Hooked on triathlons.

Puffing a pack a day, Yova Borovska often smoked cigarettes outside her dorm at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg that housed the student athletes.

While she inhaled and exhaled smoke, she'd watch her athletic dorm mates train and run, and listened as they needled her to quit her nasty, stinky habit.

"It was peer pressure in a good way," recalls 28-year-old Borovska, who grew up in Bulgaria and is an immigration and nationality lawyer at Fowler, White, Boggs in Tampa, and a member of The Florida Bar Young Lawyers Division.

One day, she decided to stop smoking cold turkey and swears she hasn't craved a cigarette since. Now, she fills her lungs with fresh air, as she trains six or seven hours a week to compete in triathlons.

Stopping smoking, she said, "completely changed my life." The time she spent standing outside buildings for a smoke, she said, was put to better use getting involved with student organizations and working out that gave her the discipline to set goals.

Her first triathlon was in 2010, during her third year at Stetson University College of Law. She was already a serious long-distance runner by this time. When she injured her foot, she had to stop running, but wanted to work out in a different way, so she bought a bicycle. A friend signed up for a mini triathlon, and she took the dare to give it a try.

There was a problem: Her swimming skills were limited to the doggie paddle. So she watched a lot of swimming videos on YouTube, and taught herself the proper strokes doing laps in the Stetson pool.

She has competed in the "Half-Ironman"--1.2 miles of swimming, 56 miles of cycling, and running for 13.1 miles.

But she prefers the sprint distance that typically involves a half mile of swimming, about 13 miles of bicycling, and a 5-kilometer (3.1 miles) run.

She's competed in more than two dozen triathlons, winning most in her age bracket. Her best average time on the sprint distance, she said, is 1:45 minutes on the swim per 100 yards; 23 miles per hour on the bike, and a...