Proving her mettle: Chris Anne Spehar’s triathalon

“I just kept thinking: She’s up there watching me,” Spehar said. “She’s cheering me on.”

Spehar, 40, was among the nearly 1,700 women from more than 30 states who finished the event at Centennial Park on Sunday. But for Spehar, the .625-mile swim, the 17.5 mile bike ride and 3.4-mile run culminated an 18-month journey in which she dodged death in Iraq only to have to deal with it when she returned home.

“It still hasn’t hit me that my mother’s gone,” Spehar, an Annapolis resident said. “I think it’s going to hit me when something happens and I want to tell her about and I’ll say ‘Oh my God.’”

Spehar’s mom, Lily, died Aug. 6 after a long battle with ovarian cancer, as Chris Anne was in her parent’s Pittsburgh home when her 74-year-old mother took her final breath.

“My mom recognized all of us until the end,” Chris Anne said. “She couldn’t speak and she couldn’t eat, but she knew we were all there for her.”

Spehar’s road to Iron Girl began thousands of miles away in Baghdad, where she worked for the U.S. State Department in the U.S. Embassy, as part of a team in charge of reconstruction projects throughout the war-torn city.

For 12 months beginning in March of 2007, she wore about 50 pounds of protective gear, ranging from her helmet to her flak jacket. Still, she wasn’t safe, as she had to run from her one-window office into the hallway when insurgents bombed the embassy.

“One time after a bombing, I looked out my window and saw two dead bodies lying on the ground,” she said. “It’s surreal in that one day I’d be eating lunch outside and the sirens would go off and we’d have to duck for cover. The bombing got tiring.”

So she took a job at Camp Lemonier, a U.S. Naval base in Djibouti, which serves as the U.S. Central Command for its operations in Africa. Spehar worked in human resources, where she was never in the line of fire or lived in a city where “everybody walked around with a gun,” like in Baghdad.

But earlier this month, Spehar knew she had to come home. Her mother was dying. The cancer that had gone into remission in March of 2005 had returned. Her mom had days, not months.

“We’re a very close family,” said Dave Spehar, Chris Anne’s dad. “We have three kids. When Chris Anne was in Iraq, we worried about her when the bombs would hit. She called and talked to us more than four times a week. It meant a lot to us.”

Spehar, who has an older and young brother, began training for the Iron Girl as a way for the former swimmer at Sweetbriar College in southwest Virginia to get in shape.

“It’s not like you can just go outside and go jogging in Baghdad,” she said.

Spehar finished the Iron Girl in a little more than three hours, but she didn’t care about her time.

She just wanted to finish.

“When I was swimming, I said to myself ‘If Michael Phelps can with eight gold medals, I can make it,’” she said. “When I was biking, I said ‘if I can be survive in Baghdad, I can make it through this bike ride.’”

Then came the run, where she sought motivation from above.

“I know my mom was up there,” she said. “She was up there looking down on me.”

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