She hit her lowest point on the walk to the treadmill. Her legs felt numb. Her shorts and tank top were drenched with sweat. It was nearly 1 p.m. on February 12 at the Korte Recreation Center in Highland, Illinois. The gym was dead. There was nobody around—no one who knew what she was doing, anyway—to give her a boost, a high-five, a thumbs-up, or a crazy loud, “You go girl!”

Ginger Kabureck, 30, stood on the treadmill and stared at the start button. I could just go home now, she thought to herself. No one would care. I’ve already accomplished so much. I could leave and go home and have dinner right now. She hit start, kept the incline at zero and bumped the speed up to 3.5 miles an hour, a touch over 17-minute pace. She knew if she just started walking, her brain could wrap itself around the five-hour task ahead of her. If I have to walk this or crawl this, I’m going to finish this.

After she’d walked a tenth of a mile—actually, after she’d swum 2.4 miles in a 75-yard pool and biked 112 miles on a spin bike, after she’d already logged more than seven hours of exercise since 5:30 that morning—Ginger Kabureck started to run.

It was part of a journey that had started eight years earlier.

Wedged in a Stadium Seat

Kabureck was 11 when the doctor said she was obese. Her parents were overweight and all five of her siblings were overweight, so obesity didn’t seem like such a bad thing. It didn’t sink in that she was different until she was 16. Kabureck tried Slimfast and MetaboLife, but they didn’t work. When she met her husband to be, she was 21 and weighed about 220, and when they got married she was 23 and weighed 280. And then a baseball game changed everything.

“I went to a Cardinals game,” she says. “I was with a big group of friends, and my brother and my husband, and I was kind of stuck in my seat. I went to the game, sat down, and kinda wedged myself in. I was too embarrassed to get up during the game and refill my drink, or go get food, or even use the restroom just because I wasn’t sure how I was going to get out of that seat.

“At the end of the game, my husband helped me up and on the drive home I had my good cry. I told him, ‘We’re going to buy a scale tonight.’ And it was 11 o’clock at night and we showed up at Walmart to buy a scale.”

She researched healthy foods, learned to cook, and started exercising every day. Unable to afford a gym membership, she walked around the block with her son, and when she got down to around 235 pounds, she started Jillian Michaels 30 Day Shred. When she got through all three levels, she started back on level one, this time with hand weights. By October 2009, after two years, the 5-foot-7 Kabureck was down to 150 pounds and pregnant with her second kid.

Losing that much weight is great, but the excess skin hanging from her stomach caused rashes and required special garments to keep it contained. In 2011, she had surgery to remove it. Complications arose, and she developed a hematoma and so much swelling she looked nine months pregnant. Then she got an infection and a huge abscess burrowed into her bones. Doctors feared she’d lose her left leg. Another operation left her bedbound for six weeks, unable to pick up or feed her 1- and 4-year-olds. For a while, it seemed the infection might be back. It was a bad time, and when one of the nurses came to her house and asked her how she was doing, Kabureck didn’t hold back.

“I said I was awful. I was very negative,” says Kabureck. “And she stopped dead in her tracks and told me to get my crap together, that there were so many people she’d seen who weren’t going to heal or survive, and she’d heard about my weight loss story and how I’d fought through all that. She said I was just going to have to put in one more fight.”

An inspirational Bible passage tattooed on Kabureck's arm is her mantra for pushing through any challenge. Courtesy of Ginger Kabureck

The nurse was a runner. She told Kabureck how running helped her erase negative thoughts, made her promise to run with her when she got better, and then she gave the hurt and angry young woman a Bible passage: And let us run with endurance the race God has set before us. The text was from the Book of Hebrews. And the words made sense to Kabureck because races, in a sense, were everywhere, whether they entailed health, family, career, or finish lines. To get through tough times, she just needed to gut them out.

Kabureck kept her promise to the nurse to start running, and eventually had the passage tattooed on her upper right arm. In every one of her eight marathons since getting the tattoo (she’s done ten), when things got tough she’s glanced at the line on her arm. “It’s my mantra.”

A Joke Turns Serious

Two years ago, the Korte Recreation Center started the Indoor Ironman Challenge, a twist on a program they’d been calling the Couch Potato Triathlon. Members could sign up as individuals or as teams of three, and they had about six weeks to complete the iconic Ironman distance: a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike, and 26.2-mile run. The goal, says Mark Rosen, director of parks and recreation at the center, was to counter the inertia that sets in when winter drags on. “By the time February comes around, people’s New Year’s resolutions start to dwindle. So it was a way to keep them motivated to stay in the gym.”

Last year, Kabureck, one of the center’s personal trainers, figured she’d try to do the whole thing in two days. She did, completing a half-Ironman on two consecutive days. But she was joking when this winter, after seeing a flier for the 2015 event, she said to a friend, “I guess I have to do the full this year.” She had been joking; she’d never done an Ironman and she certainly wasn’t training for something so epic. But her buddy didn’t think it was a joke at all.

Yeah, Kabureck thought, why shouldn’t I do it? Still, she didn’t get completely fired up about it until someone mentioned she thought an indoor Ironman was impossible.

But nothing was impossible. Not for Kabureck, not anymore. Even when she stopped sweating during the third leg of her indoor Ironman, Kabureck did not quit. Instead, after she felt the goosebumps on her arm at mile 12—a bad sign when you’re in a 68-degree gym—she walked for her max allotment of two minutes, drank an entire 32-ounce bottle of water, and kept gutting it out.

Kabureck's fuel for the all-day challenge. Courtesy of Ginger Kabureck

The friends who’d come during her 170-lap swim to scream her name and hold signs saying, You’re an Ironwoman!, and those who had ridden beside her for 5 or 10 or 20 miles to keep her company, and the clients who’d come in waves to wish her well as she continually pushed 90 to 95 rotations per minute on the bike—they were all long gone. So she summoned the toughness and tapped the motivation that is her trademark and she ran, drinking more often from the nine 32-ounce bottles filled with water and Gatorade that she’d been carting around with her all day, and eating occasionally from the giant Ziploc bag of food she’d also kept glued to her side. The bag now had cashews, almonds, bananas, clementines, peanut butter and jelly, three GUs, and her one indulgence—peanut butter M&Ms.

She adjusted the incline occasionally, going up from her baseline of .5 to 1.5 to keep her legs from burning out, and kept the speed between about 5.3 and 5.8 miles per hour, in the ballpark of 10:20 and 11:20 pace. Every hour, the machine shut down and went into automatic cooldown mode. She used those forced breaks to pee or drink or walk, always sticking to her two-minute-max walking rule.

She watched The Ellen DeGeneres Show and posted her status on Facebook. A friend joined her, running on the treadmill next to her for an hour, and that was a great distraction. A few funny moments distracted her, too, like the guy who did a double take when he saw her eating a PB&J on the treadmill. Who does that? written all over his face.

And there was the guy on the elliptical who asked her after she’d been running for an hour: “What are you doing, running a marathon?” To which she replied that, yes, actually, she was. “But I didn’t feel like explaining the whole Ironman thing,” she says.

Gradually, the gym filled with the evening rush and a crowd gathered around her and the signs came back out and the cheers started up and they all started a countdown of tenths of a mile: .3, .2, .1...

At actual Ironman events, when you cross the finish line, the announcer says your name followed by “You are an Ironman!” There was no announcer and no declaration and for sure, no official governing body is going to give her accomplishment the time of day. But she had swum 2.4 miles in 1 hour, 43 minutes; rode 112 miles in 5 hours, 21 minutes; and run a marathon in 5 hours, 8 minutes.

At 6:18 pm, 12 hours and 43 minutes after she dove into the pool, Ginger Kabureck was done.

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