Karen Smyers

In 1995, Smyers returned to the lava fields of Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, for the Ironman Triathlon. Close on the heels of seven-time victor Paula Newby-Fraser in the final event, the run, Smyers won the Ironman after Fraser collapsed short of the finish line. Smyers's total time in the event was nine hours, sixteen minutes, and forty-six seconds. (The total time allowed to finish the Ironman is seventeen hours.) In the same year, Smyers again won the ITU Triathlon World Championship and also won a gold medal at the Pan American Games. She was the first woman ever to win both the Ironman and the ITU championship in the same year.

By 1997, Smyers was looking forward to the 2000 Olympics, in which the women's triathlon would become an event for the first time. She again won the St. Croix International Half Ironman in the spring of 1997, but then in June a streak of ill luck befell her. As she was changing a storm window at her home in Lincoln, Massachusetts, the window fell and shattered, sending a glass shard through her left thigh and severing her hamstring. During the months of healing and rehabilitation, she and Michael decided it was time to start a family. Their daughter, Jenna, was born in May 1998, by Caesarian section. After a brief period of recovery, Smyers was training again in August, when another accident occurred. She was riding her bike on a narrow road with training partner Glenn Cunha when a passing 18-wheel truck hit her bike. The fall caused six broken ribs, a lung contusion, and a separated shoulder.

Four months later, at the end of 1998, Smyers resumed training. Racing again in 1999, she was proud to finish, albeit in 38th place, the ITU World Championships—she had bronchitis at the time. In September 1999, doctors told her she probably had thyroid cancer. Because this type of cancer is typically slow growing, she went on to finish second in the Hawaiian Ironman in October and to enter a race in Ixtapa, Mexico, in November, before having biopsies performed. At the Ixtapa triathlon, another cyclist overturned in front of Smyers, causing her to flip off her bike, breaking her collarbone. It was the first time in her career that she did not finish a race.