Long before I even started exercising, I caught, randomly, a Canadian TV special dedicated to the Escape From Alcatraz Triathlon race. It seemed insane — people swim over 2km from the Alcatraz Island to the San Fransisco shore, then bike on San Fransisco hills, and then also run 8 miles, also on these crazy hills! Insane! What kind of a crazy person would want to do this, I thought.
Fast forward 5 years, and — last week, I did it. Forced myself to jump off the San Fransisco Belle into the very cold water with the coast barely even visible, battled currents for far too long and then biked the hills and ran the beautiful but treacherous 8 miles on all sorts of terrain including the soft pacific sand. Fantastic experience.
Finishing up the race with the biggest smile on my face:
Biking along the beautiful coastline. The views there are stunning.
Past race. OMG, that Alcatraz Island is far!
About Maria Gorlatova
Dr. Maria Gorlatova is the Sternberg Family Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. Her research centers on pervasive computing technologies, with a focus on spatial computing and next-generation augmented reality. She received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University and her M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees (Summa Cum Laude) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Ottawa, Canada. She spent two years at Princeton University’s Electrical Engineering Department as an Associate Research Scholar and Associate Director of the Princeton University EDGE Lab. Dr. Gorlatova was named one of the N2Women Rising Stars and has received multiple awards, including the NSF CAREER Award, the DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA), the DARPA Director’s Fellowship, the IEEE ISMAR 2025 Best Paper Award, the IEEE Communications Society Award for Advances in Communications, and research awards from Meta, Cisco, and IBM. She served as the TPC Co-chair of ACM/IEEE IPSN 2023, the General Co-Chair of the 2025 NSF Workshop on Networking and Systems Challenges in Immersive Computing, and the TPC Co-chair of ACM/IEEE SenSys 2025.
