BY WENDI REARDON PRICE
Clarkston News Staff Writer
Clarkston resident Karen Laszlo kept busy during the summer participating for the first time in the 72nd Annual AuSable River Canoe Marathon and the Ironman 70.3 Traverse City.
“I loved it,” Laszlo said. “They are both very supportive communities. When people up north learned of me, I had people connecting with me and say they would help me train, which is unheard of. With the triathlon, there is a bunch of supportive people as well. There are a bunch of us who swim together at Deer Lake. You just help each other out.”

A chance meeting in January led Laszlo to the AuSable River Canoe Marathon. Karen and her husband, Mark, were up north and decided to stop at a bar after watching the movie “Bohemian Rhapsody.” There, they met Justin Griffith, who was filling in as a bartender and is also a chairperson on the Oscoda race.
“Canoe people talk about it 24/7 and he just started talking about this race,” Karen explained. “He mentioned how there’s this Australian guy who wants to come and do it. But he didn’t have a partner, his partner backed out. We started talking and he hooked us up through Facebook.”
Karen had only canoed recreational a few times but is athletic through training and participating in different triathlons.
She became friends with the Australian, Stephen Routley, and they talked at least once a week. Then, Karen and her husband obtained a racing canoe to start training.
“Justin really took me under his wing,” Karen added. “We would go up north a lot and meet with Justin and go out to the river because the AuSable starts in Grayling and goes for 120 miles to where it ends in Oscoda.”
Training with Routley began in early July when he arrived in Michigan. They would be awake at 6 a.m., eat breakfast, head to the river, and paddle as much as they could, to prepare for the 19-hour AuSable River Canoe Marathon.
“There is a lot of training, you are supposed to train for hundreds of hours,” Karen said. “I got less than 100 but because of my triathlon training, I had some. There was so much technique to learn, it was a really steep learning curve.”
By the end of July, they were ready.
“You have time trials to position yourself in line,” Karen explained. “There are 100 boats with two people each. You run with your canoe to the river, then you drop it in the river. Then, there are cut off points along the way. If you don’t make it to each cut off point in a certain amount of time, they pull you out of the river.”
They finished in just under 19 hours.
“We were dead last but we were happy to finish because several didn’t even finish,” Karen added.
She explained racers do everything in the boat – eat, drink, and go to the bathroom. There are 13 points along the way where they meet a four-person feed crew waiting in the water, two people for the front rower and two for the back. Both rowers have a couple two-liter beverage bottles attached to the canoe.
“You always have to communicate with your teammate you are going to take a drink because they are paddling like the dickens back there,” she said.
They had to watch out for obstacles along the way, including turns, bends, logs, tree branches, and dams, day and night.
An obstacle for Karen was hypothermia.
“Some point along the way, I fell in the river and got totally drenched,” she said. “They got me a new long sleeved shirt and changed. I ended up getting hypothermia because I was so wet underneath. We came to a stop along the way and I was shaking. My teeth were chattering and my husband said, ‘you have to get in the truck. You have to warm up. Your eyes are glazed over, you have to stop.’ I said ‘no, Stephen came all the way from Australia.’ My son came up to me put his hands on my shoulder and said, ‘Mom, you have hypothermia, you aren’t thinking clearly.'”
She took a break and sat in the truck for 30 seconds to get warm.
“A different feed team for another boat had an extra towel and put it over me so I was all tucked in. I finally stopped shivering,” she said.
Her partner asked if she was going to make it.
“I don’t have a choice,” she told Routley, to which he replied she did have a choice. “Which was heartwarming to me because training was tough with him. I said, ‘No, we are going.’ We finished, but the last few hours I could feel my bicep was about to tear. I wasn’t going to sacrifice tearing when I had an Ironman in about a month.”
She was taking 10-second breaks for the last three hours, but they averaged about 60 strokes a minute for 19 hours.
“Imagine lifting your fork to your mouth 60 times for 19 hours,” she described. “The top guys are 70-80 strokes per minute, but they have been doing it for years. Michigan paddlers are known to be the best in the world. New York paddlers are good. Quebec are really good. This is one of the top canoe races in the world. I had to give up some of my triathlon training because I was exhausted. My husband was really proud.”
The canoe marathon helped her prepare for the Ironman 70.3, which she finished in 8:02.38. Her son, Anthony, also did the triathlon, finishing in 7:11:12.
“Triathlons, I have been doing for a long time,” Karen said. “It was the first time they did an Ironman in Traverse City. I have done shorter triathlons for years, but I have never done one put on by the Ironman company and I wanted that logo and the bling with the stuff.”
She did great in the swim, finishing in 40:23, and bike, finishing in 3:45:36, but the run didn’t go as well as she wanted, finishing at 3:28.13.
“The times were awful because I was in so much pain,” Karen said. “Hopefully, I’ll do it again, I loved it.”
Next is training and fixing her pelvic bone, injured from sitting so much, so she can run the Ironman 70.3 Traverse City next year, too.
“Just because you are a grown up doesn’t mean you should stop doing things you did when you were little – playing sports, being outside. I have been doing them for decades. I enjoy being outside,” Karen said.