COLLINSVILLE, Ill. – It takes a tough person to be on a SWAT team. It takes a tough person to win an Ironman competition.

Lt. Bob Wingo did both.

Wingo is on the Secretary of State Police SWAT team, attached to the agency’s Belleville station, and on the Capitol response team. The 39-year-old Collinsville man won a national SWAT Ironman competition held June 2 in northwestern Illinois.

For Wingo, fitness is more than part of his job.

“It started out as a work thing, but it’s totally personal now,” Wingo said. “Every police officer needs to maintain a high level of fitness … and you have to set an example, being a supervisor.”

The competition includes a one-and-a-half-mile uphill course carrying a shotgun and sidearm. Wingo had to run to a shotgun yard for timed target shooting, run to a pistol yard, then to another shotgun yard, and then to a wooded obstacle course including beams, ropes and tunnels.

“Anything you don’t complete or shots missed are penalties,” Wingo said. “It’s stressful shooting.”

Wingo was the only competitor to break 13 minutes, and took first place. This is the second year of the event, and last year he was beaten by the man who came in second this year.

In his daytime hours, Wingo supervises 20 investigators charged with enforcing motor vehicle law, from fake drivers licenses to alcohol offenses to car dealership fraud. His district encompasses 42 counties south of Effingham.

Wingo is originally from Flora and a graduate of Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, but he has lived in Collinsville for the past seven years.

As a SWAT member, it’s also Wingo’s job to respond to any threat to the Capitol in Springfield, though his response time is a bit farther from his Collinsville home than those stationed closer to the Capitol.

On the weekends, though, Wingo and wife Angela participate in triathlons and other such events. Every weekend they are out on swim-bike-run competitions of varying levels. Angela brings home quite a few trophies herself, Wingo said, and their two young children are beginning to compete as well.

“It’s a family thing,” he said. “(The kids) love to see the trophies.”

But the SWAT Ironman competition is something special for Wingo, to place first among 150 SWAT team men (and one woman) at age 39.

The SWAT teams often compete in various events, such as mock drug raids, hostage rescue, sniper and challenge courses. Last year, Wingo’s team beat everyone at a competition at The Site, a firearms training center in northwestern Illinois _ including teams from Chicago and the local federal team.

“The fed team was kind of shocked we beat them,” Wingo said. “Actually, we were kind of shocked, too.”

Wingo and his team members don’t have a local obstacle course on which to train. They go to the Marion penitentiary for obstacle courses, and to Springfield for shooting.

Although they are competitions, Wingo said it’s mostly a lot of fun.

“When we go (to The Site), we have a blast,” he said. “There’s nowhere to stay (except the lodge), you’re out in the middle of nothing. It’s great camaraderie.”

-From the Associated Press