Goodbye Lois

A Letter to Lois Schwartz

Dear Lois,

I’ve been sitting with your name today the way you sit with a mile marker on the Queen K quietly, respectfully, letting it come to you instead of chasing it.

I heard you passed, and it landed in that part of my chest where the sport lives. Not the loud part the finish-line part, but the early morning, coffee-in-hand part. The part that remembers how much of triathlon was built by people who didn’t need the spotlight to change everything.

You were one of those people.

Most fans know the victories, the rivalries, the iconic moments. But the real story of this sport, what made it grow up and become something that could hold all of our dreams was carried by the builders. The ones who believed in triathlon before it was safe to believe in it. Before it was mainstream. Before there was a template for what endurance culture could become.

You were a partner in Competitor magazine, but that title doesn’t come close to explaining what you actually were.

You were a force of steadiness. A kind of quiet courage. A person who looked at this strange little sport—swim, bike, run, sunburn, grit, hope and saw a world worth documenting. Worth elevating. Worth protecting.

And you didn’t just document it with words. You gave triathlon its gallery.

You helped create images that don’t simply show what happened, they hold what it felt like. The salt on the skin. The emptiness of a long road. The tenderness of exhaustion. The private victory no one claps for. The way an athlete’s face can look both broken and unbreakable in the same frame.

Those photographs, those moments you helped curate, protect, and bring into the world are not just “content.” They’re part of triathlon’s memory.

In the early days, when the sport still felt like a secret shared among the stubborn and the curious, Competitor was one of the few places that treated triathlon like it had meaning beyond results. You helped give it a home on paper and in people’s hearts. You helped give us language for what we were doing out there when no one else understood it.

And when you did it through images, you did it with artistry.

You understood something essential: that endurance isn’t only performance, it’s beauty. Not polished beauty. Real beauty. The kind that shows up when someone is right on the edge of what they can do… and stays there anyway.

That’s what your eye preserved.

Years from now, long after the current conversations fade, someone will open an old issue or scroll through an archive and land on one of those iconic images maybe for the first time. A new generation. A kid who wasn’t even born when the photo was taken. And they’ll stop. Not because they recognize the name on the bib, but because they recognize the feeling.

Because your images have that kind of power.

They will see the sport the way you saw it: as something heroic and human at once. Something gritty and graceful. Something worth giving yourself to.

And in that moment—each time, generation after generation, your work will do what great art always does. It will make people feel like they’ve been let in on something sacred.

For those of us racing in those early years, that mattered more than people know.

Because when you’re deep in the work, when you’re training before dawn, traveling with a body that’s always half-tired, trying to become someone you’ve never been, there’s a need for witnesses. Not spectators. Witnesses.

Competitor was that witness for so many of us, and you were part of the heartbeat behind it.

I don’t remember you as someone who pushed herself to the front. I remember you as someone who made room. Room for stories. Room for athletes. Room for a sport that was still figuring out what it was. You helped create a culture that said, “This is real. This matters. These people matter.”

That’s not a small thing. That’s legacy.

I wish I could tell you, really tell you how many times your work, your presence, the world you helped shape, gave athletes a sense of belonging. A sense that they weren’t crazy for chasing this hard, beautiful thing. That they weren’t alone.

And I wish I could say goodbye in the way we all wish we could, unhurried, face to face, with enough time to let gratitude finish its sentences.

So I’ll say it here, as simply as I can.

Thank you, Lois.

Thank you for believing early.

Thank you for making triathlon bigger without making it less human.

Thank you for helping tell our stories with dignity.

Thank you for giving the sport images that will outlive all of us, frames of courage and grace that will keep introducing triathlon to new hearts, again and again.

The sport will keep moving and there will be more races, new champions, new headlines, but there will be a quieter absence now. The kind you feel when someone who helped build the room is no longer in it.

I hope you’re at peace. I hope you know how loved you are. And I hope you know that what you did lasts, because people like you don’t just pass through a sport.

You become part of its spirit.

Goodbye, Lois.

And from all of us who were lucky enough to race in the world you helped create—thank you for all these years.

Love,

Grip

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