“I can’t run. I can’t swim. I can’t bike.” Tonya Cowan, wife and mother to three children, told herself the same mantra she had repeated over and over again growing up. “I couldn’t do it before, because I was too heavy. I would just sit and watch.” Though she was never an “athlete” growing up, somehow Tonya found herself having a conversation about signing up for the Tie-Dye Tri sprint triathlon in Norman, OK. Three months, three weeks and three days after having bariatric weight loss surgery at The Center for Bariatrics at Bailey Medical Center, Tonya crossed a finish line she never even knew she wanted to cross. “Never in a million years did I think I would want to do this.”
After all, Tonya had just undergone surgery May 18, 2015. Considering training for eight weeks to not only run a 5k, but bike 12 miles and swim 500 meters, she wondered how she could possibly do it. “How was I supposed to get all my protein and my calories in?” Her friends convinced her she could do it, but sticking to her commitment wasn’t easy. “I wanted to quit every week. I told myself if I fell off my bike one more time, I was going to quit. I fell off the second week, third week and fourth week. The fifth week, when I said, ‘I’m done,’ I didn’t fall off.”
The day of the triathlon Tonya didn’t feel much better about the challenge ahead. “I was terrified,” she recalls. “I constantly had to psych myself out saying, ‘You’ve trained for this. All you have to do is finish.’” Halfway through the 50-meter swim Tonya swallowed water and thought she was choking. Once she recovered, she finished the swim and began the 12-mile bike ride. As she transitioned from the ride and laced up her running shoes, perhaps focused on the 5k run, she forgot to tighten her laces. “After the first mile blisters were already forming. I walked most of the 3.2 miles until the finish line.”
With her friends and supporters encouraging her on, she found the strength to begin jogging and ran across the finish line at 2 hours, 20 minutes and 55 seconds. “I cried, because for 39 years I was just a stat girl,” she says. “I wasn’t an athlete.” Overcome with emotion, she told her friends at the finish, “’For the first time in my life I’m an athlete.’ My friend said, ‘You’re not just an athlete, you’re a tri-athlete.’”
Tonya texted her husband and let him know not only did she finish, but she beat her goal of 2 hours and 30 minutes. “I’m so proud of you,” he replied. “My little tri-athlete!”
If the triathlon is Tonya’s high school sport, then the Bailey Bariatrics team is the support system she needed as a teenager when she transferred to a new school at 260 pounds. “I didn’t have close friends,” she says. “The program here is amazing. Every doctor I have come into contact with is phenomenal. The staff truly care. They were there for me and have given me the opportunity to be there for my kids and be an inspiration for them.”
Though neither the triathlon nor weight loss surgery is “easy” Tonya says, they have certainly been worth it. “This saved my life,” she says of the decision to have surgery, “and has given me more years with my kids.”
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