Before the starting gun: congratulations, Erica
Some athletes win by outlasting the field. Others win before the field has finished lining up. Erica Urquiola has now done both.
Erica applied to the Sodexo Dietetic Internship, and in less than 48 hours the program offered her a place. The application window was still open. Other candidates were still preparing their applications. The program did not wait to see them, because it had already found the person it was looking for.
Congratulations, Erica.
The race she trained for
Long before Erica studied nutrition, she lived it. She took up triathlon in Miami in 2009, with swimming and cycling skills she once called “the equivalent of a newborn’s walking skills.” Within a few races she had moved up to the local elite.
On October 30, 2010, she was the first amateur woman across the line at Ironman Miami 70.3. That is 1.2 miles of open water, 56 miles on the bike and 13.1 miles on foot. In June 2012 she stood on the start line at South Beach as a professional.
Every endurance athlete learns that the body runs on what you give it. Erica kept a strict diet and planned her race fuel down to the last gel. She also learned something deeper, and wrote it down: “Pain must become irrelevant and determination must become the driving force.”
A new kind of endurance
When Erica stepped away from racing, she kept the discipline. She turned it toward a new goal: helping other people eat well and live strong. She enrolled at Kansas State University to earn the master’s degree that now stands between every aspiring dietitian and the national exam.
Her professors noticed. They have praised her dedication and her work ethic, and those qualities ran through every project and every assignment she turned in. The woman who once trained 35 hours a week brought that same steadiness to research papers and case studies.
On December 12, 2026, she will cross a different kind of finish line and receive her master’s degree from Kansas State University.
An offer that did not wait
Most internships run like a race with a fixed start. The application window opens, the deadline passes, and only then does the program line up every candidate side by side. Applicants wait weeks for an answer.
Erica’s answer came before the starting gun. A program does not say yes that early unless it is certain, and this is not a program that hands out certainty lightly. The Sodexo Dietetic Internship is accredited by ACEND and run by the world’s largest private employer of registered dietitians. Its interns complete 1,024 hours of supervised practice in clinical care, foodservice management, community nutrition and a specialty of their choosing, in 12 regions across the country.
For a program like that to choose her before it had considered anyone else is rare. It is the kind of confidence that cannot be asked for. It can only be earned, and Erica earned it.
The next leg
A triathlon is three races joined by transitions. Erica’s new career has its own three legs: the degree, the internship, and the national exam that will make her a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist. She is nearly through the first, and she has already claimed her place in the second.
In 2011, as a young athlete with big plans, she wrote that she hoped her story would “inspire others to get out there and follow their dreams regardless of how far fetched they may seem.” Fifteen years later, she is still doing exactly that.
Congratulations, Erica. The next leg is yours.