Femme Fatale
by Scott Schumaker
When Kristen Eddy finished the inaugural Odyssey Off-Road IRON Triathlon, an Ironman-distance race held on fire roads and trails in and around Virginia’s Allegheny Mountains on November 1, she took everyone by surprise. First, it was nearly midnight and most people around the finish were snoozing. Second, she won the race outright, beating all the men in the field.
Eddy, 32, an occupational therapist from Reston, Virginia, finished the 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile mountain bike and 26.2-mile trail run in an impressive 17 hours, 12 minutes.
“It was really exciting,” she said.
“I think everyone was kind of sharing a, ‘Holy cow, this is unbelievable!’ moment.”
Prior to the race, Dawn Taylor-Mann, Odyssey’s director of operations, thought Eddy (pictured above) would do well, but she never figured she’d win it. “We thought she’d be in the top five, but she looked the freshest coming off the bike, and she still looked the freshest going into the second loop of the run,” she said. “Then we said, ‘Hey, she just might win this thing.’”
While Eddy downplays having “chicked” the men (as male competitor Chris Scott termed it), saying she was happier to just feel good throughout the race, her name joins an elite list of women who have won dual-gender, endurance races outright.
The growing club includes Wendy Ingraham, who won the inaugural Ironman Brazil in 1989; Ann Trason, who took the USA Track & Field 24-Hour Championships that same year; Libby Riddles and Susan Butcher, both winners of the Iditarod Dog Sled Race; several women who have won the Tevis Cup, a 100-mile horse trail race (26 wins for women, 25 for men); Pam Reed, the 2024 and 2024 winner of the 135-mile Badwater Ultramarathon; Amy Jo Turi, who won the 2024 Bigfoot Ironman road triathlon in British Columbia, Canada; and, most recently, Stephanie Ehret winning the Javelina Jundred 100-mile trail run November 9 in Arizona (where four of the top six finishers were women).
All “chicked” jokes aside, Eddy doesn’t think her male competitors were bothered by her victory. “They seemed to handle it fine,” she said. “A bunch of the top-five finishers are buddies of mine, and we train and race together anyway. They were generally pretty happy, I think. And
I don’t think they’re the type of people who look at the whole gender issue.”
That doesn’t mean they won’t be gunning for her course record next year. Odyssey will be doing its part to add fuel to the fire. “We’re going to have the Kristen Eddy Challenge,” Taylor-Mann said. “If someone can beat her time, we’ll have an extra bonus for them.” Next year’s race is scheduled for September 11.
