It was 9:30 p.m. Oct. 25. Adrenaline fueled Laura Hull as she placed one foot in front of the other and made her way down Water Street. The blackness of the Cape Fear River was to her left, the glow of the finish line was in front of her, and 140 miles were behind her.
Although the race began at 7:30 a.m., when she splashed into Wrightsville Beach’s Banks Channel alongside almost 600 competitors in the PPD Beach2Battleship Ironman Triathlon, her real iron journey began much earlier.
Hull was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis at age 24.
“It’s humiliating,” she said. “It has many side effects but the worst is that you lose bowel control … so I had to lead a really restricted life. Even riding in the car with friends, you don’t know if you might need to pull over all of a sudden. … It robs you of so much.”
Hull participated in clinical trials with PPD to test new medications, but surgery was required to completely eradicate the illness from her body. At age 39, after 15 years of battling ulcerative colitis, Hull had her large intestine removed.
At age 50, after her youngest child went to college, she found herself suddenly searching for a new goal in life. She decided to take a beginner’s course in training for a triathlon. After completing the course, she entered a super-sprint triathlon, consisting of a 250-meter swim, a 5-mile bike ride and a 1.25-mile run.
She was hooked.
“It’s kind of sneaky, because there are four different levels of triathlons,” she said. “So you go, ‘If I can do a sprint, let me try and enter a national distance.’ And after that, I still didn’t know what my body could do, so five years later here I am.”
She was grateful, however, that her quest to conquer the longest triathlon would end with the Ironman distance.
“If there’s another longer one, like I don’t know, a double Ironman, I hope I don’t hear about it!” she said.
Hull said her first Ironman got off to an ideal start, with a stiff current pushing her through the 2.4-mile swim much faster than she anticipated.
“I had my watch set to vibrate on my wrist every half mile, because it just encourages me,” she said. “And my watch just kept buzzing and I was thinking, is my watch broken?”
She climbed out of the water at Seapath Yacht Club and ran to Wrightsville Beach Park to retrieve her bicycle. She donned her purple PPD jersey as one of 15 PPD Heroes, competitors participating in the race to raise awareness for the importance of clinical trials.
“The bike ride was wonderful,” Hull said. “There was no headwind, so you got to just speed along I-40. You know, the way to irritate grown men is to have a 55-year-old woman on a little bike pass them.”
After finishing the 112-mile bike ride, Hull still had a 26.2-mile marathon to run, a distance she had never before attempted. The course looped twice through downtown Wilmington, meaning competitors would pass by the finish line as they were beginning the second loop.
“I thought I would like that, because it kind of divides the course into equal segments, but for some reason it really mentally messed with [me],” Hull said. “[I was] taunted by the finish line.”
Passing by the finish line also took her by groups of cheering friends and family, however, which brought her emotions to the surface and gave her energy to continue on.
“I just started crying and said, ‘I need hugs!’ because it was just starting to get really hard,” she said. “It’s a very emotional thing when you’re pushing your body beyond the limits of what you think you can do.”
Nearly 14 hours had passed since Hull jumped into the water to begin the race, and yet she drew on the endurance to keep placing one foot in front of the other; endurance she learned through years of fighting her painful illness.
“I think anyone who deals with a long-term disease, you have days when you just have to mentally make it through the day or the treatment or whatever,” she said. “I believe in a strange way that was training ground for what I’m doing now. … That endurance has been used to discover a sport that I love. … Out of pain came joy.”
Shortly after 9:30 p.m., Hull neared the end of the race, spurred on by cheering spectators. Friends and family met her as she ran across the finish line. And although she was the last PPD Hero to finish the race, almost all of the others were standing there as well, waiting for her.
In crossing the finish line, Hull became an Ironman, a goal not even conceivable during her 15 years of illness.
“There’s rarely a day when I’m exercising or training that I don’t remember when I was too weak to do anything. This is a gift. … It’s like having a second chance at life. I did this to delight in the fact that I’m healthy.”
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