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

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. 

Ariana’s journey toward healing her mind and body and finding purpose at SMU’s Cox School of Business began with a social media post. She saw that a triathlete had broken the world record to become the youngest person to complete an Ironman Triathlon—which consists of a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike and a 26.2-mile run—on six continents.

Intrigued, she went online to check out similar records and was struck by an idea. What if she became the fastest female to complete an Ironman on six continents within a calendar year? The current record is 84 cumulative hours—a daunting feat, but not impossible.

At the time, it seemed an outrageous question. She could barely walk down the block, had never completed an Ironman and didn’t yet see a clear path back to health. In fact, she had mostly stopped participating in triathlons during high school. She applied anyway.

Ariana’s mother, Allana, says her daughter has always been a self-starter with wisdom and drive beyond her years. She remembers her daughter finding a triathlon coach as an 11-year-old.

Allana found the coach’s email, and he told her he only coached adults. Allana told him that Ariana herself was pushing for the coaching, and the tween showed up with her legal pad full of questions about diet, training, race prep and recovery, impressing her future coach.

“This 11-year-old interviewed him, and to this day, he says she is phenomenal,” Allana says.

Through much research and hard work, Ariana and her doctors eventually made a plan to recover her health, which included a unique combination of drugs meant to address her condition, which she now believed was a tropical parasite she picked up traveling in Bali. However, without insurance coverage, the treatment would cost $30,000, which her family could not afford at the time.

As hard as it was to see her daughter suffer, Allana and the rest of the family tried to stay positive. Now, she looks back and sees the value in the hard times. “So many great things have come from this,” Allana says. “I always believe in my heart that you have to be open to making things happen.”

On December 6, 2023, Ariana received two answers that would change her life forever. Her health insurance company told her that the $30,000 worth of medicine would cost her just $10, and the Guinness Book of World Records told her that her application to pursue the Ironman record had officially been accepted.

When Ariana told her parents about her goal, they laughed—and they had their reasons. She couldn’t walk down the street, had never even done a half Ironman and hadn’t even begun her medication. Ariana was undeterred.

“As I was sitting there in my room, I knew these drugs were going to work and that I was going to chase the world record,” she says.

Ariana began her treatment in early 2024, and the impact was immediate. As she started training toward becoming a triathlete again, she made another life-changing decision by applying for and being accepted into the Online MBA (OMBA) degree program at the Cox School of Business.

The program was a perfect fit for Ariana, who had developed a passion for food science as a teen, after raising money to fight childhood obesity. She now shifted her goal and envisioned her future as an entrepreneur rather than as a scientist.

As a Dallas native, Ariana was familiar with the value of an MBA from SMU, and the flexibility of the online degree allowed her to balance her academics with her training and pursuit of the record.

“SMU outputs powerhouses. If you graduate from SMU with a business degree, you’re a doer and a leader in every capacity,” Ariana says. “When you walk into a room and see an SMU business graduate, you have a different level of trust in them and what they’re doing.”

Ariana, a powerhouse in her own right, has felt right at home with her cohort, organizing in-person meetups with her class before she left Dallas to train in California. The time spent connecting with her classmates has made it easier for her to integrate and feel at home, even from another state.

“It’s nice being able to text my classmates about how their day was rather than only about the homework,” she says.

Her interaction with the program has meant more than building a business plan and understanding earnings reports. She met with Elizabeth Strand, adjunct professor of management and organizations at SMU Cox, and discussed her pursuit of the Ironman record. Though it was early days, she received nothing but support from Strand.

“I had very little belief in myself at the time. We spoke, and she got to know me on a personal level. She expressed an entirely different side of belief in me,” Ariana says. “Having a complete stranger believe in me from the get-go was transformative in my journey to believing in myself.”

Remote success

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

“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.”