“I’m not bad at this – and that was with four months of training from zero. How much better can I be? That’s the exciting part.”

Excitement clearly reverberated with every word that Kayla Gallo shared.

Now 33 years old and spreading time these days primarily between Ottawa and Vancouver, with an occasional stint in Ignace (about 90 minutes east of Dryden, Ontario), the woman who starred in soccer and track in her youth and ran varsity cross-country at the university level has shifted gears, just a little, yet again.

On the urging of a training partner on the west coast, Gallo decided to tackle the Ironman 70.3 Victoria 2025 (a half Ironman, if you will) in early May.

Recovering from a hip injury that would see her carry a more than solid base of cycling to the start of the workouts geared to help her be the best that she could be on the picturesque British Columbia island, Gallo entered the race with few expectations.

She exited with a highly unanticipated next step.

Capturing her age group (30-35) and finishing as the fifth overall female in a grouping of 439, the graduate of Collège Notre-Dame will represent Canada at the Ironman 70.3 World Championships in Marbella, Spain in November.

Did we mention yet that she is a physician and avid practitioner of Sports Medicine as a full-time trade?

“It’s funny what can happen when you have no clue and you’re just there to work hard and see what happens,” said Gallo, pretty much summarizing her post-race sentiment.

Throughout high-school, Gallo was a very good but certainly not elite runner, far more fixated on a post-secondary career on the pitch as one of several highly touted talents who worked their way through the Sudbury Canadians soccer program. With future Olympian Cloe Lacasse among her steady core of teammates, the highly driven northern product was always grounded in perspective.

To boot, Gallo was also quite academically inclined, opting to forego her original plans to tryout with the McMaster University soccer team to spend more time on her studies. Through it all, the impressive journey that leads to becoming a doctor, Gallo maintained a very healthy lifestyle, one that she appreciated more with every passing year.

“I was much more competitive in my early thirties doing half marathons than I ever was in my twenties or university,” she acknowledged. “I started breaking all of my PBs (personal best times). That’s just getting to know our body, better nutrition, understanding recovery and figuring things out.”

As this New Year arrived, Gallo knew that her running skills were more than competitive – and that her cycling had taken a huge leap forward, evidenced by an outstanding showing at the RBC GranFondo Whistler, a 120km pure climb from Vancouver to the mountain ski paradise.

Swimming, however, would be interesting.

“I will never be a fast swimmer and I am fully accepting of that,” said Gallo. With her only competitive exposure to the pool wrapped around a favour she performed at CND – “I think they just needed someone for the endurance events so they poached me from the cross-country team” – Gallo undertook her water training with a high degree of comfort in that setting, albeit with no base of speed.

“It was a little bit of learn to swim again,” she noted. “Swim was always, I dare way, a punishment when you were injured as a runner.”

Ironically, 48 hours prior to the Victoria race, the swim segment was cancelled due to an algae outbreak. The relief that Gallo felt was tempered by a feeling that is at the very base of many great athletes.

“I was disappointed because I had put four months of hard work and I could see how much better of a swimmer I was – but I knew I would be more competitive in a bike/run,” she said.

And for as much as that is true, it does not leave Gallo the least bit overwhelmed by the prospects of an international half Ironman competition later this year that features the opening leg contested in the Alboran Sea that sits between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea.

“Because the swim isn’t particularly long, you don’t lose as much time there,” explained the age group champion who benefitted nicely from the guidance of Sara Massie, a highly accomplished duathlete/triathlete/Ironman in her own ranks. “On the bike, you can really lose a lot of time because it’s 90 km – and the run is 21.1km.”

All of which is fine and dandy and would be great if Gallo had been able to anticipate the outcome of her breakthrough performance in Victoria and all that now flows out of that effort.

“When you don’t anticipate qualifying and you plan your professional life otherwise … well, I do not have the most optimal next four months for training,” she said. “There’s a lot of travel back and forth (between Vancouver and Ottawa mostly, with a volunteer gig at the Canada Summer Games in Newfoundland mixed in this August, just for good measure).

“We’ll make due – and I will have a good solid training base from the end of August until the end of October.”

Besides, Kayla Gallo will enter this World Championship event in very much the same head space that she tackled her first 70.3 Ironman on just four months of focused training. “I think if I feel that I get everything out of myself and I show up to the start line healthy, those would be wins in my books.”

Beyond that, who knows. The truth is that she never ceases to amaze herself – and the family and friends who support her.