They call themselves average Joes.

An emergency room doctor.

A sales manager for a construction company.

A chief credit officer for a bank.

An insurance agent.

Separately, David Turner, Russ Lott, Fred Tolly and Brooks Keys quietly go about their business in the Electric City, blending in with the rest of the community in the workaday world.

Average Joes? Some of the time.

But the mental and physical sacrifices they’ve made leading up to next week’s trip to New York makes them anything but average.

On Tuesday the foursome will head to the Adirondacks to participate in the Ironman Lake Placid Triathlon, which begins July 20th. The event features a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride and 26.2 mile marathon.

“I remember watching it when I was a kid, and I grew up riding a bike,” said Keys, a 28-year-old insurance agent. “For me it was just a natural progression. I ran a few marathons and worked my way into it.”

The upcoming event will be the fifth Ironman competition for Keys and his three fellow athletes — all in their 40s and all triathlon veterans — agree he has the chance to make the most noise.

“For the rest of us the accomplishment is getting through it,” said Tolly, the banker. “But Brooks really has a chance to do well. He is someone who could really be a factor.”

By definition a triathlon is an endurance event consisting of swimming, cycling and running over various distances. While grueling, the athletes say a successful triathlete doesn’t have to excel at all three disciplines.

“Basically it all comes down to being decent in all three events — you don’t have to be great at any of them,” said Lott, a former baseball pitcher for The Citadel who is in the construction business. “One of us might be better at swimming than biking, or better at running than swimming. You can be great at one but then if you can’t keep up in the others, you can’t be successful in a triathlon.”

Trained triathletes race each stage in a way that preserves their energy and endurance for the other stages. In most modern triathlons the events are placed back-to-back in immediate sequence and a competitor’s official time includes the time required to “transition” between the individual legs of the race, including the time needed to change clothes and gear.

“It requires a little craziness,” said Turner, an ER doctor. “I did it a long time ago in my 20s and then five or six years ago I started thinking about doing it again just to see if I could.”

Certainly top conditioning is required to compete, but the mind has to be strong as well. Some athletes who don’t finish a triathlon might still have gas in the tank physically, but the mental strain becomes too much to deal with.

“We’ll get on the bike for eight hours one day and the next we’ll go over to the track at McCants Middle School and run 20 miles,” Lott said. “We do it there to make it miserable because you run around in circles over and over and the scenery never changes. It helps shape you mentally and you do it because there’ll be times in a triathlon when you don’t think you can go anymore.

“But you know what? Your body can do all kinds of things you don’t think it can do.”

The training, in fact, is more intense than the event itself.

“You almost think the triathlon is the easy part after you do all this,” Tolly said. “But it’s addictive. You go through all this and realize it’s tough, but you can get through it.”

The payoff, of course, is making it through all three cycles.

The Lake Placid Triathlon will have a water start and feature a two-loop swim in Mirror Lake, with water temperatures expected to be in the low 70s.

The bike course is next and has a nine-kilometer downhill stretch mixed in with rolling hills and a few small climbs.

The last leg is the run, which requires passing through the downtown area four times with a few rolling hills interrupting an otherwise smooth path.

“I remember the first one I competed in,” Keys said. “When I crossed the finish line I looked up in the stands and my father was up there crying, and that’s something I’ll never forget. You have this unbelievable feeling of accomplishment, but to know you have people cheering you on makes it even better.”

The fan support isn’t just confined to family members.

“There’ll be people cheering you on who don’t even know you,” Lott said. “But that motivates you even more. The bottom line is when you do one of these, you know you’ve done something very few people have done.”

But the sport is growing.

The field for Lake Placid filled up in record time, with 2,500 triathletes securing a spot.

Some are novices while others are world-class triathletes, but they all share the same stage.

“I think a lot of us just sort of stumble into it,” Tolly said. “I used to play a lot of basketball but then I broke my ankle and that’s what led me to biking then swimming then running then moving onto a triathlon. And to be out there with all the big names in the sport is a great feeling.”

Lott said making it through one isn’t enough.

“That’s what you think when you first get into it,” he said. “You run a half-triathlon and then you think you can run a full one and that’ll be it. Then you run a full one and you think, ‘I can do this again. I have to do it again.’ It’s like eating an elephant. You do it a little at a time and before you know it you want to do it all. And anyone in decent health can do this if they just set their mind to it and train hard.”

The four hope their involvement will grow the sport in Anderson, introducing more young people to it.

Lott, who is also a recreation league coach, was at the Anderson YMCA when some youngsters noticed he was wearing a tee shirt from the Coer dAlene, Idaho, triathlon.

“They asked me if I was in it and when I told them I was they were in awe,” Lott said. “And that was a really neat feeling for me. It’s a sport a lot of people might not be familiar with but these kids were and that makes me think there might be a lot of kids who will be interested in it in the future.

“That’s why I hope by us going to Lake Placid we can show them there’s another sport out there that they can compete in.”

Currently an event known as Kids of Steel serves as a starting point for young triathletes, with the swimming segment anywhere from 100 to 750 meters; biking five to 15 kilometers; and a run ranging from one to five kilometers.

Other shorter triathlon events include sprints, super sprints, long distance and half triathlons.

In fact the Palmetto State boasts the South Carolina Triathlon Series, which is a 14-event series that offers a variety of course types, distances and difficulty levels.

As for the upcoming challenge in New York, Turner, Lott, Tolly and Keys simply want to do their city — and themselves — proud.

“In training you spend a lot of time beating the crap out of each other,” Keys said. “But now we’re all in this together.”