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Running for it: Rees on the move for fitness, adventure

Here’s a healthy method of multitasking: grading papers while riding an indoor bike.

Leave it to UUP member Robert Rees of SUNY Alfred to come up with a way to merge his two interests: training and teaching.

As someone who just finished his first Ironman triathlon, it is clear that he is as determined as he is fit. As an electrical engineering professor, he knows how to be innovative. As a competitor, he is schooled in the thought process of making every second count.

Tick, tick.

He constructed a wooden podium on which he arranges his students’ papers. He then begins a three-hour stationary ride.

“My handwriting is a little shaky,” Rees said. “But the time just goes flying by. I feel really good.”

Every hour is important. Rees stacked up 500 of them to alert his body that something big was about to happen. In July, it did. He completed the Lake Placid Ironman USA 2001, stroking his way through a 2.4-mile swim with 1,800 other swimmers; jumping on his bike for a 112-mile ride; and then running a 26.2-mile marathon. All in under 13 hours.

Tick, tick.

After placing 997 out of 1,820, he signed up for next year’s event. This year, he said, he didn’t really race during the bike ride — he wanted to make sure he could handle the marathon.

Next year, watch out.

He’s already getting ready. He completed a triathlon a month after the Ironman — swimming in Lake Ontario in three-foot waves; he said he had “never been so intimidated.”

Rees — who has been running for 12 years, fitness swimming for 15 and fitness bicycling for 25 — began competing in 1999 after stepping down as chair of two departments at Alfred. He pieced together information on competition, nutrition and training all by reading: true to form for an academic.

In his first race, he said, he finished the bike ride portion as the winner of the triathlon was coming across the finish line to wild cheering.

Rees still had 13 miles to run.

Now, he’s tackled the Tin Man Triathlon in Tupper Lake several times. It is half the distance of an Ironman. Last October, he did his first marathon, from Bath to Corning.

He will also have to take a new job in stride: being a UUP chapter president. You can bet he’ll be figuring out union strategy while riding his bike or running outside this winter — which he does even when he has to wear a ski mask, or on those days when it’s so cold his wife, Cathy, won’t let him take the dog, Rudy, with him. Rudy is nine years old; for eight of those years, he’s been Rees’s sidekick, running more than 1,000 miles a year on those four paws.

Rees confesses to being a pursuer of adventure. His curriculum vitae includes a stint in a nuclear physics lab and another as a project engineer in the steel industry. But he didn’t like doing the same thing over and over, so he decided to try teaching. He’s taught more than two dozen courses to satisfy that drive. Triathlons are another outlet for that constant quest for change.

“It’s an unknown thing; that’s what adventure is,” he said.

Take his honeymoon, for example. He and his wife took an ice route up in the White Mountains in New Hampshire, where they watched the sunset from Mt. Washington — in February. Then they descended with headlamps, ice axes and crampons to brace their feet. They spent the night in a tent because, Rees said, “that’s just the kind of people we are.”

Together they have daughters, Julia and Bethany, who are active in high school athletics.

Currently, his wife does open-water swimming with him in a nearby lake. When swimming, his body is always responding to an internal checklist: What is the position of the hand, how is he pulling, how is using his hips to put force into motion? Every second counts.

Tick, tick.

— Liza Frenette