Veteran competitors enjoy challenge of taking on youth

The variety of participants at Saturday’s Coeur d’Alene Triathlon extended beyond the young, the gung ho and the recently pregnant.

Donna Messenger, 64, and John Rudolf, 59, were two of the more senior members of the field.

“I’ve been doing it a long time,” said Messenger, the former Lake City High track coach. “I did my first Coeur d’Alene back when it was still on the other side of the lake. I watched it once and thought, ‘I can do that,’ so the next year I did.”

That was 21 years ago. Messenger now does several triathlons a year, and also competes in running events such as the Boston Marathon.

“I don’t know if it’s any harder, but I’m a lot slower,” Messenger said. “But us older runners have more time to train.”

Rudolf, on the other hand, considers himself a mountaineer first and a triathlete second.

“Olympic triathlons, I’ve done like three. Mostly, I climb big mountains,” said Rudolf who has scaled Mt. Rainer and Argentina’s 22,841-foot Mt. Aconcagua in the last six months. “And I biked across the Pyrenees in June. This just kind of throws the swimming and running in every now and then.”

As the chairman and founder of Summit Capital, a Seattle-based financial services firm, Rudolf counts on a potent dose of outdoor activity to offset the time he spends sitting behind a desk.

“This triathlon is just a personal challenge in one of the most beautiful areas in the world,” said the exuberant 59-year-old. “And it’s fun to compete against all these 20- and 30-year-olds.”