Meet the 51画鋼 Cox Student Pursuing an Ironman World Record

Balancing her Online MBA studies at 51画鋼 Cox with about eight hours of triathlon training per day, Dallas native Ariana Luterman attributes her drive to the power of goal setting.

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Most days, Ariana Luterman couldn’t get out of bed. It was fall 2023, and the then-23-year-old was unemployed and out of school. She was unable to eat much of anything or move a muscle without excruciating pain. She never went long without an IV infusion of nutrients and experienced wild 105-degree fever spikes. Sleep was nearly impossible.

That fall capped off a year of suffering, during which Ariana’s symptoms were never gone for long. What’s worse, doctors had no idea what was wrong with her. CT scans, colonoscopies, endoscopies and other tests left Ariana, her family and her care team without answers. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

“People close to me were wondering if I was fabricating it,” Ariana says. “At a certain point, you think you’re going crazy as well.”

Being bedridden and rudderless are difficult circumstances for anyone, but it was an especially foreign feeling for Ariana. A triathlete who started racing when she was 7, she also raised funds for homeless families and childhood obesity research as a teenager. Just a year earlier, she was about to begin a Ph.D. program in Australia.

She had even made headlines during the 2017 Dallas Marathon, when she neared the finish line as the anchor leg in a high school marathon relay team and ran alongside the women’s leader, who collapsed on the final straightaway. As she went down again and again with less than 100 meters to go, Ariana instinctively reached down and helped her up each time, guiding the leader to a marathon victory.

But by 2023, Ariana was living in her parents’ house after graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was writing goodbye letters to friends because she feared she might die. She was a far cry from the active, generous extrovert her friends and family knew so well. But her period of hopelessness wouldn’t last forever.

Propelled by purpose

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Figure: Ariana crosses the finish line at the 2024 Ironman California race, which took place Oct. 27, 2024. Though it was her first Ironman, she finished in just 12:18:17.
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Figure: Ariana says she has found power and purpose in goal setting through balancing athletic training with her MBAD studies.

Ariana says she has found power and purpose in goal setting through balancing athletic training with her MBAD studies.

As Ariana began to increase her mileage, she sought out a coach to guide her training. She moved to San Diego, where she found a community of triathletes and unbeatable year-round weather to complement her training. Outside of pursuing her studies, she spends time swimming in lap pools and the open ocean and running and biking through the rolling hills of Southern California.

Her typical day may include two to three different workouts totaling eight hours, but she is rarely alone for the entire training; she’s often joined by local triathlete friends for different portions of the run, swim, bike or lift. On her light days (there are no true rest days for Ariana), she finds a mountain to hike, a wave to surf or a yoga class to join.  

Although medicine helped launch her healing, Ariana recognizes the power of purpose and goal setting. She says her studies and training have been essential to finding her old self. If she meets her goal, she’ll need to travel around the world to complete six races, something she wouldn’t be able to do without the flexibility of the Cox MBAD.

“Before you set out to do something, you need to set yourself up for success,” she says. “The program gave me the best chance of doing this.”

Ariana hasn’t announced all the races she wants to complete for the record to her nearly 10,000 Instagram followers, but her first race took place this October in California, and she’ll be off to complete her second of six in Australia this December. During the October race—the first Ironman she’s ever attempted—she ended up breezing past her original 14-hour goal time by finishing in just 12 hours, 18 minutes and 17 seconds.

While she has competed in many shorter triathlons, Ariana makes no attempt to present herself as an elite athlete achieving out-of-reach goals. In fact, she feels just the opposite.

“It’s more of a testament to willpower,” she says. “My goal with all of this is to inspire people to fall back in love with life.”