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To complete an Ironman triathlon, you must swim 2.4 miles, cycle 112 miles, and then run 26.2 miles — all in under 17 hours.

To earn your Master of Business Administration online from the �ǿ����޴�ý, you must complete 33 graduate hours, including classes in management, economics, marketing, accounting, international business, and quantitative methods. Thankfully, you have more than 17 hours to do it.

In the autumn of 2021, Jake Benoit decided he want to do both. And so in 2022, he did both.

A Kid’s Dream, a Man’s Motivation

Benoit had known since he was a teen that he wanted to attend graduate school and earn his MBA to pursue leadership roles and better understand teamwork dynamics, he says.

And after his uncle introduced him to the idea of triathlons, he knew that he wanted to do that, too.

“He was showing us videos of like people who were having to crawl across the finish line, and in my kid brain, I was like, ‘That’s so dumb. Why would people do that?’ and then, ‘I’m gonna do one.’” 

After earning his bachelor’s degree from �ǿ����޴�ý Lafayette, Benoit knew the MBA degree program online through his alma mater would provide the academic challenge he wanted with the flexibility to maintain a grueling training schedule while working full-time. 

“The flexibility of the online classes was especially beneficial when looking at my plan for each week,” he says.

The tradeoff was Benoit had to become more organized and proactive to meet the demands of online graduate coursework.

“What worked for me was I bought a planner …” he says. “I found I prioritized work, grad school, then my training, in that order, since work and grad school had more set times and training was more flexible.”

Using his planner, Benoit was able to break his days and weeks into small blocks of time to make the absolute most out of the flexibility of online classes, says Benoit.

“I could look ahead and see ‘I need an extra hour today since I won’t have much time tomorrow,’” he says.

“If I saw I had a two-hour bike ride on Wednesday, but only had a one-hour run or a 30-minute swim the days before, I would put the extra time into my MBA work on Monday and Tuesday so I could complete the assignment and submit it on Thursday or Friday.”

The autonomy of online classes also prompted Benoit to become more aware of when he was pushing his limits and to develop ways to take care of himself to ward off burnout.