Menlo Park’s Tim Sheeper beats ultra triathlon across Hawaiian islands

Swim 2.4 miles. Cycle 112 miles. Then run a marathon.

Now quintuple that over five days on five Hawaiian islands, and you have an idea of what the Epic 5 Challenge is.

That’s what Menlo Park resident Tim Sheeper, 54, completed May 5 to 9 as one of 10 elite participants.

Mr. Sheeper runs Menlo Swim & Sport, which operates swim programs at city-owned pool facilities in the Menlo Park Civic Center.

The challenge pitted 10 athletes and their three-person support crews on a journey that, to most, sounds nearly impossible: to complete five Ironman competitions in five days on five Hawaiian islands.

The event is called a challenge for a reason. It’s not a race. Event coordinators don’t even publish times, according to Mr. Sheeper. Instead, they try to cultivate a mindset akin to that of someone seeking to summit Mount Everest. The more important goal is to get to the top, not to get to the top first, he said.

“The Epic 5 Challenge was started in 2010 by two guys, and very few people have done it since,” Mr. Sheeper said in an interview. He said he’d heard about the challenge a few years ago, but after he met one of the founders of the event who challenged him to do it, he felt compelled to accept the challenge.

He said he likes to mindfully consider potential endurance events to see if it is “something that really comes from my heart. … I wait for the inspiration and then I go after it.”

A ‘traveling circus’

The challenge, which hops from Kauai to Oahu to Molokai to Maui to Kona, was comparable to a “traveling circus,” in Mr. Sheeper’s words. Each competitor’s crew team followed him or her from island to island.

During the event, he said, “Your body is always in a state of challenge.”

Segments of the challenge varied from the sublime to the strenuous.

On the swimming portions, he said, there were moments when he reveled in the beauty of moving through Hanalei Bay, looking at fish and the reef. Other times in the water, he had to fight against swell and wind chop.

While cycling, the path took him through neighborhoods, up volcanoes and along highways, he said. Cycling across lava rock got uncomfortably hot, he said.

The runs, he said, varied in time of day, so some were in the heat, while others were late at night. His final marathon, he said, finished after midnight in Kona, in the middle of a quiet, dark mist. On that last stretch, he said, he was having so much fun he could have done another marathon.

“When your brain knows it’s the end, it finds some reserves that you didn’t know you had,” he said.

He credits his crew for providing crucial support and motivation during the challenge.

Having a crew that knows its athlete’s capabilities is very important because an athlete can get to a point of exhaustion when he or she may not be capable of making good decisions, he said. Crew members help with things like passing out water and nutrition, keeping the athlete’s body cool with ice packs and boosting morale.

“It’s kind of enticing to be held accountable by team members,” he said. “You try to do a good job to pay them back for working super hard for you.”

For Mr. Sheeper, ultra-endurance events are “a time to get away and just focus on the purity of athletic movement and being efficient.”

“It allows me to think clearer, to think through issues and just reflect on the path in life I’m on and if I want to change things,” he said.

The Epic 5 Challenge is only one of a number of impressive endurance feats under his belt. Mr. Sheeper said he has also cycled across the country during the Race across America, completed a 24-hour triathlon, paddled 70 miles around Lake Tahoe, and paddled down the Sacramento River.

“It helps day to day to have these big (athletic) goals other than family or work goals,” he said. “They kind of are my north star.”

Mr. Sheeper said his personal approach toward athletics affects his coaching and teaching. “I try to inspire people to strive toward their personal growth through sport.”

Whether it’s a 5-year-old learning how to swim or an adult triathlete trying to swim farther or faster than ever before, he said, “I try to inspire them to have that personal confidence to try something that maybe they never have or never thought they could do. I’m always one to just have somebody try something and not be limited by what their perceptions of themselves (are),” he said.

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