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Wilson grad Matt Guenter achieves goal of winning triathlon national championships

Matt Guenter was at a bit of an athletic crossroads in the summer of 2016.

The Wilson grad was getting ready to head back for his sophomore year at Penn State, where he had competed as a preferred walk-on on the swim team.

But he, his sister, Lindsay, and another friend signed up to compete in a team triathlon. It ended up being a transformative experience.

“I did the swim,” he said. “She did the bike and another friend did the run. And I remember looking at the results, and I was like, ‘I think I could do all three of these and I could place relatively high.’

“I didn’t really understand much about the sport and I wanted to learn something new, give something brand new a shot. And I also realized I could be pretty good at it if I worked at it. So that’s kind of how I got into it.”

Six years later, the 25-year-old Guenter is a double amateur national champion. Last month in Milwaukee at the USA Triathlon Age Group National Championships, he won the Olympic-distance race on a Saturday, then came back to win the super sprint race on Sunday.

He became the first male to win on back-to-back days since 2018 and the second male since the sprint race was added in 2013. There were 6,500 entrants.

“I want to word this right,” said Guenter, an aerospace engineer at Lockheed Martin in Boulder, Colo. “I have always really believed in myself, so it was not a surprise. I think it was just a lot of satisfaction, validation. … I wish I could find a word for it. But I’m really happy, like in the purest form of the word; very ecstatic that everything that I did paid off in the end.”

Guenter won the Olympic-distance event — 1,500-meter swim, 40-kilometer bike and 10-kilometer run in one hour, 51 minutes and 40 seconds, by a margin of 3:46. In the super sprint race — 380-meter swim, 10-kilometer bike and 2.5-kilometer run — he won in 29:29, a margin of 1:01. The second race was supposed to be a sprint event, but the distances were cut in half due to weather conditions.

Guenter first competed at the national championships in Cleveland in 2018 and finished 19th in the Olympic-distance race. That result caused him to set winning the race as a goal.

Last year in Milwaukee, he finished sixth in both the Olympic-distance and super sprint events.

“Triathlon is a weird sport, because similar to running or swimming, you can only affect what you do,” Guenter said. “There’s Olympians that have shown up to this, future Olympians that have shown up and won this event. So if someone like that showed up, you know, I can’t affect that, but my goal was to win.”

Matt Guenter and his mother, Barbara, get together after one of his victories at the USA Triathlon Age Group National Championships. (COURTESY OF MATT GUENTER)
Matt Guenter and his mother, Barbara, get together after one of his victories at the USA Triathlon Age Group National Championships. (COURTESY OF MATT GUENTER)

It’s been a seemingly quick rise for Guenter.

He was a two-time All-American in water polo at Wilson who also swam and ran track. Following a breakthrough senior season in swimming, he earned a spot at Penn State — where his sister had competed in track and cross country — as a preferred walk-on.

“I swam for one year but my heart was never really with swimming,” Guenter said. “I loved polo and I tried to love swimming and it’s very hard to do a sport collegiately if you don’t love it.”

So he shifted gears, so to speak. Lindsay gave him her bike — a 1980s road bike, he said — and he ended up giving up swimming at Penn State. He adapted his training and joined the club triathlon team at Penn State.

His first big triathlon was the collegiate nationals in Tuscaloosa, Ala., in 2017. Later that year, he competed in a race in Norristown and said he did really well and “definitely caught the bug.”

“It’s such an individual sport, a lot of times the only person preventing you from getting somewhere is you,” he said. “In contrast to a lot of the team sports where you have to go against an opponent, triathlon is a very individual and a very mental effort, which I really enjoyed.”

Following his graduation from Penn State in 2019, Guenter moved to Boulder for his job. The move also happened to put him in one of the country’s triathlon hotbeds and with other fellow Penn Staters. Nate Savoy, also a Wilson and Penn State grad, lives in the Boulder area and competes in triathlons.

Now, Guenter, who has developed his own training plan, said he trains between 16-20 hours per week. About 50% of that time is spent on the bike, 30% running and 20% swimming, he said.

“It just kind of allows you to get away from all the stresses of the daily world,” Guenter said, “and just spend time with yourself.”

He also has found time to coach others, usually done virtually, including the Penn State club  team last year.

Guenter has won all four races he has entered this season. Prior to nationals, he won the Virginia Blue Ridge 70.3 in June and the Boulder Peak Triathlon in July.

He’s also scheduled to compete in the 70.3 World Championships in Utah in October.

Guenter said he would like to turn professional at some point — though it wouldn’t be lucrative enough, he said, for him to quit his job — but has other goals in mind first. He has qualified for world events in Germany and Spain next year and would like to see how he would fare at one of those.

“So that’s kind of on the plan,” he said, “but honestly, this (winning nationals) was kind of like my main goal for so long that I didn’t really have a goal afterwards. I’m trying to answer that question inside my head, too, where to go from here.”

Which takes things back to Guenter’s time last month in Milwaukee for what he called “a perfect weekend.”

His mother, Barbara, of Sinking Spring, was able to attend with an aunt and uncle, and Guenter was able to pay tribute to his late father, Alan.

During the race, Guenter wore a blue baseball hat with the word “ECOLAB” on it. His father, who died unexpectedly in April 2021 at the age of 66, worked at Ecolab and also was a longtime swimming official in Berks County.

“He never missed any of my sporting events,” Guenter said. “Growing up, he was the perfect dad that was always there for me and introduced me to all these sports and would buy me whatever I needed for all this stuff. So there were times on the run when it got hard when I could just kind of like hear him in the back of my mind cheering me on.

“Talking about this sort of stuff doesn’t make me super emotional because it’s honestly like a happy thing for me. I know he’d be extremely proud of me and be bragging to all the people he knows. It was a special moment and I’m glad my mom could be there and in a way I represented my dad by wearing that hat and by my performance as well.”


Source: Berkshire mont

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