Reflections - A Race Report

Just to change things up, I will start this story at the end and work backwards towards the beginning. Lets call this journey the Omega to Alpha. It will be like re-writing the Bible, but the big climax will be Eve trying yet again to subvert the original paterfamilias with an apple. I am not taking sides here, I am just explaining the reverse time line thing.

I like that opening paragraph a lot so I left it in, but its a stupid idea and impossible to pull off in a blog, so we are back to a chronological description of the event. Sorry if I got your hopes up. And don't think I am throwing Eve under the bus here, either. I like Eve. She is my second favorite character in Genesis.

Intro - I wrote these words over a period of days.  I started off reclined on a chaise lounge, under the warm afternoon sun of the Southland situated on the lanai of a beautiful rented house in Mesa, Arizona. I have water bottle at the ready position, and am listening to the low murmur of a waterfall in the swimming pool. There is really little in this life better than quiet contemplation in comfortable surroundings after facing some challenge or difficulty. Reflection eliminates all pain, eases all anguish, soothes all suffering. I am not trying to forget the bad things from yesterday's Ironman, but they start to fade into the fog of the past much quicker than the good things. Most of the good things stay with me for years to come. At least, that is my hope. Onward.

Preparation - My rapidly aging group of training partners, Jim, Duane and John have suffered the usual bumps and bruises that come with training for this event. It just happens. We were all feeling some sort of pain and are in varying degrees of readiness. John and Jim are having leg issues that make walking across the room a challenge.

There are several ways to get into this race. Volunteer, online registration, pay for a 'Foundation' entry slot (read: pay through the nose) or raise money for the Smile Foundation (read:pay more). Commit any of those errors and you find yourself in possession of a ticket to ride the express train to Ironman. Everything seemed like a good idea a year ago. I think you could have talked me into donating a kidney to get into this event a year ago.

When you sign up for Ironman, you might think that just because you have seven hundred bucks burning a hole in your pocket, it is a decision that you can make in your own little bubble and come what may, it only impacts you. You might think that, but it isn't true. You need to know this: if you decide to participate, you are stealing. The time that you take from others is bigger than I can describe. When you sign up for Ironman, you are essentially stealing time from your spouse, your family, your employer and who knows who else to help you along the way. Your wife isn't going to see you in the morning for at least six months. You will be swimming at the pool at 5AM, then going straight to work. Your kids aren't going to see you at soccer practice. You are going to be running or riding or in a yoga class or taking your bike in to the bike shop. Your employer still expects a full day's work, and you might think that it will just work out. But remember, you need to leave work early every Thursday because that is your second ride day of the week and you need to be done riding before dark. So just know you will be explaining to co-workers that the report due on Friday will be written Thursday night after the wife and kids are in bed.

Just because your training calendar calls for twelve hours one week, it doesn't mean you only need to dedicate twelve hours to it. You are fixing your bike, driving to the swim store to get a new pair of goggles, packing your workout bag with clean workout gear. Hey, speaking of clean workout clothes, a question just occurred to me. I am not sure who washes my stinky bike shorts and spin shirts. That's weird. I am pretty sure I don't. Maybe I sleepwalk the laundry.

Emotional display – The ideal attitude is one of quiet confidence. You don't need to scream or yell or brag about your three marathons you ran in three days or whatever it is you did elsewhere. Just try to focus on yourself and those things you can control. Everybody knows you are an Ironman because you wear the Ironman logo on every piece of clothing you own, you don't need to verbally assault them with your most recent PR or who you can beat in a 5k.  That is what a blog is for.

What you don't want to do is blow up. Don't launch yourself into oncoming traffic, don't throw a tantrum when you get the wrong flavored gel at the water stop, don't break down into an emotional puddle of self pity.  Calm.  No drama.  Focus.  That's what you shoot for.

In my first Ironman, I cried three times before the starting gun. I was a walking dictionary of all the known emotions, and I think, with good reason. Its a long, hard road. Fear, unfocused emotion, adrenaline, jock itch. Fear. Did I mention I was scared to death? I was a mess.

This time around, I only cried twice before the starting gun and once the day after, so I think that is good. It's progress. I still cried three times for each Ironman, but in the second one, I spread the load out over a longer period. Ya, that's way better. I should be on the poster for Ironman. It could show a picture of me crying at the starting gun. The caption would be “He doesn’t belong!!”

The Swim – A couple days before the event, we met a guy and his girlfriend who live in the Phoenix area. They seemed knowledgeable and suggested we skip the practice swim. He said that you can get some pretty bad germs in Tempe Town lake. The locals know that the lake is off limits to swimmers 363 days of the year for a reason. If you swim there, you will pick up something nasty, your stomach will hate you and put together an organized labor work stoppage. We thought that he sounded like he knew what he was talking about, so we ignored the advice and swam a practice loop in Tempe Town lake on Saturday. Perfect. I only swallowed a half cup of germy water. That's not so bad, I was fine. There is nothing wrong with that water. Swim in it? Sure. Feed it to schoolkids? You bet. I looked up Tempe Town Lake on wikipedia. It seriously won 11 awards at the state, federal and international level.  Don't ask me how a lake wins an award, but it's true.  It must be safe, right? Right?

The event started with a cannon shot. Boom. The male pro triathletes are off, which means I have twenty minutes before I start. I am in my wetsuit, ready to wander down to the water. I am fairly relaxed, crying very little, just a sniffle or two, with the odd sob and body convulsion thrown in for good measure.

Boom, the female pro triathletes are off, which means I have ten minutes to go. I jump in the water, inhale a quart of that wonderful liquid, cry some more and slowly swim the two hundred yards to the staring line, coughing out water the whole way, which might sound weird if you don't do a lot of open water swimming, but it's kind of a normal thing to cough out water while your face is underwater. I coughed out 90% of the water that was stuck in my left lung. The other 10% I relocated to my right lung.

I line up ten yards back from the front line of swimmers and I am thinking this is perfect, I have lots of room around me, nobody is pushing me underwater, I have my emotions under control, the clock counts down and Boom, we are off. Within two seconds, I have three swimmers swim over the top of me. I think they were professional weight lifters. Their stroke count is as high as humanly possible. I think they will burn out in five or six minutes at that rate. Another group of twenty swimmers in a school formation hit me on the head and shoulders from both sides as they fly by. One of them must be a boxer because he is trying use me as a punching bag. I took a left hook to the chin. For five hundred yards, the battle continues. It's all part of the fun. Ten minutes later, I am feeling confident and settle in to my long distance stroke. Bam, somebody's heel hits me in the right eye hard. My goggle is compressed down on my eye and seems to have suctioned down hard enough that I cant blink. I fix that and swim. Other than that, it was an uneventful swim until five yards from the end. The stairs that you climb out of the lake are stacked with people trying to get out. Somebody panicked and pushed me under. I think he pushed me two or three feet underwater. It happens. I waited him out, then got out of the water. Good swim. I swallowed about a pint of germy water. I am sure that will work out for me.

The Bike – I hit the road with a plan. Its a three loop thing, so my first loop goal was 70% heart rate, second loop 75%, third loop ...well, I didn't have a plan for the third loop. Ten minutes into the bike, I get water at the water stop and am trying to jamb it into my bottle carrier, I hear a nasty scraping noise, oh, that's me, my nice new wheels are riding on the curb and I am about to fall. I don't fall but should have. Note to self: Look where you are going.

I see two spots where people threw up. It happens. I am sure that is the last I will see that.

I go another ten miles, I have seen twenty spots where people pulled their bike to the side, threw up and continued on. I am sure it wont happen to me because I don't get sick...hmm, now that I think of it, I feel like I have a bag of kittens in my stomach sloshing around chasing a mouse.

I get five miles in and pull over to a portapotty. I gotta do something, I feel terrible. I spit up a chunk of something. I think it was part of breakfast. I am not sure who's breakfast because I don't remember eating anything that tasted that bad or was shaped like a AA battery. I spit it out, the wind catches it and the guy on the bike behind me can now share my pain.  How much crap was in that lake?

The amount of barf on the side of this bike course is staggering. The Pepto-Bismol people should get a concession here, they would clean up. Tempe Town lake is now officially renamed Lake Barf-o-rama.

I feel OK, but ten miles into the second loop, my vision is blurry. I don't know why. I cant see clearly beyond fifty yards. Not to worry, I can get through this bike course blindfolded: I am pretty sure I can do that. I spit up something else that tastes bad and try to yack it to the side of the road but it catches the wind and sticks to my shoe. I need food so I eat a big wadded ball of stuff that just yesterday was a PBandJ.  It got squished in my bike shirt and its just a ball now.  It tastes pretty good so I don't have a problem keeping it down.

The third loop I feel normalish. I start to push harder and I am passing most of the people who passed me earlier. I still can't see very well, my vision is clear out to about thirty yards.

This course is mostly flat, but there is this little two mile long section that looks like a small mountain if you live in Kansas. In Washington, we call it a hill. I am pushing hard up this hill and flying by most riders. It's nothing to brag about, the stronger riders are ahead of me, so I am passing really weak riders. I shouldn't even be here, I think I should be ten miles ahead, so I push harder. I put my head down for a second, ride a bit, then look up. There is a guy who is going really slow, and he is right where I am going to be in about a thousandth of a second. I veer hard left to get around him. He is an unsteady rider and wanders left. We hit and we both go down.

There is a rule in bicycling. When there is a crash, it is always the fault of the guy in the back. It is the rule and it is always true. Until now. Who is this jackwagon to think he can put his bike where I need to be? And why did he crash us right in front of the cop? I think he was a cop, but I couldn't really see very well. I was laying in the street, looking up when I see a guy with a gun on his hip walk over to me and ask me if I was OK. I think it was a cop, but this is Arizona and I don't really know what the local customs are. Does everybody in Arizona have a gun on their hip?

I started to think of the horse that fell in the Kentucky Derby. This horse is running along, minding his own business and down he goes, broken leg. Everybody who saw the horse fall and had a gun raced onto the track to help the horse out. The trainer or the vet or maybe the lawncare guy got there first and did the humane thing. It was a great day in horse racing. It was the humanitarian thing to do. As far as we know, the horse was going to recover with a splint, but the lawnmower kid with the Beretta decided he needed to be put down on national television. He had a nine round magazine and emptied it from the prone position into a basically healthy horse.

This horse thing runs through my mind as I am laying in the freeway, bike on top of me, wheel slowly spinning, like a clock, counting down to zero. Am I the horse here? The cop or the lawncare guy or whatever he was has his hand on the butt of his gun, then I swear he says in his best Buford T. Justice voice “Boy, is your leg broke?”

I am back on the bike. I guess I received a stay of execution from the governor. Problem is, everything was fuzzy. I can see twenty five yards clearly, everything outside of that looks like second grade art class. I know that the swim was making everybody barf, but does it make you go blind too?

More barf on the road. Here is the bonus question, what actor in what movie said “I know it was you Fredo. You broke my heart. You broke my heart!” The slightly reconstructed version goes something like “I know it was you, Tempe Town Lake. You made me barf. You made me barf!”

The Run – The run is what you make of it. If you have the energy, you can start fast and go faster the entire run, or you can start slow and slow down as you go. It's up to you. Just be done by midnight. The nice thing about the run is you make so many friends. I must have met twenty new friends yesterday on the run. In the swim, you chat with the guy next to you before it starts for at best ten seconds. I high-fived a couple guys before the swim. Other than that, the swim is a solitary thing. On the bike, you might chat with four or five different folks for a few seconds, but other than that, its pretty lonely on the bike. The run is different. If you find somebody who runs at your pace, you can chat for an hour. I know, some of you are saying that you are working too hard or are concentrating too much on your athletic performance to chat, but seriously, you can run and chat at the same time. Or just run next to somebody. Anybody. At the end of the event, nobody gives a rip about time. You beat me by an hour? Good for you. I met a guy from Nebraska that was in his first Ironman and isn't going to do another one. I met a girl from San Diego that was in her first Ironman and planned on another one asap.  We all promised to write each every week for the rest of our lives.   Beat that! The run sucks and everybody knows it so I do what I can to forget about my feet.

And that's all I have to say about the run.

The Medical Tent - I finish, I don't see my training crew, which is odd. The medical guy grabs me, asks me what my name is, I can't answer, so he tells me to sit in a chair and drink some water. I mumble about getting an IV and point at my left elbow, he says “you don't need it, you are fine.” OK, you are the medical guy but I can't stand on my own and I cant tell you my name. You are the professional. OK, fine, I don't need an IV but an ambulance would be nice.

I hear my daughter screaming from the sidelines and I turn towards the noise. It's a primal reaction. If you kid screams, ten thousand years of evolution insists that you need to see what is going to eat them, so I turn and look and fall into the medical guy. He puts me back in a chair and says I will be fine. My daughter tells me how great I did. Really? I think I need to throw up.

 Since I only crashed my bike, they wont let me in the medical tent, but I do get sit outside for a for a quick scrubbing. See, when you fall off a bike onto the highway, you drive gravel into your skin and it wont come out unless somebody digs it out. They don't put that in the literature when they take your seven hundred bucks, do they? No, they do not.

After the sadistic nurse-wannabe tears my skin off my body with an iron brush designed for postmortem dissection, and since I can't talk, she gets bored and leaves for a more coherent victim to subjugate. I think maybe I can get an IV if I can just get into the medical tent, so I tell the nurse at the door of the medical tent that my training partner, John, is actually my brother and I need to be with him. Before he dies.

John is on a cot, covered in two blankets and is getting an IV and has a full time doctor holding his hand. He looks gray but seems coherent. I have blood running down from my knee into my shoe, my elbow has tendons poking through the skin and I can't say my own name and they gave me a chocolate milk. What kind of bullshit is that? Then somebody comes and changes out John's IV bag. I guess the first one didn't take. Thirty minutes later, they give him a third IV bag. I almost got blown away by Deputy Dog with the magnum and I get nothing. I got hosed.

Connections – In the end, I found a truth that I believe escapes most. That truth is that Ironman, and life itself, isn't about the event. Its not about a list of achievements that you list on a resume or a bank balance that has the right number of zeros and its not about your finishing time in Ironman. Ironman, and life, is about the journey. Its about the process. The process is the training, the preparation, the people you meet and the connections you make. The friends we make in life are the truest reflection of ourselves.

That is me in the middle there.

And just a few hours later, I seemed to have some sweat issues to work out.