Hall wins Superfrog Triathlon for third time

For the 29^th consecutive year, the Superfrog Triathlon was held Saturday on Coronado Island, this year in atypical September conditions for San Diego.   A choppy Pacific Ocean, spitting rain, fierce crosswinds, and sinking sand were a grueling challenge but no match for the military's toughest men on two feet, the Navy SEALs.

A race bringing the military and civilian communities together, Navy SEAL Mitch Hall took the men's title for the third straight year and Boulder, Colorado's Emily Finanger took victory in the women's field.

On a morning plagued with heavy rains and heavier ocean chop, most race directors would not have hesitated in converting the event to a run-bike-run, eliminating the challenge of a rough water swim.   However, Superfrog is not your typical race, directed by retired SEAL Moki Martin, and while altering the swim course was debatable, eliminating it altogether was never an option.

Currently capped at 350 racers, Superfrog was created by Martin, who was captivated by the original Hawaiian Ironman on Oahu, Hawaii.   Martin and his fellow SEAL teammates typically competed in San Diego's original swim-run-swim events in Mission Bay in the 1970's as extra-curricular training to complement their SEALs training and figured the Navy should host a triathlon event to prepare SEAL competitors for the upcoming Ironman event.

Over the past 29 years, the Superfrog course has adapted and undergone many course changes, yet certain rigorous course traditions remain.  

The Amphibious Base is the home training grounds to one of the most elite special warfare units in the United States, the Navy SEALs.

Says Rehberg, "It breaks the mystique down of the SEALs and brings the community in.   We want to bring people in and show them what they do."

What SEALs do is physically and mentally taxing, designed to weed out those with even the slightest chink in their armor.   SEALs train and compete day in and day out in the most unforgivable terrain and conditions, simulating what they will inevitably face on the battlefield protecting the nation abroad.  

The half-iron distance race is no different, throwing competitors into the same choppy waters the SEALs use as their rough water training grounds and run them across the same sinking soft-sand beaches SEALs use in their daily training runs. There are a few permissions race organizers grant competitors though.   While the SEALs teams are forced to complete their daily beach runs in fatigues and combat boots, competing triathletes wear lightweight racing flats and don't carry cinder blocks.    

A modified three-lap swim course was staged, each loop broken up with a 200-meter run on hard-packed sand.   None of the racers on the line came close to 2006 Superfrog swim leg winner, and Athens Olympic silver medalist, Larsen Jensen's winning time, but a group of three men and Finanger led the competition out of the unrelenting Pacific waters.  

Rough conditions continued onto the four-lap 56-mile bike course with gusty winds and blowing rain challenging riders.   Boulder, Colorado's Lars Finanger was first onto the bike course, consisting of out-and-back segments on the narrow Highway 75 strip between Coronado and Imperial Beach, and maintained a lead throughout the bike leg and early stages of the run before running off course during the half-marathon and pulling from the race.  

Hall came off the bike four minutes down to Finanger and started the five-loop 13.1-mile run course unaware of Finanger's misguided adventure yet looking poised to strike on his familiar soft-sand training grounds.   Hall broke the tape in 4:24:15 and became Superfrog's lone three-peat champion with Craig Zelent and Tom Scherbart finishing second and third on the day over ten minutes behind.

"I like racing in this dicey (weather), when it's rougher and windy," said Hall, who recently returned from a duty in Iraq in April.   "It doesn't bother me as much as it probably bothers the majority of the other racers."  

"The hardest part is always the run," continued Hall, a two-time Hawaiian Ironman finisher with a personal best Kona time of 9:39:40.   "The first two laps feel pretty good but then you try to keep the wheels from falling off, so to speak."  

In the women's race, Finanger posted the fastest female swim, bike, and run splits of the day to finish in 4:45:06, nearly 12-minutes ahead of runner-up and Kona-bound San Diegan Sonja Doherty and 40-minutes up on third place finisher Kerri McClellan.

In the early years, Superfrog regulars included original ironmen John Dunbar and Tom Warren, the owner of Tug's Tavern and father of the now legendary San Diego triathlon scene.   Scott Tinley and Paula Newby-Fraser also tested their legs on the soft-sand beaches against the military's fittest men in their lead up to Kona race day.  

While many SEALs are currently deployed in the Middle East, a smaller-than-usual 30 percent of the field competing were active SEALs.  

Martin told racers that next year's 30th running of the event would bring about exciting changes but in typical SEALs fashion would not offer any further information.  Rehberg went a step further and acknowledged that the 2008 edition would feature Martin teamming up with So-Cal based event promoter KOZ Enterprises to include an International distance in addition to the traditional half-iron distance Superfrog Triathlon. 

Complete results are posted at www.superfrogtriathlon.com.