Jeff Kolka paddles canoes. The first thing to know is that these are not your typical heavy wooden boats with wide paddles that you might use for an afternoon cruise around a peaceful lake. Kolka's canoes are sleek, modern vessels--graphite is the main material--and he can keep up a pace of 50 to 80 paddle strokes a minute for 15 hours. Before you pull out a calculator, that's well over 50,000 paddle strokes.

Kolka, a 20-year veteran custodian for the Crawford/AuSable school district in Michigan, and his partner have dominated the sport of canoe racing in North America for years. For the third year in a row, the 44-year-old Kolka and Canadian Serge Corbin claimed the "Triple Crown of Canoe Racing." One leg of the crown, the Weyerhaeuser AuSable River Canoe Marathon, is considered North America's toughest non-stop race.

Kolka and Corbin have won the 120-mile race seven straight years, with each successive victory breaking their own mark for the oldest combined team to win. With a combined age of 88, the winners were more than twice as old as this year's second-place finishers.

Starting at night near Kolka's hometown of Grayling, Mich., the race not only covers 120 miles, but the teams have to carry their canoes around six dams and continue no matter what the weather conditions. "It's a unique sport," says Kolka. "The competition is fierce, and the camaraderie is greater."

The physical conditioning needed to complete the race is intense. Kolka estimates that he puts in between 200 and 300 hours of training time in the water to get ready for the summer racing season, in addition to all kinds of other exercises to get in shape. For him, that means working out after school and on his vacation time. "It's a sacrifice you make," says Kolka, a former president of the AFT-affiliated Crawford AuSable Custodians/Secretarial Local 4595. "Sometimes you want a real vacation. It would be nice to be able to go out and just go camping."

During the race itself, he says the mental strain is the biggest challenge. "To win, you have to stay focused for the full 15 hours."

Naturally, Kolka's success makes him something of a local celebrity in northern Michigan, however reluctant. "It was just kind of personal when I first started out," he says, noting that he got into the sport as a child after watching his father race. "Then it became bigger than that. I've become a kind of role model."

Kolka speaks regularly to students in the area and shows them his equipment, although he's a bit cautious about letting them handle his $200 paddles too much. "I try to show the kids that if you try hard enough at something, you can succeed," he says. "It's not going to be a piece of cake, but the rewards aren't that big if you don't have to work hard."

Each year, Kolka asks himself how much longer he wants to continue in the grueling sport. "The sport's been very good to me, but it takes a lot of time," he comments. "Getting to the top was hard; staying there is harder."