Teacher Ready To Face Physical Challenge

Janet Jolly Edwards, a math teacher at Cedartown High School, has qualified for Team USA in the duathlon event.

Edwards qualified at nationals held earlier this year in Richmond, Va. She will travel to Rimini, on the eastern coast of Italy, for the 2008 Duathlon World Championship held on Sept. 27.

The duathlon is a strenuous multi-sport event where athletes run a 10K, then bike a 40K and finish the race by running a 5K.

To convert these numbers, they run just over six miles, then bike for 24 miles and finish with a run of just over three miles.

According to Edwards, she has been running for about 21 years.

She was originally born in Anchorage, Alaska when her father was stationed there with the military. However, at a very early age, they moved to Cedartown.

She graduated from Cedartown High, and attended Shorter College before returning to teach at her alma mater.

Edwards continued training and running through the years. She competed around the state at various races, and coached the high school cross-country team before deciding to focus on her own training.

It was around this time that she decided to hire a professional coach.

She chose Matt Russ from The Sport Factory located in Atlanta. Edwards calls hiring Russ, “the best athletic decision I ever made.”

She adds, “Sometimes it takes someone else to see the potential you didn’t know you had, someone else to believe in you and tell you something can happen.”

It was Russ who encouraged Edwards to participate in nationals. Though she has raced the duathlon for the past four years, this year was the first year she attempted nationals.

At the national’s competition, limited slots are available from each division. The athletes with the best times were selected to represent the United States in Italy.

By her own admission, she did not expect to be selected to represent Team USA, but remarkably on her first attempt she qualified.

Edwards describes her first reaction when she found out she was selected as extremely happy.

“I found out here at the high school, and I immediately ran to tell the first person I could find,” she said.

Once the excitement began to wane, the reality of the immense amount of training that lie ahead set in.

Edwards trains seven days a week, a fact that she says sometimes takes away from activities with family or friends.

However, her husband Mark Edwards is very supportive of her, and even runs with her from time to time. Edwards acknowledges that without the support of her husband, she would not be where she is today.

“Anyone around me understands that I have to devote a lot of time to training,” Edwards said.

She added, “I realized that running is a large part of who I am. We all choose various ways to spend our spare time, and I choose to spend my spare time training.”

All of the work, however, has not come easy, or without setbacks.

Edwards has had five operations for various injuries. Rather than having these setbacks deter her, she looks at them as a testament to the resilience of the human body.

“The setbacks have shown me that people can have an injury, recover and then go on doing the things they were doing before,” she said.

Another disappointment through all of this is the fact that her parents are not alive to see this achievement.

“I wish my parents could have been here to see me accomplish this,” she said.

However, Edwards is able to honor her parent’s memory when she competes in major events by wearing one of her mother’s rings and her father’s dog tags.

Through it all, Edwards feels that the hard work has paid off.

She now looks forward to competing against some of the best athletes in the world, and is proud to represent not only herself, but also our small Georgia town and her country.

“It is an honor to represent the United States in an athletic event,” she said.