ROANOKE, Va. – Parker Albright is not your average Roanoke Valley high schooler.
“So, I stopped halfway through my sophomore year to do online school because a lot of my teachers got a little mad at me because I missed a lot of school because of races and all that so it kind of helped me with keeping my grades up and focusing on training,” she said.
All that to focus on her training, a time consuming one at that, because instead of working on perfecting her craft in one sport, she is doing three at once.
“I like triathlons a lot better than straight-up running because it gives me a little more variety with my training you don’t get burnt out as easily,” she said. “I swim about six days a week, sometimes a little bit more than that. Right now, I’m running about four to five times a week and my bike’s pretty light right now so I’m only riding about two to three times a week.”
“It’s nice now to have the option to do triathlons rather than three years ago, you would either choose swimming or running in college, and you would have to fit all your training around that single sport.”
And when National Signing Day came around, Parker became the first athlete from Roanoke to sign with a Division I Women’s Triathlon program at the University of South Dakota.
“It feels really cool. I’m hoping to encourage other people to step out of their comfort zone,” she said. “A lot of girls are signing with triathlon teams but they haven’t done a triathlon before, they’ve swam or ran in high school. So [it’s] sort of opening the door for other options in high school than just one discipline.”