Milwaukee, Kiefer came out of the water of Lake Michigan and nobody passed him as he raced to the Olympic distance (1,500-meter swim, 40K bike, 10K run) national championship in 1 hour, 53 minutes, 14 seconds.
He also won his age group (25-29) but had to wait until the other age groups finished to see if he won the title. Tyler Tanko of Sherwood, Wisc,, who was in the 30-34 age group, ended up finishing second overall (1:53:58).
“He started way later than me,” Kiefer said. “He was the guy to watch. I was done before he even got in the water, I think. We were watching the splits come in. I knew he was a really fast runner. I was thinking, If this guy is faster on the bike, if he is ahead of me on the bike, it’s probably all over for me.”
Kiefer was a little faster in the swim and the bike.
“It was cool being able to watch and experience the excitement of the overall race, after I had already finished and secured an age group win,” he said.
Kiefer had competed in the sprint triathlon (750-meter swim, 19.4K bike, 5K run) national championship the day before, finishing third while Tanko was second.
“Currently, I’m better at cycling and worse at running,” Kiefer said. “There are some fast runners out there and I can’t quite compete with them on the run alone. My bike is pretty strong.”
Kiefer, who works at Travelers in Hartford, grew up swimming in Wayland, Mass. and continued at UMass. When he finished his eligibility, he thought he would try triathlons.
“I’ve always been kind of interested in racing triathlons,” he said. “I did a little kid sprint one when I was 7 years old, which was a lot of fun.”
It was a bit of a rough start (he wasn’t wearing proper shoes and he ended up with a calf injury) but he started to learn about the sport and after he graduated in 2024, he began to focus more on training. This year was his first serious year of training.
It was his first national championship race. He had competed in a Half Ironman race (1.2-mile swim, 56-mile bike and 13.1-mile run) in Springfield, Mass. in June, finishing fourth and qualifying for the World Half Ironman championships in France in September, which will be his first international competition.
He has run the Hartford Marathon as well as the Bay State Marathon (where he ran his personal best of 2 hours, 44 minutes last year) in the past but plans to run the Chicago Marathon for the first time in October.
But he enjoys triathlon training the most because of the variety.
“It makes training a lot more interesting,” he said. “On race day, it’s pretty cool from a racing perspective, it’s not who is the best runner or who is the best cyclist. It’s a balancing act between the three.”
Leave a Comment