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Ahead of her second Olympic appearance, American triathlete Sarah True chats with Runnersworld.com about how she and elite-runner husband Ben True manage simultaneously pursuing their Olympic dreams.
He’s the American road 5K record-holder and two-time top American at world cross country championships. She placed fourth at the 2012 Olympics in triathlon. Together, Ben and Sarah True want to compete at the Rio de Janeiro Games in August—a feat few athletic couples ever achieve in the same year.
The Trues are an endurance power couple, connected by her agent and their shared New England roots. Ben is training for the 5,000 and 10,000 meters at the Olympic track trials in July. Sarah has already qualified for Team USA at an International Triathlon Union (ITU) Olympic test event last August in Rio de Janeiro, where she was fourth overall and the second American behind Gwen Jorgensen.
The Trues reside in West Lebanon, New Hampshire, next to Hanover, the town where Sarah was born and Ben was an All-American Nordic skier and a sub-four-minute miler at Dartmouth College. After a brief professional stint with the Oregon Track Club, he came back to New Hampshire in 2010.
Sarah was an All-American swimmer at Middlebury College in Vermont and was a well-established triathlon pro by 2007, when she won the ITU Aquathlon World Championships in Mexico. In 2010, she returned to New Hampshire, where her brother still lived, to use it as a base from which to travel to international competitions.
“Her agent was trying to get us to connect,” Ben said. “I was resistant—why do you want me to show her running trails around here when the Dartmouth women’s cross country team could do that?”
Read more: Runnersworld.com