The ‘culmination’ of his work: SC retiree competes in Ironman World Championship
For some people, exercising is a chore. For Jimmy Mahaffey, he doesn’t want to stop.
On a recent morning, as he jogged past his house, he called out, “One more lap.”
It wasn’t the first time he’d said it, or even the second. It was like watching a teenager playing video games telling his parents, “Just five more minutes.” Mahaffey wasn’t listening to music, or a podcast, or anything, while he ran. He just finds that much joy from running.
As he ran, Mahaffey was finishing up the last of his three workouts that morning: swimming, biking and running. But the 64-year-old doesn’t exercise just to stay active.
Mahaffey is training to compete in his 33rd Ironman, a grueling competition that features a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride and a marathon. And this Ironman is special — it’s the world championship. It could be his capstone competition, his last one for the books. Or, it could be just one more impressive line on a resume that will keep growing for years.
33 triathlons: How Jimmy Mahaffey got here
Mahaffey isn’t your typical elite athlete. He hasn’t been doing this his whole life.
He first got into running in his late 20s, but injuries led him to expand his horizons. He got into biking and swimming, both of which offered similar kinds of cardio exercise, but with less wear and tear on the body.
After awhile, knowing he was already doing all three activities in a triathlon, he thought, why not actually do one?
He competed in shorter triathlons at first. But within a year he decided to do his first Ironman, a competition whose distances dwarf the Olympics. An Olympic triathlon is a little less than a mile of swimming, nearly 25 miles of biking and 6.2 miles of running. An Ironman is four and a half times longer than that.
“I like to be fit. I like to be active. I like to be outdoors,” Mahaffey said. “The race is a culmination of all the work you do to get to that point.”
Mahaffey loves all three activities about equally, but he said he loves the simplicity of running. All that’s needed is to put on shoes and go. “It’s a really freeing experience,” he said.
Mahaffey’s first Ironman was in 1999, when he was in his early 40s and living in Greenville.
From then on, Mahaffey was doing Ironman races nearly ever year, or multiple in a single year. He was training 15 to 20 hours a week on top of working as an elementary school teacher during the day, usually teaching kindergarten and first grade,and teaching college classes at night.
Oh, and he was also raising nine children at the same time.
He takes his time with everything, though. He’s not out to finish first in these competitions.
“I’ve always been slow, and I’m just getting older and I’m just getting slower. God gave me a good body, a healthy body and a strong body, but he did not give me a fast body,” he said. “So, the training that I do is moderate. I don’t do anything fast.”
Through the years and the competitions, he had support from his family and from a longtime friend and coach, Chris Connor, who himself has done three Ironman races.
Connor and Mahaffey met when they both lived in Greenville, where Mahaffey had been until about five years ago when he moved to Myrtle Beach. A physical therapist, Connor helped Mahaffey with his training regimen over the years and assisted whenever Mahaffey was recovering from an injury. It’s been a while since Connor has done an Ironman, though he knows that Mahaffey makes it seem like you’re never too old to do them.
“That’s Jimmy’s take,” Connor says with a laugh. Though, he concedes, “That is true.”
“I think a huge challenge for him is just continuing to be able to do it,” Connor added. “He loves it, and he wants to just do them and participate, and I like that, too, but I don’t have the same draw to that that he does. “
Ironman presents a particular challenge because of the need to be good at three activities that require very different methods of training. Connor said he’s seen Mahaffey improve the most with swimming.
“It’s very cool and encouraging because swimming, if you don’t learn it as a kid, the strokes and the technique, it’s really difficult to get as an adult,” Connor said. “To see him really make a breakthrough as an as an adult, it’s pretty remarkable.”
By his side for the last 15 years, though, is Mahaffey’s wife, Kathryn, who enjoys going for walks to exercise but nowhere near to the extent that her husband does. For her husband, the goal isn’t to finish the race quickly. In fact, he usually cuts it close to the 17-hour deadline for finishing. He also gets anxious the day of a race because he’s not a very competitive person. She said his love comes from just doing the Ironman at all.
“He’s very goal-oriented,” she said. “It’s a really difficult goal to meet just to finish an Ironman, so it just gives him something to work for, and he gets a lot of satisfaction out of that.”
At least a few members of his family attend the competitions, and they don’t get to see Mahaffey much throughout the race, but every time they do, he always stops to hug them.
“Jimmy’s always super sweet. Most of the participants just kind of wave as they go by, but Jimmy always stops and hugs us and talks to us,” Kathryn Mahaffey said. “He takes the time to do that, which is really nice.”
An Ironman in retirement
Before he retired from teaching, Jimmy Mahaffey decided he wanted to retire from Ironman competitions. His last one was in 2019 in Lake Placid, New York. The older he got, the harder it was to keep going. That last Ironman, in particular, was really trying for him.
“I pulled into the town of Lake Placid. I saw my wife, I saw my children, and I said, ‘Kathryn, I’m done,’” Mahaffey said. “She said, ‘What?’ And I said, ‘I don’t want to do Ironman anymore. I just don’t know. It’s so hard, and I’m getting older. My heart’s not in it right now.’”
That didn’t last long.
He never really, truly stopped. He did half Iroman races instead afterward.
Then, the organization that runs Ironman competitions around the world reached out to Mahaffey personally and asked him to compete again. This time, it would be for the Ironman World Championship in St. George, Utah, this May.
It’s his second time competing in the world championship, and it wasn’t a chance he could pass up. His first time in the top-tier Ironman competition was in 2012, when he got to race in Kona, Hawaii.
Mahaffey had never stopped exercising. All three Ironman activities — swimming, biking and running — are individual, COVID-friendly sports. So he got back into training.
“I’d like to do it as long as I can,” he said. “I recently saw a doctor, he was telling me, ‘Jimmy, you’ve got this going on, you’ve got this going on.’ I said, ‘Look doc, with all due respect, I’ll stop when I’m ready to stop. I’ll make that decision, but please don’t tell me to stop.’”
Mahaffey’s wife, Kathryn, wasn’t surprised to see him taking on one more Ironman. Mahaffey will be 65 when he competes this May, and she doesn’t full believe it will be his last one, either.
“Probably not. I can see him doing this, like, 10 more years,” she said.
