Gasping for breath, a sixth grader stumbles past the finish line with a mile time of over 10 minutes. His classmates had completed the run minutes ago.

A few years later, a high school student crosses the finish line of a half Ironman—1.2 miles of swimming, 56 miles of biking, and 13.1 miles of running.

Senior Eren Veziroglu was both of these students.

Through running and other endurance activities, Veziroglu discovered the importance of discipline and determination, traits that transformed him from the slowest runner on the team to a half Ironman finisher and captain of the school cross country team.

“If you just train consistently, amazing things can happen,” Veziroglu said. “When I started running, I was running 10 minutes for the mile and exhausted at the end. Now I’m running five minutes for the mile.”

When Veziroglu was a sixth grader, his father encouraged him to join the cross country team at Redwood Middle School. Despite his unremarkable performance at the time, Veziroglu discovered an interest in running.

“My improvement curve was very sharp at the time,” Veziroglu said. “It’s really fun to train hard and see your work pay off at the race, and at that time I saw day-to-day improvement.”

Veziroglu credits his father with initiating his interest in athletics. In 2009, Veziroglu’s father brought him on a weekend trip to Mount Whitney—at 14,500 feet, the highest summit in the contiguous United States.

Because he decided against taking time off from school, Veziroglu received less time than he had wished to transition to high altitude. After staying in a hotel at 4,000 feet, Veziroglu had just one day to adjust to the 8,000 feet elevation of the trailhead.

“You should actually have three or four days at 8,000 feet,” Veziroglu said. Throughout the trip, Veziroglu felt the impact of his maladjustment.

“When you’re going that high and you aren’t getting any oxygen, it’s definitely scary. Around 10,000 feet, I got lightheaded. I felt like I was going to throw up the whole time,” Veziroglu said. “I had a bad headache, and I was seriously considering turning back.”

Despite fears of dangerous high altitude illnesses, Veziroglu decided to continue.

“I didn’t want to push myself too far,” Veziroglu said. “When you’re going to 14,500 feet, it’s really not something to screw around about. But I didn’t want to turn back because I wanted to make it to the top.”

Leaving around 2 a.m., Veziroglu and his father reached the summit just after noon. The round trip took roughly 18 hours.

In September of 2010, Veziroglu participated, again with his father, in the Santa Cruz half Ironman.
“The funny thing is, I thought more and more about how I actually completed that, because if you think about the totality of swimming over a mile, biking over 50 miles, and running a half marathon … I would think someone who did that was completely crazy,” Veziroglu said.

According to Veziroglu, the only way to complete a half Ironman is to take the challenges in smaller, more manageable pieces.

“If you just have the mentality that you just do one thing at a time, it’s really not that bad,” Veziroglu said. “When I was swimming, I only thought about the swimming section. And since it’s really long you have to divide it even further, so I split the swim into quarters. I was saying, ‘one step at a time.’”

Going into the last event of the triathlon, the half marathon, Veziroglu had already engaged in essentially five hours of nonstop exercise, both on land and in the waves.

“When I hit mile 9, I could feel my legs starting to cramp out. After 11 miles, I had to stop because it was too painful. There’s really no way to run like that,” Veziroglu said. Stopping, albeit temporarily, was a disappointment for him.

“I was definitely expecting it to be hard, that my legs would be hurting, but I wasn’t expecting anything that would make me stop,” Veziroglu said.

Nevertheless, Veziroglu successfully completed the half Ironman in just under seven and a half hours.

“By the time I finished running, I couldn’t really stand up, [because] my feet collapsed,” Veziroglu said. “It was definitely one of the hardest things that I’ve done, but it was definitely one of the most fun.”

Looking ahead, Veziroglu hopes to qualify for the annual world Ironman in Hawaii.

“It’s definitely much more competitive, but I’ve been wanting to do a triathlon for so long,” Veziroglu said. Since the Ironman involves an entire marathon, Veziroglu is considering qualifying first for the Boston Marathon.

“You can’t do an Ironman without being able to run a marathon with ease,” Veziroglu said. “Well the qualifying time for ages 18 to 34 is 3 hours and 10 minutes, which takes a lot of training.”

For Veziroglu, training for a triathlon consists of swimming, bike rides or long runs with friends, as well as “bricks”—two of the events in succession.

“In my mind if you can do each individual event with ease, you should be able to do the whole thing,” Veziroglu said.

After training over several years, Veziroglu has realized the importance of discipline and determination in achieving his goals.

“If you try hard enough, you can. If you do anything consistently, you’ll get better,” Veziroglu said.

“If you don’t have the self-discipline or the desire to keep getting better, you’re not going to reach your goals for whatever you desire to do.”

Veziroglu, a second degree black-belt in Taekwondo, believes that the lessons he learned from martial arts helped him nurture his self-discipline.

“There’s a saying called ‘kaizen’ which means constant and never-ending improvement. People think that a black-belt means you’re a master in whatever art it is. But it’s completely different,” Veziroglu said. “A blackbelt means you’re a master of the basics. From then on, it’s your responsibility to uphold all the qualities of a blackbelt. That’s why a lot of people quit, truthfully. They have less guidance.”

Veziroglu learned that he needed to rely on himself to achieve his dreams. Although he enjoys the challenge of endurance events, his goals lie in improvement, not in the professional realm.

“Since I don’t really have any prospects of becoming a professional athlete, I want to just have fun,” Veziroglu said. “Even if you don’t win the race, you can still be good at [cross country].”

Veziroglu plans on continuing to pursue his passion for endurance events in college, albeit not necessarily in an NCAA team.

“Some people are built better or worse for certain events. I’m not really built for marathon running. I’m not built for cross country and not really for track either,” Veziroglu said. “But I still run and have fun. There’s no reason why other people can’t.”