Amanda Felder wanted to read this story before it was published. She was quite serious about it. After all, the 26-year-old from U.C. San Diego already got burned by the press recently and is leery of it happening again. During an interview after her biggest triathlon, she told the reporter “there were three of us working together on the swim.” But when the story was published, that got turned into “there were three of us working together on the bike.”

Oops. Working with other bikers – i.e. drafting – is illegal in triathlon. That inaccurate quote made her look really bad.

As a participant, a fan, and a journalist, I felt her pain. But as a realist, all I could think was, “Stuff happens. Welcome to stardom, baby.”

With her win at the USA Triathlon National Collegiate Championships in Tuscaloosa, Alabama on April 19, Felder is definitely a star. She won that misreported Olympic-distance race (1.5K swim, 40K bike, 10K run) by a full minute in 2:07:30, capping a comeback from an injury-plagued 2007 season and proving that her collegiate national title in 2005 was no fluke.

The two-time champ hopes her last domestic collegiate race will help set the tone for her professional triathlon future. In the short term, that includes the World University Games at the end of June and a quartet of ITU Continental Cup races, which are a step below world cup level.

One thing’s for sure: as she flies to races this summer, she’ll be studying on the plane. Felder is a student in Bioengineering at UCSD, researching the proteins involved in exercise-induced injuries that come from activities with eccentric contractions and muscle lengthening, such as running downhill and some weight-lifting. “Surprisingly little is known about this – what protein has what role,” she says. “There’s no solution. We know they make you sore, then ultimately make you stronger.” She stacks an average training week of 17 to 20 hours on top of her regular 35 to 40 academic hours. She’ll get her Ph.D. in the summer of 2009, and she hopes to teach at a university someday.

Before that, however, another career beckons. “I’ll probably go full-time pro,” she says.

Felder’s road to triathlon began at age 6 in the pool in her hometown of Houston. She competed in the 50-meter freestyle and the 200-meter backstroke in high school, just missed junior nationals, and then switched to cross country and track as a mechanical engineering major at Rice University.

“I didn’t like the swim coach, and my dad encouraged me to run. He broke three hours at the Boston Marathon in his 40s,” she says. After two years of shin splints and stress fractures, it all clicked in her junior and senior years. She ran the 1500 in 4:48 – good, but admittedly not spectacular in NCAA division one, where the top women do 4:30 and 4:20.

Heading off to UCSD for her Ph.D. in 2003, Felder’s first two classes were Anatomy and Cycling 101. Aboard the steel KHS road bike she was given for her 12th birthday, she hammered San Diego’s hills and did interval training on Fiesta Island. She also kept running, using her remaining year of athletic eligibility on the cross-country team, which went to the nationals. “I was definitely a factor at races,” she says, noting modestly that the drop to a division two school helped out.

In the summer of ‘04, despite having swum just once or twice a month in college, Felder scored immediately in the San Diego international sprint triathlon.

“On my KHS, with no aerobars, I finished first woman!” she says. “Because I was not strong on the bike and was dying on the run, it crossed my mind that I could be successful in this sport.”

Felder improved throughout three Olympic-distance races that year as she learned how to pedal, eat and drink. A dehydration-wracked top 20 at Camp Pendleton led to a top-five finish in the collegiate division at the Folsom International, and second woman overall on a hilly Carpenteria course.

Excited about her prospects for 2005, Felder trained rigorously over the winter under UCSD triathlon coach Sergio Borges. The payoff was huge: barely 10 months after her first adult triathlon, with no sponsor and just five races under her belt, she won the collegiate nationals in 2:11:23.

Two weeks later, she won the Olympic-distance race at Wildflower, crossing the line in 2:18 before a huge crowd. She was stunned. So was Triathlete magazine, which named her 2005 collegiate triathlete of the year.

So Felder did what any media sensation would do. She turned pro.

“Turning pro so quick was not the smartest thing with such limited racing experience,” Felder says. “By the end of the year I was really frustrated and burned out.” Although she went under 2:10 at the nationals and did two hours at the draft-legal New York City ITU race, her running was getting worse.

In 2006, her plan for a title defense at the collegiate nationals was derailed in February by a stress fracture. After five weeks of aqua jogging and 10 days of real running, she took fourth – more impressive because a cancelled swim turned the race into a 3K run/40K bike/10K run duathlon.

“Most people actually thought that I was in good shape,” she says, amused. A sub-five-hour half-Ironman at Buffalo Springs qualified her for the Clearwater 70.3, where she took 20th in 4:39, despite a poor run.

2007 was a year of highs and lows. The highs: a new carbon-fiber bike from Planet X, several early-season sprint wins, a third place in the Olympic-distance nationals with a 2:08, and fifth in Memphis in May. The lows: cramps at every Olympic-distance race that summer, leaving her mystified. What was causing it? Diet? Training? It would probably have taken a Ph.D. to figure it out, but she didn’t have one yet.

In 2008, the cramps left and the sponsors arrived. (Genius carbon bike, Powerbar, Wetsuitrentals.com, and Avia, which takes care of her travel and shoes) – and Felder says she’s finally thinking like a pro. “I’ve learned patience,” she says. “You need a high-quality base. You can’t accelerate your training. In races, you've got save some of it for the run… and sometimes ignore the people who go out too hard on the bike.”

As she gets more ink, Felder’s also probably going to learn to ignore those embarrassing mistakes made by writers – including any she may find in this story. (But I did fact-check it pretty thoroughly. I swear.)

Roy M. Wallack is the co-author of Bike for Life: How to Ride to 100.