He swam and ran cross country at Grand Island High School and ran track and cross country at Fredonia State but when Kevin Buzzelli graduated from college he looked for a different kind of challenge. So he started doing triathlons two years ago.

Now, the 23-year-old is preparing for his first Ironman at Lake Placid on Sunday.

“The main thing for me was watching it on TV when I was a kid,” Buzzelli said about NBC’s annual coverage of the Ironman World Championships in Kona, Hawaii. “It was so motivating, the stories they told on the broadcast, that it definitely spurred me. I wanted a big challenge and that’s why I started doing triathlons.”

Buzzelli was familiar with all three triathlon disciplines when he took it up. He had already been involved in competitive swimming and running and would use his bike as cross training in the summer.

His first foray into triathlons came at the Summer Sizzler on Grand Island in 2007. In the short sprint distance race, Buzzelli finished seventh overall.

Last year, he and several friends decided to take the plunge into a half-Iron distance race, participating in the Musselman Triathlon in Geneva. That race —half the distance of an Ironman with a 1.2-mile swim, 56-mile bike ride and 13.1-mile run—also went well for Buzzelli. He finished the race in five hours, 10 minutes and 27 seconds.

“The next weekend we went up to Lake Placid [to watch],” Buzzelli said. “Since I did pretty well at Musselman I decided to go for the full Ironman. And the day after the race I signed up.” [First-timers must sign up in Lake Placid the day after the race to be guaranteed a spot.]

Buzzelli chose to work out without a coach. His only structured training comes on Thursdays in run-bike workouts with the Buffalo Triathlon Club.

“I train myself and just do what I feel like doing that day,” he said. “I get bored with structure.

“I took most of the fall and winter easy. In the winter I started swimming and ran the trails of Chestnut Ridge Park. I’d work out on the bike trainer. I didn’t use that too much, just a few times here and there. I would put in Ironman DVDs to watch while I was on the bike. Once the spring came around I was running and biking more and swimming open water swims once a week.”

Buzzelli is used to competing but has found challenges in switching to triathlon.

“Everything I did before was team-oriented,” Buzzelli said. “This is the first real individual competition. It wasn’t too different from going out on a cross country race when you end up by yourself but triathlon takes a lot more planning and preparing, getting everything ready for race day and all the transitions.”

The hardest things for Buzzelli were “Swimming in a straight line in open water and sitting the same position on the bike for 100 miles.”

Meanwhile, his goals for his first Ironman are rather lofty.

“Well, first, I don’t expect to get too much sleep the night before,” he said. “I’m hoping for three goals. First is just to finish. The second is to finish in about 10 1/2 hour 1/3 . Third would be to qualify for Kona [the world championships]. That would take under 10 hours and I don’t think it will happen, but you never know.”