The race director of the Encinitas Triathlon, Jim Curl, has roots that go back to the very beginnings of triathlon, the swim-bike-run endurance sport that was born in San Diego in the 1970s. Curl recalls when a certain female triathlete, living in Encinitas, registered on the sports radar in the mid-1980s. “Lloyd Peters had worked for me and went to take a job at the Olympic Resort Hotel and Spa with a guy named Ron Smith,” Curl said in a recent interview. “Ron was starting a management and coaching service for elite athletes. One of their clients was a young woman from Zimbabwe living in Encinitas. No one really knew if she was any good or not, but at a race in Monterey, she had held the lead through the bike leg and onto the run. But she had blown up before the finish and didn’t win. Well, she wanted to move up to longer races, like the Ironman, but Ron told her that she needed to take her time and move up slowly in distance over a period of years. She fired him.”

The brash young woman from Zimbabwe was Paula Newby-Fraser, and history confirms, she was right to keep her own counsel. Not long after she fired Smith, Newby-Fraser took her first steps into what is roundly considered the greatest career the sport has ever seen and one that has inspired legions of women to accept the challenge of triathlon. The distance she was advised to shy away from, the Ironman, is comprised of a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike and a 26.2-mile run. The pinnacle event of the sport, the Hawaii Ironman, is held on the Kona side of the Big Island, and is famous for the severe heat and wind a racer confronts in his or her quest to finish the Ironman World Championship. Newby-Fraser would win the Hawaii Ironman for the first time in 1986, and in the following decade win another seven Kona championships, a record that stands today. As Ironman events began to spring up around the world—in locations like Germany, Japan, and Australia—Newby-Fraser snapped up more and more victories, a breathtaking 24 in all.

Charismatic and outspoken, Newby-Fraser’s success and image transcended the niche sport and registered powerfully within the mainstream. In 1990, the prestigious Women’s Sports Foundation named her “Professional Sportswoman of the Year,” the United States Sports Academy, CNN and USA Today poll named her as one of top five professional women athletes of the last 25 years (1972-97) and Triathlete Magazine recognized her as “The Greatest Triathlete of All Time.” Newby-Fraser also showed a talent for business, as co-owner of the Multisports School of Champions, and also works with Ironman North America, helping the organization stage eight Ironman events across the continent.

Ask just about any triathlete, anywhere in the world, to name a few towns they consider central to the sport, and Encinitas will likely be one of them. While triathlon’s relationship to San Diego preceded the beginning of Newby-Fraser’s career, it is because of Newby-Fraser that triathlon has an emotional connection to Encinitas. Anyone who witnessed one of her eight Hawaii wins on television heard the phrase, “Paula Newby-Fraser, originally from Zimbabwe, lives and trains in Encinitas.” Her relationship with North County inspired several generations of upstart triathletes—from the United States, Germany and Australia for others—to pack up their gear and head to the promised land. Much like Newby-Fraser did when she first visited Encinitas, staying at a friend’s, in 1985.

Living in South Africa at the time, Newby-Fraser had found a passion for triathlon and felt San Diego’s magnetism. “I planned to visit San Diego because of the great athletes that were here, like Scott Tinley, Mark Montgomery and Colleen Cannon. I stayed at a friend’s in Leucadia and started doing all the famous workouts: The Tuesday run in Rancho Santa Fe, the Wednesday bike ride, swimming and track workouts at UCSD.”

When Newby-Fraser returned to South Africa, it was winter, and she couldn’t shake Encinitas from her mind. “All I could think of was that I had to get back.”

She flew back to the States and got setup at the Village Park apartments, her first residence in an area she would remain until today. She would soon meet the man that is now her husband, Paul Huddle, an elite triathlete at the time and now recognized as one of the best triathlon coaches in the world. “We’ve tried to move before,” she mentions. “We’ve looked and looked and looked. We’ve never found anything we liked better. And in the end, we’ve never wanted to leave.”

Newby-Fraser’s migration and ensuing success sparked more of the same. As triathlon cornered into the late 1980s and ’90s, Europeans and Australians also heard the call in droves. It’s a pattern that has continued until today. Triathletes who would become stars, like Germany’s Jurgen Zack, Wolfgang Dittrich and Normann Stadler, Australia’s Greg Welch and Michellie Jones, Canadians Peter Reid, Lori Bowden and Heather Fuhr, all following the lead of the original stars that first staked out San Diego: Americans Scott Tinley, Mark Allen, Colleen Cannon and Scott Molina.

The draw: The year-round climate of San Diego was utopian for a triathlete wanting to train day-in and day-out, and the growing number of stars—whom you could swim, bike and run next to at the various workouts and rides—yielded a team dynamic that lives today. Newby-Fraser’s accidental work as an ambassador of Encinitas has been a raging success. She recalls one particularly dramatic instant of this. “I was at Ironman Lanzarote, and I remember telling Spencer Smith [a world champion sprint triathlete from Great Britain] that he should visit Encinitas and give it a try. He came to visit and stayed at our place. Within a week he had bought a house here.”

Along with the camaraderie and notion that excellence rubs off, Newby-Fraser says that San Diego is a great place to train on the bike. “The riding here is unbelievable,” she says. “You have so many options to do some very tough rides. Places like Temecula, Rice Canyon and Fallbrook. You can go for miles without ever seeing a car.”

Although in the last decade, the sport has developed other strongholds: Boulder, Colorado, Tucson, Arizona, Bend, Oregon and the San Francisco Bay Area are just a few. But Encinitas and San Diego retain their status as the holy land of the sport. While Newby-Fraser, 45, last won an Ironman in 2002 and has retired from professional racing, she still jumps in the occasional race, and if she were to enter an Ironman, few would doubt that she might be able to win. She clearly still enjoys the lifestyle of fitness that she helped set into the heart of Encinitas.

“The family unit still exists here,” Newby-Fraser adds. “Scott Tinley is still here, Greg Welch is here [a former Hawaii Ironman champion], John Duke [publisher of Triathlete Magazine), Bob Babbitt [co-publisher of Competitor Magazine]. They were all here back when it began. That’s what’s so amazing about this place.

For Newby-Fraser, it all started in this place back in 1985, when she paid her visit and “crashed on a couch” at a friend’s apartment on Vulcan Avenue in Leucadia. “Even now, when I ride my bike past the apartment, I get a good feeling thinking about it.” •