SMYERS TAKES BATTLES TO L.A. TRIATHLON.

Byline: KAREN CROUSE

Karen Smyers always figured she'd catch up to cyclist Lance Armstrong in Sydney's Olympic Village. She'd trade cancer stories with him and talk about treatments and training.

Smyers suspected she and Armstrong, who has won back-to-back Tour de France titles since beating brain cancer, were kindred spirits. He would understand why exercise was an essential part of her fight against thyroid cancer; he wouldn't try to dissuade her from continuing her triathlon career as a few of her doctors had in so many words.

And heaven knows Smyers would have been the perfect person to talk Armstrong through his recovery from injuries he suffered last month when he was hit head-on by a car while training in France; in 1998 she was struck by an 18-wheeler while riding her bike near her home in Massachusetts.

Smyers, 38, never considered that her Sydney plans would fall through and she would get only as far as L.A. A six-time national pro champion and the 1999 U.S. Triathlete of the Year, she looked to be as much of a lock for the Olympics as Michael Johnson in the 200 meters or Dan O'Brien in the decathlon.

So when she failed to make the U.S. team, it was like getting hit by an 18-wheeler all over again.

Smyers has recovered from the emotional trauma and the physical ordeal of a subsequent five-hour operation related to her cancer. Sydney's loss turned into L.A.'s gain when Smyers chose the city's inaugural pro triathlon, to be held today, as the first competition of the rest of her life.

A ``litmus test,'' is how Smyers, no stranger to pop exams, is looking at it.

``Sure I'm disappointed this season isn't going the way I had hoped,'' she said. ``But at least I know I did everything I possibly could given my circumstances to get to the starting line. I have no regrets. I would have regretted not trying.''

``Everything,'' she added, ``is a matter of perspective.''

If positive thinking, pluck and perseverance were the events in the triathlon, Smyers would be the prohibitive gold-medal favorite. In the past three years she has overcome a severed hamstring, childbirth (daughter Jenna was born in May of 1998), the collision with the semi-trailer truck, a broken collarbone and the cancer diagnosis.

Smyers underwent a six-hour surgery last December in which her thyroid and cancerous lymph nodes were removed. She had to have another surgery in July after doctors discovered more enlarged lymph nodes.

``Every time something happens, I go through a phase,'' Smyers said. ``First it's disbelief, second is questioning whether I did something wrong to cause it and third is accepting it and trying to find the positive side of things.''

Her sunny disposition disappeared briefly behind dark clouds in July when she found out the reason she was having a hard time breathing when she trained was a grape-sized lymph node was pushing against her windpipe.

Smyers couldn't shake the thought that her second surgery was her payback for choosing to delay the radioactive iodine treatment she would have had after the first surgery if she hadn't been so hellbent on becoming an Olympian.

She knows some people say she ought to be concentrating on getting better, not faster. What some people don't understand is that training and competing are potent drugs in her battle to get well.

``There's no question for me that having athletic goals is therapeutic,'' Smyers said. ``As soon as I didn't make the Olympic team, I needed another goal to get me through this latest rehab. Competing gives me the motivation to get better. It helps me to stop dwelling on my woes.''

Though she won't get to meet Armstrong in Sydney, after all, Smyers feels as though she knows him. She recently finished Armstrong's best- selling autobiography. In many ways it was like reading her own story. Smyers cried a little, but then, she's a sucker for happy endings.