Maegan Rudolph was doing her best not to think about the cramp beginning to seize up in the calf of her leg. She’d been running for miles and was too close to the end of the race to end up sitting on the sidewalk.
“I got to the final turn onto the boardwalk in Wilmington that led to the finish line, and all the thoughts about my calf cramp went out the window,” says Rudolph, a third-year student at the USC School of Medicine Greenville. “I had this overwhelming feeling of pride that I was about to accomplish this thing that I’d been working towards for a long time. It was so rewarding to get to do it with some of my classmates, as well.”
What Rudolph and her classmates competed in this past October was no ordinary race. It was an Ironman 70.3 event in Wilmington, N.C., a triathlon that included a 1.2-mile swim in the chilly Cape Fear River followed by a 56-mile bicycle sprint and a 13.1-mile run. The group trained together for months, pedaling up the steep slope of Paris Mountain near the School of Medicine Greenville campus, logging innumerable laps in a pool and jogging for miles, often doing all three every week. It was a rigorous bonding experience beyond the academic challenges of medical school.
“There's nothing like trauma bonding, and when you're struggling to bike up a hill, you definitely get closer to the people you’re doing it with,” says Molly Crosswell, a second-year medical student at the school who, like Rudolph, grew up in the Greenville area, went out of state for her undergraduate degree and returned for medical school.
“I think a lot of us were drawn to [the USC School of Medicine] Greenville because of its emphasis on lifestyle medicine,” Crosswell says. “That’s something that we're passionate about and trying to implement in our own lives and want to implement in our patients’ lives. So, I don't think it's a coincidence that students from this school competed in a triathlon.”
But neither was it a foregone conclusion that they would. None of the seven medical students who competed in the event — Rudolph, Crosswell, Katie Morgan, Luke Morcos, Grey Holler, Charlie Meyerson and Logan Cripe — had ever attempted such a feat before. Morgan and her boyfriend, Ricardo Chacon, who also competed in Wilmington, didn’t even own a bicycle before they started training.
“I’ve always been attracted to things that are difficult. And with our lifestyle curriculum at the School of Medicine, it makes you feel like you need to walk the walk before you can talk the talk. Now that I’ve completed the Wilmington competition, I feel like I have credibility to help other people.”
Some had swum competitively in high school, but Cripe says he could barely stay afloat. “I would joke with people that my swimming wasn’t really swimming,” he says. “It was just kind of progressive drowning.”
Cripe’s wife, Grace Anderson, a fellow second-year medical student, didn’t compete in the Wilmington event only because she had finished a full Ironman triathlon in Chattanooga a month earlier. She has registered for a triathlon in 2026 when she’ll be doing clinical rotations.
“A couple of the students who did the Wilmington event with Logan are third-year students, so they made it happen somehow,” she says. “I can’t imagine doing all of the training while doing clinicals, but it can be done. I hope so because I’m signed up for one.”
So how did a bunch of medical students — already up to their eyeballs in late-night studying and, in some cases, all-day clinical rotations — seize upon the plan to compete in an Ironman 70.3 event?
The seed was planted as several of the students jogged and exercised together in the first year of medical school, and it began to take root when someone mentioned doing a triathlon in 2025. Crosswell puts it simply: “When you take a bunch of competitive people and put them in a room together, you get things like this.”
Competing in the Ironman 70.3 in Wilmington was cause for celebration, but Holler, who hails from Sumter, South Carolina, says completing each day of training was a triumph in itself.
“The time put in was a little bit more than I expected, but it's kind of nice because if you wake up and do something that's undesirable, it makes the rest of the day feel a little bit easier,” Holler says. “When you’ve done your run or bike ride first thing in the morning, everything else seems a little bit smaller in comparison.”
Sounds like the kind of advice a physician might share with a patient who needs to become more active. Morgan is already thinking of her Ironman training through the lens of talking with future patients.
“When I think about counseling patients on exercise, I think about what is most feasible for them to do long term every day,” Morgan says. “What's one small thing that you think you could keep up with? You don't have to change two, three or four things in your life because that gets way too overwhelming.”
Nearly all the students who competed in Wilmington envision doing another Ironman 70.3 or perhaps even a full Ironman, doubling each of the distances, before finishing medical school.
“I’ve always been attracted to things that are difficult,” Holler says. “And with our lifestyle curriculum at the School of Medicine, it makes you feel like you need to walk the walk before you can talk the talk. Now that I’ve completed the Wilmington competition, I feel like I have credibility to help other people.”