By the time athletes reach the third run of the Survival of the Shawangunks Triathlon, they have been moving for hours. They have biked 30 miles, climbed into Minnewaska State Park, run across the ridge, and swum through two mountain lakes with their running shoes tucked into their clothing or strapped to their bodies. Their feet are wet, their muscles have repeatedly cooled and reheated, and their reserves are beginning to go.
Then comes an eight-mile run toward Lake Mohonk, including the climb known as Godzilla. “You go a little crazy,” says Evan Davis, whose father, Don Davis, founded the race. “They say the squirrels start to talk to you.”
This is no standard swim-bike-run triathlon. The SOS is a 50.5-mile, eight-stage endurance event that threads together some of the Shawangunk Ridge’s most spectacular terrain: a 30-mile bike ride followed by four trail runs totaling 18.7 miles and three open-water swims totaling 2.1 miles. Athletes cross Lake Awosting, Lake Minnewaska, and Lake Mohonk before making a final, lung-busting seven-tenths-of-a-mile ascent to the Survivor Line beside Sky Top Tower.
The course is beautiful enough to inspire reverence and hard enough to induce hallucinations. On August 30, it will do both for the 40th time.
The race began as an outsized training day devised by Don Davis, now 81, when triathlon itself was still an emerging sport. A longtime Rockaway Beach lifeguard, Davis routinely biked, ran, and swam as part of his training. He had completed the Boston Marathon and set his sights on a new event in Hawaii called the Ironman.
Living near the Shawangunks, he began imagining how the ridge’s lakes and carriage roads might be joined into one enormous workout. He biked to Minnewaska, stashed his bicycle in the woods, ran to Lake Awosting, and swam across it. From there, he began connecting the dots: Awosting to Minnewaska, Minnewaska to Mohonk, each swim followed by another run.
“He would get himself in condition to be able to do this mother of all workouts,” Evan says. “It included all these gorgeous vistas—the most beautiful segments of any workout that you could put together.”
The following year, Don brought several friends. The group grew, and the outing evolved alongside the sport it represented. He eventually secured sanctioning from the Triathlon Federation, a predecessor of USA Triathlon, and what began as a few athletes improvising their way across the mountains became one of the country’s most distinctive endurance races.
Evan was in junior high school when the event began taking shape. His first jobs were simple. He and a friend were dropped at Rhododendron Bridge with several gallons of water and left to encourage exhausted athletes as they climbed Godzilla. He later worked at Lake Awosting and served as a draft marshal on the bike course. Over the past several years, he has assumed more of the race’s leadership, easing some of the burden carried by his father.
An athlete completes one of the SOS Triathlon’s three open-water swims, which are separated by long runs across the Shawangunk Ridge.
It is a considerable burden. The course crosses Minnewaska State Park Preserve, the Mohonk Preserve, and Mohonk Mountain House property, while the cycling leg requires coordination with police and municipalities along the route. Each lake needs lifeguards, medics, doctors, and its own volunteer operation. Eight aid stations have to be established, some deep in the woods. The trail must be marked meticulously enough to guide athletes whose powers of cognition have begun to deteriorate.
“My dad’s a triathlete, so he knows that later in the race your brain cells start to exponentially expire,” Evan says. By the closing miles, pink arrows appear on nearly every available tree.
Race director John Stern, who has been involved since the 1990s, oversees much of that complicated machinery. His wife, Tommy Stern, creates an original painting for the event each year, which becomes the basis for its handmade award plaques. The organizing committee includes people whose involvement stretches back decades, and many individual lakes and aid stations have developed their own longstanding crews.
The 300-athlete field is supported by approximately 250 volunteers—a ratio that helps explain how an event spread across 50 miles of rugged terrain maintains its intimate character. It also explains how SOS has survived four decades while remaining family-owned and community-run in an endurance industry increasingly populated by corporate race operators.
The athlete cap protects both the landscape and the experience, Evan says. Organizers want a modest footprint on the ridge, but they also want competitors, volunteers, and their families to feel part of the same gathering. The weekend includes a prerace pasta dinner and a postrace barbecue where people can compare notes after the ordeal. “We don’t want people to feel like they’re just a number,” he says. “It’s more fun when you know people and you care about people. You’re able to cater to each athlete and their family and the volunteers. It’s more rich in terms of human relationships.”
That personal scale does not soften the physical demands. Competitors must demonstrate that they are capable of completing the course, either through qualifying races or other evidence of fitness. Organizers will consider training records and Strava segments and connect prospective participants with coaches, but the standard exists for a reason. An athlete who falters during an ordinary road race can step to the curb. At SOS, that same athlete may be alone on a carriage trail or midway across a mountain lake.
The repeated alternation between running and swimming creates its own form of punishment. Triathletes typically complete a swim, change disciplines, and never return to the water. At SOS, athletes must plunge in three times. Their muscles cramp as they cool; wet shoes cause blisters and bloody feet; nutrition and hydration become difficult to manage. Each competitor must determine how to transport shoes through the swims and goggles through the runs. “These are things that sort of break down the barrier between the athlete and their ego,” Evan says.
Although SOS crowns winners and has attracted elite competitors, the race’s central drama is often survival itself. Evan describes it as athlete versus nature, though he means that in a spirit of respect. The course reduces people to a shared condition: tired, wet, hurting, and still facing a long climb. Strangers meet during the third run, struggle through it together, and remain friends years later.
Evan completed the race three times alongside his father. Don deliberately slowed his pace to stay with him, a fact apparently lost on competitors who celebrated having beaten the founder. “They didn’t,” Evan says. “They only beat me.”
During one of those long runs, fatigue loosened the conversation between father and son. Don began telling Evan stories about his childhood that he had never shared before. Other relationships have formed on the course as well; two couples have been married at Sky Top on race day.
The event’s spirit may be most apparent among the volunteers stationed across the mountain. Evan recalls asking Ironman champion Timothy O’Donnell whether SOS’s eccentric format—especially swimming with one’s sneakers—was what set it apart. O’Donnell agreed that the course was extraordinary, but said something else mattered more: the energy passed from Don and his family through the volunteers to the athletes.
At the end, each athlete climbs from Lake Mohonk, pulls on a pair of sodden shoes for the final time, and heads uphill. The Survivor Line waits beside Sky Top. Forty years after Don Davis first connected the dots, reaching it still requires everything an athlete has left.
