Ironman Profiles: Kimberly Townsend bends without breaking

Boisterous, friendly and unforgettable: That’s how Kimberly Townsend describes herself. She’s a fighter, too. It’s the perfect profile for someone who has raced the Ironman Chattanooga since its inception, and will suit her well when she volunteers during this year’s event.

Although not obvious when you first meet her, Townsend was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or ALS, immediately following the 2014 race and given two to five years to live. The disease has drastically hindered the manual dexterity in her hands. Although doctors now believe that rather than ALS she may have a different motor neuron disease, what it is called matters little when she drops her toothbrush for the 100th time or chokes while trying to swallow water.

“I figured I had two options. I could take the hand I was dealt and make the best of it, you know, play it out to the best of my ability, or I could fold and be a bitter bitch,” Townsend says. “The second one didn’t really suit me.”

She opted to stay in the game, and began training for Chattanooga’s 2015 Ironman. Despite the obvious hurdles that came with doing the event without full use of her hands, the incredible people she’d met the previous year and the catharsis of crossing the finish line brought her back to compete again.

During the cycling component, the only way she could brake was to steer into the grass until she slowed down, since her fingers couldn’t operate the brake handles. If the chain on her bike broke or she got a flat tire, she’d have been forced to rely on the kindness of strangers. Her food was kept open in a bento box, packed by her training partner, so she could access it easily.

Adaption was the name of the game, both in her training and in her life.

“If I wasn’t training, I’m not sure where I would have found the strength to get up every day,” she says. Her husband had recently taken a job in another city, forcing them to live apart. She was helping care for her father as well, who had his second stroke in the months preceding her diagnosis. “Without the mental fortitude to push through the Ironman, I think I would have just crumbled,” Townsend says.

The support from her fellow racers, she says, contributed to her being able to stay above water. She came to Chattanooga from her native Indiana several times to train, and with every visit she was reminded of crossing the finish line in 2014. The memory propelled her forward – all the way to the finish line, again, in 2015.

“It was kind of a place of self-discovery,” she says. “I found out what I was made of there [at Ironman Chattanooga], but I did it with another 2,000 people taking the journey with me. There’s not another city I’d rather race in.”

A month before Ironman 2016, she’d just barely managed to get her bike into her training stand in preparation for a separate race. She had to use a hammer to bang it in, and she admitted she wasn’t sure how she was going to get it back out. She wasn’t really concerned about that, though – not with another planned round of neurological testing to find some answers about her difficulty swallowing. That discovery expedition will involve a neurologist sticking needles in her tongue and running electric current through them to read how her nerves react.

“I really don’t want to go back [to the doctor] again,” Townsend says with a halfhearted laugh. “It’s not really a great time.”

Despite the trials she’s faced both in her training and her personal life over the last several years, she refuses to be bitter about it. She never lets on that she is suffering in any way.

So if you see a volunteer during the upcoming Ironman deliver gear with a soft Midwestern accent and a permanent smile on her face, it might just be Kimberly Townsend. In light of her diagnosis, she says she knows her time is limited, and she wants to use what time she has left to do as much and touch as many hearts as she can.

“I want to have control over what I am remembered for,” Townsend says.