Dominic Guinta

Dominic Guinta
Married to Lisa 9-14-96

Three kids: Sam 9, Tony 7 and Jenelle 5

The "cliff note" version of my story is I started out as a mountain biker. I was into 6, 12 and 24 (with a team) hour mountain bike races. In 2004 as I got more into this I bought a $300 road bike to train. I started doing pack rides with this cheap bike and ended up doing a century. While pack riding I met a guy that told me he was training for ironman. I had no clue that people even did this race. I remembered watching it as a kid on tv when I was around 10 or 11. After hearing this I quickly made up my mind to train for this race, the only problem was I never ran more than 3 miles and never did any kind of distance swimming.

That winter I started swimming and in the spring of ‘05 I started running. I did an Olympic distance triathlon that summer. The next year I did a half ironman and my first marathon. The following year 2007 I did Ironman Wisconsin finishing in 13:14.

After I did Ironman I was looking for the next big challenge and found it with ultra running.

I now do around six ultras a year and a total of 9 ultras. I don't keep much track of how many races I do, I got that info off of realendurance.com. LOL! I don't even keep a log. I just run further than you drive! Although this year I am working with a coach (Karl Meltzer) and he has helped me a lot! I see a lot of value in using his service and having more structure!

This r2r2r for me is more of a training run to help me get ready for my races this year and to hang with my friends doing what I love! Two of the races I'll do this year are Western States 100 miler and Wasatch 100 miler. If those two races go well I would like to try and get into Hardrock 100 next year. Hardrock is the hardest 100 miler in the country!

People ask me why I do these races and it's kind of like the old adage "if I had to explain you wouldn't understand." I think for the most part I do it to see what I'm capable of doing and to be a good example to my children. Showing them that anything is possible!

I love everything about ultra running and will do it as long as I can.