Not a lot intimidates Winter Vinecki. Because the 23-year-old prepares for the beginning of her first Olympics, she’s already seen extra life than most individuals twice her age: At age 9, she misplaced her father to prostate most cancers; at 13, she moved away from dwelling to start out coaching in aerial snowboarding; at 14, she turned the youngest individual to run a marathon on all seven continents. A phrase of recommendation? Don’t underestimate her.
“It began again once I was 9 years outdated,” she says over Zoom. That was the yr she signed up for her first Olympic distance triathlon, which contains a 1.5 kilometer swim, a 40 kilometer bike trip, and a ten kilometer run in speedy succession. Vinecki had gotten her first style of competitors just a few years earlier whereas tagging alongside along with her mother, Daybreak Estelle, as she competed in triathlons. “We’d go as a household to observe her race so we’d take our R.V., load my three brothers, myself, my dad, and I to go watch my mother,” she says. One occasion in Canada provided a youngsters’ race, she remembers. “We had been like, ‘Effectively, shoot, let’s do it.’” Wiinter, gangly and stuffed with power, walked as much as the beginning line sporting water wings. “I noticed no different youngsters had their water wings on so we needed to rip mine off,” she says, laughing. It was prompt love.
Rising up on 200 acres of land in northern Michigan, on a property adjoining to her grandparents’ 2,000 acres, “I cherished working across the woods and simply having enjoyable and enjoying, being outdoor. The working in triathlons got here naturally,” Vinecki says. She was hooked—however confronted a small problem: There weren’t many youngsters’ races in her space. “That’s how I received concerned within the grownup dash triathlons and doing longer distances,” she says. “I didn’t suppose something of it often because I used to be simply on the market having enjoyable.”
By the point she had signed up for the Olympic-distance race when she was 9, she was used to fielding it’s-never-been-done-before’s from doubting adults. “[The race organizers] needed to have a separate begin for me as a result of I used to be so younger,” she says. “They had been like, ‘You’re by no means going to complete.’ However I did, and I completed very properly amongst all of the adults.
“That was the final race my dad was there ready for me on the end line,” Vinecki says. “After he handed away simply shortly after, I used to be all the time pondering, ‘What may I do subsequent in honor of him?’”
Whereas most individuals her age are simply starting to determine what they need their lives to appear to be, Vinecki appears conscious about time, diving head-first into each alternative that begins with a “Wouldn’t or not it’s cool if….” In the future, in her early teenagers, she was “randomly” wanting by way of the Guinness E-book of World Information and got here throughout the youngest individual—a 27-year-old—to run a marathon on all seven continents. Wouldn’t or not it’s cool if she may beat that? “I instantly instructed my mother, ‘I need this report.’ I assumed it might be so cool to have the ability to honor my dad in that manner and be capable to take his reminiscence throughout the globe,” she says.
It’s these moments that make Vinecki seem to be she may really be able to something. When confronted with a problem, she doesn’t simply rise—she soars. After her dad’s prognosis, Vinecki based Workforce Winter in 2008, a nonprofit with the goal of elevating consciousness of prostate most cancers. What higher approach to elevate consciousness than to run along with her message throughout the globe? Vinecki’s mother began wanting into races and earlier than lengthy a plan had shaped: They’d grow to be the primary mother-daughter duo to run a marathon on all seven continents. The duo began with their first race in Oregon earlier than heading to Kenya, the place Vinecki completed third within the discipline.
Supply: Glamour
