Kirk Williams, 17

I pretty much swim or run every other day. And then I bike every day — just for an hour, hour and a half. And then run for 30 minutes. Then swim 30 minutes, then ride for an hour, hour and a half. So as you can see, it takes up a whole lot of time. When you have school all day, and you’ve got friends doing stuff, it’s hard to fit it all in there, for sure. I get up before school a lot of times — at 5, 5:30. But you do it a few times and you get used to it. I just got my license a year or so ago, and that hurt the training for about a month. And then I was like hey, I don’t need to drive everywhere. I can get on my bike.

I sing songs [in my head] pretty much every race I do. The last race I went to, they had Mozart playing at the start line, and I was going nuts. Everybody else didn’t care, but I was like, if I get Mozart stuck in my head, people are going to be flying past me cause I’m singing some symphony. Usually they’ve got some kind of rock or something going on, and it’ll get stuck in your head, and you’ll be climbing this hill, just having this beat going in your head. And it really helps a lot.

I like team sports — I played soccer for years, and I did stuff like that. But I realized I like being independent, where if I mess up, it’s my own fault. … I just like being able to push myself, you know, on my own limits. If I can’t do it, it’s my own fault. Then I can’t blame anybody.

If I do well here, I’d go onto the nationals, which would be Lake Tahoe. I think I could handle going out to Tahoe. — As told to Jason Roop

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