Aragon seniors take summer training to new extremes

Over the summer, two Aragon seniors took summer training to a whole new level. Seniors Anthony Nichols and Trevor Stocker participated in and completed two triathlons. Both students, after undergoing rigorous months of training, finished both the San Francisco Triathlon at Treasure Island and the Santa Cruz Sprint Triathlon.

Summer training is not a new concept to Aragon. Every summer, Aragon athletes in basketball, football, volleyball, water polo, track and field, and cross country are given the choice to participate in conditioning, practices and competitions. According to senior cross-country runner Stephen Chan, “[summer training] is optional, [and] necessary to stay in shape, but you don’t learn that much.”

Nichols and Stocker are two students at Aragon who have taken summer taking to an even greater level.

To prepare for the events, which consisted of a half-mile swim, a 12-mile bike ride and a three-mile run, the two woke up at 5 a.m. every day and biked from San Mateo to the San Francisco Bay, where they would practice endurance swimming.
Asides from keeping up with the regimen, the two also worked out at the gym to improve muscle tone and endurance, sometimes up to four or five times a day.

According to Stocker, the training was tough, but he enthusiastically says, “you [got to] do, what you’ve [got to] do!”

The training paid off. Both Nichols and Stocker claim that the triathlon proved only a small challenge after following through with their intense training regime.

For Stocker, the motivation to participate in the triathlons came from previous experience; Stocker competed in a similar triathlon in the summer of his junior year and hoped to improve on his performance.

Stocker also says that he participated in order to stay in top physical shape to help his performance in his other sports, mixed martial arts and jujitsu.

Stocker mentions that the intense training for the triathlon has helped him maintain his focus in school.

Nichols’ motivation stemmed from the uniqueness of the experience. He says, “[Running a triathlon] is not something that most high school students have achieved. My training has kept me in the best shape I’ve been in [because] we always train for larger distances than necessary.”

Both Nichols and Stocker hope to participate in future triathlons and they have plans to participate in three more in the coming months.

The ultimate goal of both is to participate in the Ironman triathlon, which consists of 2.4 miles of swimming, 112 miles of biking, and 24 miles of running. Nichols feels that the pair will not be ready for the Ironman until their early 20s, but with their rigorous training, the time might come sooner than expected.