On July 16, 2022, 18-year-old Sullivan Middaugh of Eagle-Vail, newly graduated from Battle Mountain High, competed for the first time at the elite level in the Xterra USA Championship in Beaver Creek. The grueling off-road triathlon (dubbed “The Beast at Beaver Creek”; motto: “Can I Get Some Oxygen, Please?”) included a mile-long swim in Avon’s Nottingham Lake (elevation 7,430 feet), followed by a 15-mile mountain bike ride and a 5.6-mile trail run up Beaver Creek Mountain, topping out at 9,500 feet. Of the 139 males who competed that Saturday, Sullivan Middaugh won with a time of 2:20:28, earning the race’s $15,000 prize. 

The second-place finisher, less than two minutes behind? Local professional triathlete Josiah Middaugh, a 15-time national Xterra champion—and Sullivan’s dad, who would celebrate his 44th birthday nine days later. The father and son finished the biking leg at the same time before Sullivan pulled away with the lead during the run. “It was pretty cool,” he recalls. “I don’t think many people get to experience racing their dad.”

But there’s more. Sullivan’s brother Porter, two years younger and racing as an amateur, placed 10th overall, finishing ahead of even a few elite competitors with a time of 2:35:07. Today, both brothers train with Project Podium, a USA Triathlon development program for top-performing collegiate males at the University of Arizona in Tempe. The project’s ultimate goal is to produce Olympic medalists. In February, the brothers were named to USA Triathlon’s development team for male and female triathletes under 25. And at press time in late March, Sullivan and Porter had finished fifth and seventh respectively among male competitors at the Americas Triathlon Cup, an elite-level event in Gulfport, Miss., with Project Podium triathletes dominating the top five standings.

Triathlon, which made its Olympic debut in Sydney 26 summers ago with its combination of three sports in one race, not only demands speed, endurance, and technical skill but also an intense level of training. Even among Vail’s sizable community of elite athletes, the Middaughs—including mom Ingrid, a former Division I collegiate runner, and daughter Larsen, 14, a competitive runner and cross-country skier—stand out. To have three of the country’s top triathletes in one family reflects an uncommon level of grit and perseverance.

THE PACK LEADER

Josiah moved to Vail with Ingrid—whom he’d met at Central Michigan University and married a week after graduation—in June 2000, when he was 21. He came for a fitness internship at the former Vail Cascade Resort, which soon turned into a full-time job that he would supplement with snowboard instructing the next winter.

That first summer, Josiah also discovered triathlons. He had competed once in high school (“I side-stroked the whole way,” he says about the swim), and in college he’d watched on TV as former pro mountain biker Ned Overend won one of his two Xterra world championships. But living in Vail, hometown of legends like Lyndon Ellefson (a mountain running pioneer who died in the Swiss Alps while training for the world sky-running championships in 1998), Ellen Miller (an alpinist who coached the USA Women’s Mountain Running Team), and Mike Kloser (former professional downhill and cross-country mountain biker and father of Sochi Olympian Heidi Kloser), provided a local professional network—and the inspiration—he needed to begin pursuing a long-term goal of earning a living as a triathlete. After learning that an Xterra race was being held in nearby Keystone, he started swimming laps at the Potato Patch pool in Vail and logging miles on Vail’s mountain bike trails.

His first Xterra race, in July of 2000, wasn’t exactly a triumph. Josiah crashed several times on his bike (which he’d bought at a secondhand store) and had a panic attack as he again defaulted to a sidestroke during the swim (held in a pond). “My skills were horrible,” Josiah recalls.

Meanwhile, the couple loved living in the mountains, but a move back to the Midwest after their first winter seemed inevitable as they struggled to make ends meet. Recalls Josiah, “We had about $70 in our bank account, so we were like, ‘OK, that was fun, but we’re heading home soon if something doesn’t turn around.’”  

Salvation came in the form of a snowshoe race at Beaver Creek that Josiah, who had been a distance runner in college, entered and won, earning $4,000 in prize money. It meant they could stay for at least the rest of the winter.

They stayed for the next summer, too—and never left. Meanwhile, undeterred by his first Xterra experience, Josiah continued training, and he was a quick study. Triathlon’s multisport aspect strongly appealed to him, especially the cross-training. Plus, Josiah was curious to explore his potential (a theme that still defines his athletic career). At the next Xterra in Keystone in 2001, he shaved 45 minutes off his time, winning the race’s amateur division. Three years later, he won the pro division.

Since then, Josiah has become the most decorated American off-road triathlete. He won the Xterra World Championship in 2015, along with 15 Xterra national titles. Additionally, he was a 12-time top American finisher at the Xterra Worlds. In 2021, he was inducted into the Xterra Hall of Fame. 
Along the way, he’s also competed in a couple of Ironman triathlons. Not content to just cross-train in the winter, Josiah has won the snowshoeing national championships and the Fat Bike Worlds six times each, as well as three winter triathlon national championships. 

TRAINING WITH HIMSELF

In college, Josiah studied the science of athletic training, earning undergraduate and master’s degrees in kinesiology and exercise science. When he got serious about triathlons, he read books like The Triathlete’s Training Bible, by Joe Friel, which was the sport’s bible at the time. “I was digging into the periodization of training and trying to figure out the optimal way to train and making a lot of mistakes,” Josiah says.

He served as his own coach, while also coaching other endurance athletes remotely via Middaugh Coaching, which he founded in 2003, and working as a personal trainer at local gyms that cater to endurance athletes, like Dogma Athletica in Edwards and the Westin Athletic Club in Avon. Sponsors for Josiah’s athletic career wouldn’t come until later. He maintained a steady juggling act for years. “I was pretty consistently training twice a day,” he says. “On a typical day, I would get up at 5:30 and swim, then go straight to work and personal train clients until early afternoon, then try to get another workout in before I had kid pickup duty, or work up until that time and then train again in the evening.” 

Josiah’s self-taught strategy obviously worked (at the Westin, where he coaches a masters swim team, a photographic wall of fame hanging in the hallway leading to the reception desk claims the Middaughs—Josiah, Sullivan, and Porter—and Mikaela Shiffrin, as the club’s resident athletes). But getting there was far from easy, especially compared to the money and training that athletes from other countries benefited from. “By the 2010s, the Europeans really started to dominate,” he says. “It was just a whole other level of racing. Most people had coaches, and a lot of Europeans even had government funding. That just was not where I came from. [I was] always balancing work and family. I didn’t have the luxury to train near the amount of hours.”

In fact, Josiah insists that he never tried to persuade Sullivan and Porter to follow in his footsteps. He knew from experience that competing in a series like the Xterra full time is difficult to make financially viable and that endurance sports in general are not what he calls a “glamorous path.” “I was focused on just raising decent human beings and trying hard not to impose any of my athletic ambitions onto them,” he says.

Until the boys were tweens, Josiah and Ingrid encouraged them to be involved in a variety of sports locally, from basketball, football, and lacrosse to skiing and biking. Yet triathlon always loomed large, as the Middaugh family often traveled together to Josiah’s races. As young teens, both Sullivan and Porter entered sprint versions of the Xterra in Beaver Creek. But each boy has come to love triathlon on his own timeline.

PROPELLED TOWARDS THE PODIUM

With so many different athletic opportunities available, Sullivan didn’t focus on a single sport until high school, when he became serious about running. Yet the idea of doing a full-length Xterra triathlon was appealing, and in 2019, the 15-year-old freshman competed in Beaver Creek as an amateur, finishing a very respectable 16th in a field of 141 males. (Josiah finished first that year.) Then, in spring 2021, in his junior year at Battle Mountain, an IT band injury sidelined him from running for several months. In the interim, he biked frequently. That summer, also competing as an amateur, he placed sixth in Beaver Creek, well enough to qualify for the world championships in Maui that December. (Josiah finished third at the Colorado race.)

Among the other competitors in Maui was Project Podium head coach Parker Spencer. During the race, Sullivan passed Spencer in the biking leg, on the way to winning his age group. Impressed, the coach invited Sullivan to Arizona to see if he could make the transition from off-road to road triathlete. He did, and that spring he committed to joining the team. A few days after beating his dad in the Beaver Creek race, Sullivan packed up and drove to Park City, Utah, where the Project Podium athletes train in the summer, away from Tempe’s blistering heat.
Though he didn’t have a traditional triathlon background—he swam mostly in casual summer pool programs in Vail—Sullivan says his mountain upbringing of running and biking up hills and at altitude paid off. “I have a pretty good engine,” he notes. “I may not have the perfect stride, but I’m able to use my mountain legs.”

Now 22 and a college senior, Sullivan trains intensively while completing his biomedical sciences coursework online, the standard format for Project Podium participants. The group of 10 men lives in the same apartment complex about a mile from campus. (Sullivan and Porter don’t room together; “that was my mom’s call, and it was a good one,” says Sullivan.) Every day they swim, bike, and run for about three hours total, along with twice-weekly strength-training sessions. Weekends are for longer training sessions.

Though Sullivan’s focus is on draft-legal road triathlons (where racers are allowed to draft off each other during the cycling portion)—he plans on competing in at least a dozen this year—he still does some off-road ones, too. 
“Triathlon wasn’t something I saw myself doing,” he admits. But now, he adds, he’s very happy with his decision to pursue the sport. “It suits me well as an athlete,” he adds. “Doing all three sports makes it more interesting. Once you get bored, you’re on to the next sport.”

Similarly, Porter, 20, hadn’t thought much about competing in triathlon as he was growing up. Like his brother, he focused on running in high school and sometimes dabbled in swimming and biking. When Sullivan started competing in full-length Xterra races, including the world championships, Porter stuck with running, with great success. In his senior year at Battle Mountain High, he placed sixth in the Nike Cross National Championships and also ran one of the fastest-ever 3,200-meter races among US prep sports athletes. But when he visited Sullivan a few times in Arizona, Porter was impressed with the opportunities available through Project Podium. And the possibilities of broadening his athletic performance beyond just running seemed exciting.

Before Porter’s senior year of high school, Project Podium’s coach encouraged him to compete in a road triathlon, and he did well enough, finishing fourth, to be accepted into the program. A couple of months later, he competed in the USA Triathlon Junior National Championships in Wisconsin with the rest of the Project Podium team. “I got crushed pretty bad by all of them, but it was still fun,” he says. He upped his swim training, and after graduation the next year, he entered the USA Triathlon Junior National Championships in Iowa, finishing fourth.

His first year on the team, and away from home as a freshman at the University of Arizona, was hard, Porter acknowledges. “I was always comparing myself to the guys who were having a lot of success, including Sullivan,” he says, noting that his results were inconsistent. Now a sophomore majoring in biological sciences, Porter has grown more accustomed to the volume of training, as well as the importance of proper sleep and fueling (competitive triathletes consume between 2,500 and 7,000 calories per day). “I’m able to dig deeper with less fatigue,” he says. 

His short-term goal is to make the team for the under 23 (U23) world championships in Spain this fall. Both brothers have the Olympics in their sights, with Sullivan aiming for the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles and Porter, who has an outside shot at qualifying in 2028, looking at 2032 in Brisbane, Australia.

THE FAMILY ADVICE TREE

These days, the Middaugh brothers’ secret weapon may be the specialized advice they’re able to ask for and share. “I have great mentors on the team, and I definitely trust my coach,” says Porter, “but I call my dad pretty often to talk over training with him. It’s nice to hear an outside voice.” Sullivan says he and Josiah speak almost every other day. As the voice of experience, Josiah may weigh in on everything from pacing a hard workout or training while healing a small injury to picking the right bike tires and calming prerace nerves.

And then there’s Ingrid. “Mom has been there for everything life throws at you,” says Porter. She’s helped the boys adjust to living on their own and maintaining their own apartments, as well as handling the moves back and forth between Tempe and Park City each year. For that, she draws on her own experience as a college athlete. “My mom will tell you that she was on the athletic scholarship, while my dad was on the academic scholarship,” Sullivan says.

When the brothers compete against each other, Sullivan has had the edge, so far. But it’s not all cutthroat. “I’m excited to race against him this year because I think we’ll be able to work together a lot more,” says Porter, referring to the bike segments, where he’s now more able to keep pace with Sullivan. They also share swimming tips, which both say is still their weakest event, echoing their father. 
Porter also looks to his brother for the wisdom that comes with being two years older and more experienced at triathlon. Some of the best sibling advice he’s received, Porter says, includes learning when to back off. “A lot of times I can lose sight of my ego and try to race the guys in a training session or go hard all the time,” he notes. “Sullivan is really good at managing how to stack training and be consistent rather than having a hero session here and there.” As the savvier bike tech, Sullivan also helps Porter get his bike race-ready and troubleshoot any mechanical issues.

Asked what he’d tell his boys about triathlon that he wishes he’d known when he was an up-and-comer, Josiah hesitates. “I don’t know, they’re on a really different trajectory than me,” he allows. “They have a good squad to train with. They have a good coach. So I just tell them to take advantage of those resources. They have the opportunity to train professionally without the same kind of distractions [I had].”

The Middaugh patriarch is far from relinquishing his status as the triathlete family role model, though at 47 he’s taking a slightly different approach. After completing the extreme off-road Patagonman in late 2024—a bucket list triathlon in Chile’s Patagonia—Josiah reorganized his priorities. He still competes at the pro level, but enters fewer races. In 2025, he took a position at Vail Health, leading a new health and wellness initiative called Healthspan.

“It’s hard, because I’m still comparing myself to my past self, but I’m also interested in exploring what high performance means now,” he says. First on the schedule this summer is the time-trial bike race at the GoPro Games in Vail in early June. After that, he plans to compete in the Xterra World Championship, which, after being held in Italy the past four years, will move to Ruidoso, New Mexico, in October. “My motivation there is to compete with my boys,” Josiah admits. “If they weren’t racing, I probably wouldn’t have the same drive to compete.” 

PRO TIP

How to Stick It Out

How to stay motivated, whether during a training session or a race, is often at the forefront of an athlete’s mind. Professional triathlete Josiah Middaugh suggests reframing it, for starters. “I think that’s a lot to ask of somebody, to keep a high level of motivation all the time. It’s more about developing habits and creating consistency over time,” he says. In other words, the discipline to keep training—whether you’re tired or it’s raining, dark, or cold—provides the scaffolding on which to build success.

That’s no simple task, and there’s no getting around it. “My wife used to say that I have ‘ugly face’ when I am racing,” says Josiah. “I don’t think it should feel easy, and it doesn’t always have to look easy. It’s really about putting in that effort and getting the most out of yourself that day.”

So how do you dig deep during those moments of extreme exertion or overwhelming fatigue? Josiah relies on a strategy he refers to as association. “It’s where you actually kind of welcome the discomfort, instead of disassociation, when you’re thinking of something else or having some sort of distraction,” he explains. “That’s what high performers do. They manage discomfort. It’s a more effective strategy.”