A Swiss (not to) Miss!

   Natascha Badmann is my hero.  Not because she has won six Hawaii Ironman titles.  Others have done that. 
   Not because she didn't even start winning the race until she was nearly 30.  Plenty of folks get into racing later in life and a few of them, Natashcha among them, have done quite well.
   Not because she had a tough adolescence, complete with motherhood while still a teenager herself, yet overcame these early long odds to find herself in sport.  Though not many, others have done that too. 
   Not because she has come back from terrible accidents to win again.  Even that has been done.
   No, what makes Natascha Badmann especially amazing, perhaps even singularly so, is that she's had the equivalent of two or three full lives and she's still having fun and racing incredibly fast - plus she smiles and says "hi" to her fans in the thick of competition! 
   Almost 46 years old, she still was within 10 minutes and change of the overall women's lead at Kona last month.  That's about one quarter of one percent off the lead pace.  Or a bit more than a mere mile behind the leader at the finish.  A mile and change after a full day and 140.6 miles of racing against the best in the world, some of whom could have been her daughters!  Even at nearly 46 years old (she turns 46 in two weeks), she still performed her usual magic on the bike, which is to say she pretty much toasted the field, again, on a very tough day for Kona cycling.
   Folks in their 40s have done well at Kona, even folks who had previously done very well at Kona.  Dave Scott comes to mind.  But no one has been in the latter half of the fifth decade of life and done nearly as well.  And no one has done it with her unique biography and vitality.
   Natascha Badmann is special for another, more personal, reason.  In July of 2010, before I even knew that I had another Ironman or two in me, we four Evanses made our annual exit from the heat of Saudi Arabia and vacationed in Switzerland.  At the doorstep of the Alps, we made the town of Meiringen our home.  Of course, not wanting to miss out on an excellent opportunity for photo-op alpine rides, I took my trusty 1986 Nobilette road bike along and regularly rode in the heaven that is this part of Europe.  We stayed nearly three weeks in Meiringen, and on one of the last days there, a weekend day, I rose early to tackle an epic 180 km counter-clockwise ride which would take me up and over three of the higher alpine passes in the entire region.  I'd done the ride once before nearly a decade earlier on a previous vacation in Switzerland, and not wanting to give an inch to my then impending 50s decided that having another go at this Mother of all Rides would be a fitting way to end our time there - and reestablish the M(F)ountain of Youth.
   The ride started well, and within a few hours I was up and over the first two passes.  Then, approaching the town of Andermatt, I had a flat and immediately used the only extra tube I'd brought along.  Unfortunately, another flat soon followed and now, about 100 km from home and with another huge pass still to go up and over, I began looking, then praying, for an open bike shop.  Except it was a Sunday.  A family gave me a ride into the nearest town, but still no bike shop, or at least not one open.
   Then suddenly, as if the waters had parted, into the parking lot next to me pulled a VW van, the outside of which advertised triathlon coaching.  Trying to act subdued, I nonchalantly approached the driver, learned that he had some extra bike stuff in the back, told him of my troubles that day, and asked if he could fix me up with a tube or two.  He looked over my by now pathetic repair kit and, while fixing me up with a new and much improved version, asked me if I knew Natascha Badmann.  Well, folks, not only had I not been involved with the Ironman since '87, I hadn't really stayed abreast of what was happening in triathlon in the more than two intervening decades.  Truthfully, I didn't know who she was, but I did let him know that I'd remembered seeing a gal and guy riding toward me uphill about two hours previously, and when I described them he let me know, "well, the woman is Natascha, and now you can say that you've seen a six-time Ironman champion on your ride.  And I'm her husband and coach, Toni Hasler.  Happy to meet you."
  By now realizing how late I was going to be, and not with a phone to call ahead to family and let them know, I just shook his hand, said I was honored and appreciative, and biked off as quickly as my now-rested body could.  I didn't get another flat that day, but I did do some thinking then and later about the wonderfulness of Natascha and Toni.
  Fast forward four months, I get the Ironman bug all over again after my friend Scott Tucker completes Kona 2010 and throws out the idea of my getting back in Kona Shape, and suddenly I'm scrambling to find a qualifier to do in hopes of meeting him in Kona in October 2011.  Fast forward another five months, now April 10, 2011 to be exact, my 50th birthday, and I'm getting off the bike and beginning the run at Ironman South Africa in Port Elizabeth and who comes into transition just as I'm leaving but none other than Natashcha Badmann.  And there to her right, yelling her encouragement, is my Swiss Savior Toni, her coach/husband.  Natascha was still recovering from injuries, had not yet found her form and would later drop out 6 km into the run.  If you had asked me then if the 44 year-old woman I saw at T2 could ever again hope to compete with the likes of the top women (like Crissy Wellington, who was just then blitzing the course and establishing yet another world record for the Ironman distance) I would have thought you perhaps more than wishful.
   And then I happened to peek at the results of Ironman South Africa 2012 this April and, apart from noticing the slower times in general and reading of the tough, blustery conditions that were their cause, I was more than a little surprised and impressed by noticing that Natascha Badmann had trounced the women's field, and with a very respectable time.
   We all know that qualifiers are one thing, Kona quite another.  Yet a part of me thought, hmm, if tough conditions bring out the best in certain folks, then with all of her Kona experience and love for tough conditions, if Kona has a tougher than normal year, Natascha could be in the running.
   Which is exactly what she was, and with a terrifyingly fast Kona time of 9:26.  Heck, even Miranda was in the 9:20s.  Only Miranda is many, many birthdays from being 46.
   I know that Natascha has had very many races, and that she has won a good portion of them.  But it would be difficult to rank any of her victories above her recent 6th place at Kona.  The phrase used to be "40 is the new 30."  For those of us already in our 50s, in a few more years Natascha could well prove that "50 is the new 30."  Here's to the Swiss Miss!                    

Cheating and Sport - some thoughts

Why do folks want to succeed so badly in sport that they cheat in order to achieve success?  Cursed with the probable, is it that many would rather tempt the improbable?  Is it that money has so corrupted sport that real sport no longer exists?  Or is it that a certain narcissism brought on by technology has deluded some?  If we're instantly being served up access to this or information about that 24/7, is it somehow making us impatient/uncomfortable with ourselves?  Given that so many love sport, indeed live by sport, has our infatuation necessarily distorted its meaning and falsely inflated its importance, making us all at least partially culpable for its current troubles? There are legions of examples of folks who have betrayed out trust.  Worse, they've depreciated sport, and I take that very personally.

• Paul Ryan may be a gifted orator with some reasonable ideas for America's future.  There's even a chance he could be a future president.  So why say you've run a sub-3 hour marathon in a race when you've not ever broken 4?  To a runner, the time difference is at once mind-boggling and ridiculous.  Think Rosie Ruiz. Those who run 2 hours and change are in different running worlds than those who don't break 4.  Ask any runner.  Yet, unprovoked, Mr. Ryan felt the need to grossly deflate his achieved time and thereby incredibly inflate his best actual performance. For a man who apparently would have us believe that hard work and determination can get a person anywhere, this would be laughable if it weren't so pathetic and ironic.  My advice to any voter: If you want to know whether to vote for a person, see what the fact- checkers say about the candidate's PBs, in any sport.  Full stop.
• Then there is the case of Kip Litton.  The man is my age, apparently came to running in mid-life and, for a while at least, seemed to have made marathon racing his mainstay.  Not satisfied with being merely a prolific marathoner, Kip decided to embellish his record by starting and finishing races in different outfits and inadvertently perhaps, with negative splits on occasion.  Hmm...  As if that weren't suspicious enough, Kip also resorted to wholly making up races he'd "competed" in so as to pad his running CV.  As if it's not bad enough to cheat your way to a fast marathon time, it takes a lot of imagination (and time) to conjure a marathon and design its website, complete with fictitious roster of runners, in order to "win" the thing outright.  How does anyone even think of that?!
• Perhaps most infamously, there is Lance Armstrong, a person who probably had less reason to cheat than most anyone on account of his obvious natural athletic gifts.  I suspect there would be full agreement that Lance was precocious and prolific as a young athlete and that, if you saw him race as a teenager you'd have felt he was already in a league of his own - no reason to dope.  What is less clear is why he eventually felt the need to cheat personally, essentially coerce teammates to cheat as well, and then lie about it compulsively for years and years, and still.  Lance has cheapened already damaged cycling (a sport I love), has harmed, possibly irreparably, a foundation that gave real hope and money to our ongoing fight against cancer (a disease I now take very personally), and perhaps worst, he continues to deny his failings, with ongoing repercussions for many, not least Lance.  Were Shakespeare alive today, I'm sure he'd find a great play in all this.   

 Myriad other examples remain, with more sadly adding to this total daily.  Yet I remain hopeful that these headline grabbers won't define sport for the rest of us, least of all not our children.  When I think of what sport has done to help inspire and define me, I can only hope that sane minds (combined with clean blood) will prevail and that true sport will eventually undergo a bit of a renaissance so that my students and two sons can enter a world that more consistently rewards that endlessly fascinating intersection of raw athletic talent and supreme discipline.           

2012 NYC Marathon - Thoughts of a Veteran

   I can't believe they've cancelled the NYC Marathon!  By waiting so long to cancel, the many people who had already traveled such long distances in order to compete in one of the world's great endurance events have now arrived to ...?  Personally, I think going ahead with the race would have been a great way to signal to the world that NYC was recovering yet still able to showcase a world-class event. 
   NYC Road Runners could have done a better job of getting thousands of caring and concerned athletes in volunteer positions during the week, providing work many athletes I'm sure would have been willing and able to do.  Instead, my sense is that there was a growing groundswell of opinion that the marathon was an elite event out of touch with the concerns and real needs of at least some of the rest of the city.  But I think this misses the point - and the opportunities. 
   If I may be so bold, Kona's Ironman is an elite event that is increasingly out of touch with its locale, and if a similar event were to befall the Kohala Coast and Ironman officials had to consider cancelling the Ironman, through chats and conversations I recently had with a number of disgruntled Kona residents, I could see how many of the locals would be just as happy to see Ironman go away for a year, if not forever.  Kona is an elite event that gives every indication of becoming only more elite and exclusive in the years ahead (more on this topic soon).  Ironically, the very very argument Ironman folks made in 1982 justifying their move from Oahu for the then more expansive and inviting venue offered by the Big Island could be used by Kona locals today.  Based on the name, maybe they should consider moving the event to the town of Ford? 
  The NYC Marathon is vastly different.  Rather than 2,000 triathletes, it welcomes nearly 50,000 runners, many of them decidedly fair to middling as athletes, nearly half of them from the burroughs of self-same NYC.  While Kona disallows local viewers from all but a but a small portion of the race, NYC's marathon is watched live, race-side, by millions of supportive and wildly cheering folks, and generates incalculable good will and memories.   It isn't necessarily an event you want to cancel - unless the event gets politicized and its relevance distorted which, unfortunately, would appear to be the case today.  And while Kona continues to separate world-class from world-class by allowing the professionals to start earlier than - which is to say apart from - the many very fast and able age-groupers present, NYC allows a common bloke like me to line up directly behind the Kenyans and Ethiopians, crossing the start line only moments after they do and experiencing the race as they do (albeit at a slower pace!).
   Granted, Mayor Bloomberg had to make a very tough decision, and I know he must be aware of various details he can't, or won't, make public, but the more I find out about today's decision the more it seems to smack of posturing and smell of preening.  With millions of folks watching live and tens of thousands more volunteering (or, let's not forget, getting excellent overtime pay as police, etc.), I think a marathon tomorrow could have been a great signal to the world that NYC can take a hit and get right back up.  In truth, some of the challenges that a distinct minority of east coasters have felt this past week are the daily realities for tens/hundreds of millions of folks, more than a number of whom live in countries that host world-class events on at least a sometimes basis - like India did with its recent hosting of the Commonwealth Games. 
   At least with an event like the marathon, Regular Joes and Janes of the sports world get to toe the line with the immortals running the sub-2:10 marathons.  With professional sports, on the other hand, cities increasingly have to pay ridiculous money to build and maintain venues in which the (increasingly only wealthy) citizens only get to watch athletes entertain/compete.  The Knicks played last night at Madison Square Garden and the Nets play tonight in their new home in Brooklyn.  To my knowledge, no one was/is asking them to cancel their events.  I'd be interested to know how many other professional sporting events got canceled in the NYC region through this weekend.  Each requires a fair amount of emergency/traffic personnel, and, as more than one economist has noted, the economies of elite professional sports don't have nearly the broad brush trickle-down effect a 50,000 strong marathon has. 
   I'm bummed (in case you couldn't tell!), especially for the athletes who just traveled a very long distance to fulfill a dream, only to find their hopes dashed.  I was one of those athletes traveling a very long distance just last year, and not once but twice, to Port Elizabeth and then Kona, both times from Saudi Arabia, and I can tell you I'd have been particularly upset had either race been cancelled for the reasons I've at least been able to read about related to NYC Marathon's demise this year.
   No one wants to promote suffering and loss of life, but the truth is most of the folks who ended up losing their lives during Sandy failed to take the precautionary steps advised repeatedly by local officials.  In addition, many of the homes destroyed were built on low-lying, fragile, coastal regions; statistically, these venues have a much greater chance of experiencing the kind of devastating damage they did, and with global warming/climate change it was mathematically only a matter of time before they did.
  Concern was voiced about possibly having to force flood victims out of temporary hotel rooms so that 20,000 or so out of town athletes would have places to stay - before any mention was made about how social media could possibly easily have solved the housing problem through quick apartment shares/extra room donations and such.  I'm willing to bet the NYC Road Runners Club, et al., could have solved the housing problem quickly with its members' Twitter and Facebook accounts.  As for the lack of electricity and gas to many NYC residents, I'm not sure how a Sunday morning marathon is especially relevant.  Most emergency crews are already on location, hard at work; many problems have been solved, or will have been by Sunday.  Hardly anyone is reporting to work on a Sunday morning.  Unlike Ironman, roads are truly shut down for just a few hours, and even at Kona with its one major north/south road, emergency vehicles can get up and down the coast if need be during the race.
   We used to be a scrappy and plucky nation.  Now we seem scared of our shadows, too worried about our images, excessively concerned about what others might think.  As if the nauseatingly too long and expensive national election weren't enough, now we have to throw in a perfectly good and decent marathon to the political mix just to placate a few potential voters.  Opportunity lost.  As a former NYC resident and NYC Marathon runner, my heartfelt apologies to all those who were inconvenienced by this very late and unfortunate decision.  I must disagree with the mayor (and especially his handlers) on this one.

David Evans
2:29 Marathon P.R.
1989 NYC Marathon
Top Manhattan finisher
12th American

Musings One Year Later, Oct. 8, 2012

What a difference a year can make.  Exactly one year ago it was the eve of Kona.  I'd done all final preparations, checked in my transition bags and bike, and thought through not once, not twice, but three times each of the stages of the race.  Except for the Energy Lab portion and a bit of the farther reaches of the swim, I'd been on every section of the course in the preceding week and felt I had reacquainted myself well enough with the mythic terrain.  In my mind, I knew that Kona was a tough suitor.  I'd experienced the full complement of high, medium, and low in '84, '87, and '86.  In each, I'd thought my chances good, yet the races couldn't have been more different.  A bit of this gnawing uncertainty resides in each athlete, no matter how strong.  Legion are the Kona examples of top athletes who more than proved their humanity race day.

Yet humbling moments needn't occur just on the race course.  We can blow up on the bike or bonk on the run during a race, but life has a way of dealing us less ephemeral but no less powerful challenges, ones that remain off-script race day yet may come to define our lives, even more than all the races we do.

As I ran down Ali'i drive exactly a year ago, as tired as I'd perhaps ever been in my entire life, I knew the hard work of the preceding year was about to be over.  Especially during the final months of training, when we four Evanses were either waltzing around the US, visiting friends and family, or jumping back into work in Saudi Arabia, during the hottest, most humid August and September weather most could ever endure, I'd felt slightly less committed to my training.  I hadn't lost sight of the goal, I just didn't feel quite as on target as I had in the months leading up to Port Elizabeth in April.  Of course, then it had been cooler, and the process of getting the "Kona Fit" back was still a novelty.

Once I'd qualified on April 10, the focus then was on attending to a body that my doctor was now claiming I'd too-long ignored.  Although my legs were seemingly functioning well, the vascular bed on the surface of my legs was not healthy.  Varicose veins had been making themselves increasingly visible for more than a decade, and now a vascular specialist at our hospital in Jeddah felt the issue had become more than cosmetic, that there was a growing potential for real, perhaps serious, circulatory problems, especially given all the flying common to overseas postings.  I'd put the operation off to get through the qualifier, and now it was time to treat the patient.

Three weeks after returning from South Africa, instead of gaining a full head of training steam like most of my competitors, I was being wheeled into surgery, assured that all would be fine yet knowing that all surgeries have a bit of uncertainty attached.  I do teach math, including probability.  And besides, although I'd tried to explain to my surgeon what my legs had just done for nine hours and forty six minutes on my recent 50th birthday, and what I hoped they'd be able to do for me in a few months in Hawaii, my sense is that these asides were lost in translation.

Yet the surgery was successful and, gradually, I got back into some training and began setting my sights in earnest, finally, on Kona.  Unfortunately, now mid-May, the academic year was winding down, which is a busy time for teachers, more roads were being shut down on campus due to construction, and, of course, it was going from hot to hotter to hottest, this being Saudi Arabia.  And then the itinerant U.S. existence began, followed by the hottest of the hottest weather upon our return the first week of August, just when the Kona Countdown was to have been in full swing.  It all added up to a less than confident and motivated run-up-to-Kona picture.

But still, that didn't explain the cramps I had been increasingly getting in my feet and calves, the tiredness and staleness I sometimes felt, even discounting for the tiredness many triathletes feel for obvious reasons.  I had always undertrained as an athlete, never overtrained.  Although I knew that I was asking a lot of my body, my longest run by August was still just a half marathon, and my riding, though fast, wasn't at the mileage it had been.  There was no way I was overtraining.

A tremendous amount of psychic energy goes into the commitment to a goal like Kona, yet as the race gradually approached, I found it harder and harder to maintain the focus and drive I'd seemed to easily sustain in the lead up to Port Elizabeth just a few months earlier.  I can remember a number of long rides, out there on the campus's measly 20K of roads, feeling that I just had to get through three more long rides, wondering where the passion had gone, why I wasn't more excited about an opportunity so few get?  Hadn't I left the sport for 24 years, trained for four months seriously, done exactly one qualifier, qualified for the exactly one spot, and was headed to one of the most amazing races in the world against the best competition on the planet?  Yet my body was telling me "Enough Already!," or "Can't it be Oct. 8 yet?"  I attributed the diminished passion to the demands of job, needs of kids and wife, general loneliness from training in a land where no one does triathlon, lack of sponsors, and the honeymoon of the qualifier being over.  Although I knew I'd get through Kona, the final months of preparation just hadn't been as fun as I'd anticipated.  More and more, I noticed what I thought was emotional weariness, telling no one, writing it off as an occupational hazard.

Only later, after the dust had settled from Kona, after my wife had discovered the lump in my throat just months after the run down Ali'i Drive, after the doctors had asked me to come in again and again and again, never exactly telling me why, the probes and tests getting more invasive, the vague hints about surgery becoming less and less amorphous - only then I think back on the lead up to Kona. And suddenly, it all began to make sense.  And just as suddenly, it dawned on me that I'd been lucky to make it to Kona, never mind having a race that would help me finally resolve some of the feelings I had over not being able to compete in '85, and then for not being able to show that '84 hadn't been a flash in the pan after dropping out in '86 while a member of the U.S. team.

So, while I may never know, it's quite possible that my thyroid was already on the blink (energy issue) and that the adjacent tumor had already begun affecting the parathyroid glands (calcium, and therefore cramping, issue).

Some of my students asked me just the other day, "Mr. Evans, are you going to do the Ironman again?"  Standing there before them, only I knew that I can't even ride a half hour on a bike without feeling blitzed these days, that I'd pretty much given up running since it doesn't make my body feel so good, and that a freak tandem bike crash this past summer on Mackinac Island, MI, had hurt my left shoulder, making swimming painful at times.  In truth, my students couldn't understand what a difference a year has made.

David Evans' Strength Workout, 2012

Practicing balance is increasingly important. 

 

When I was younger, I never thought about maintaining strength. Indoor workouts were anathema; those who lifted were from a different species. Back then, strength was a natural result of doing all the things you'd ordinarily do, including the swimming, biking and running that defined my mid 20s.  I had plenty of strength and never really gave serious thought to where it came from.  Strength just was.

Fast forward two and a half decades and life is decidedly different.  For one, the strength I had then, especially the explosive, faster-twitch variety, began ebbing at least a decade ago.  For another, I now live in an extremely hot environment, one where workouts, if they are done at all, are very often done indoors.  Add to this mix the desire to remain healthy and strong and competitive and, well, you're headed to some changes in habits and attitudes.

No longer do I think of strength workouts as something alien and unnecessary.  In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that without a regular regimen of strength training, an Ironman triathlete in middle age is operating on borrowed time.  It could even be that once endurance is firmly established by one's 20s, that fitness components like strength, technique and coordination gain primacy.

I do this spinal rotation stretch in the morning and before every workout.  I love it and consider it to be my own private mini-chiropractic adjustment!  For maximal benefit, be sure to breath deeply and relax.

Keep front lower leg perpendicular.  15 lbs/hand.

 When training for Ironman, my usual strength workout regimen included three strength workouts per week.  These lasted about 35 - 45 minutes each and focused on the muscle groups you see highlighted in this entry's pictures.  The more intensely I trained, the more I began to realize the crucial role played by strength training.  Concerted hours swimming, biking and especially running have meant a body weight in the 150 - 153 lbs. range.  As an Ironman approaches and volume begins peaking, my body weight can dip below 150, at which point I'm more susceptible to injury.  Perhaps equally important, a lower body weight can lead to a lack of strength down the stretch in the marathon.  A pure marathoner is lighter than a triathlete doing a marathon, and because the Ironman triathlete's competitive day is a lot longer, holding onto strength in the latter stages of the race is key.  This is where strength training can reap huge dividends.  

Exhale during contraction.  Slower is better with lifting.

Before strength training, be sure you are warmed up and that your muscles are ready for the flexions and extensions demanded by the workout.  Avoid jumping right into a strength workout without taking at least a few minutes getting the major muscle groups warmed up and ready to go. 

By the same token, be careful about tackling a strength workout after your muscles are tired.  Especially middle age, tired muscles can be less flexible and therefore less capable of delivering the energy loads and ranges of motion the workout demands.

25 lbs./hand.  Don't drop arms below this level.

 In general, use free weights if you can.  Free weights force the body to be more coordinated, and allow you to see if there are any asymmetries to your strength development. 

Focus on lighter weights at higher repetitions.  To the right, I'm doing these military presses with 25 lbs. in each arm, 15 reps at a time, two times per workout. 

Warm up with legs together on this one.

 In 1989 I was the top Manhattan finisher in the NYC Marathon, running a 2:29 PR which provided aspirations of running even faster at Boston the next spring.  Unfortunately, though perhaps predictably, I was also in my late 20s - the perfect time for tired connective tissue to make itself known.

Suddenly, my Achilles tendons were sore and tight, and the pain seemed to not want to go away.  In retrospect, I now see that I was lacking a coherent system of strength and flexibility training.  The years of running (by then 20,000+ miles in total) had taken a toll and, well, the Greeks had it right with my chain's weakest link.

Mostly by giving up on marathoning in '91 and getting involved with Nordic skiing and other non-percussive sports, I eventually made peace with my Achilles.  However, getting back into the Ironman meant that my now-even-older Achilles tendons needed TLC.  This exercise (above left) helps maintain strength and flexibility.  15 reps/side, fully up and down, with weight on ball of foot.  In part due to the dictates of weather, I also did about 85% of my total running mileage on the treadmill, which seems to be a much more forgiving running surface for the Achilles than pavement. 

Have the free arm pivot through 180 degrees.

Good spinal rotation forms the basis of much health and is the linchpin to a strong freestyle swim stroke.  This exercise (right) starts with the load-bearing hand fully extended forward, the feet placed about three feet apart.  I do 15 reps on both sides, 35 lbs. at a time.

This is a great core workout, especially if you focus on driving the rotation with your abdominal obliques and your thoracic carriage muscles.  A bit like pull-starting a lawn mower engine, this exercise gives a full-body workout.

Focus on the full range of motion; however, be careful not to retract the pulling arm to far behind the body.  

The free arm (hidden) pivots around body during rotation/contraction.

 I go from one station to another in fairly rapid succession during a strength workout.  Remember, you are an endurance athlete who should be very comfortable with an elevated pulse, so don't be afraid to march through the workout.

On the other hand, once there, slower is better than faster.  Focus on full ranges of steady motion, less weight rather than more, more reps rather than fewer.

Done well, this is harder than it looks. 

This abdominal workout is becoming one of my favorites.  For one, it really focuses on the core.  Yet it also demands balance and timing, and the bonus is that it helps loosen up and realign the back if you do it correctly!

Find a flat, stable bench.  I use a ball weighing anywhere from 6 - 8 lbs, placing it centered against the chest.  Extend the elbows out to the side, legs up, with lower legs at or near horizontal.

Focus on full rotation of the upper torso, all the while keeping your lower body still and in the position noted.

 

Keep feet together and still.  Focus on full rotation.

As with all good strengthening exercises, balance is key with this one.  Again, I do 15 reps (back and forth being one rep) twice during the entire workout. 

These little medicine balls are great for strength growth in general.  I sometimes throw it up in the air and catch it as a means of improving general strength.  Can also be done with a buddy.

I rarely do "traditional" sit-ups anymore but, thanks to this kind of strengthening, feel that my abdominal muscles  remain strong and flexible.

Breath out on the way up.  Strive for symmetry in the arms.

The bench press used to be the be all end all of lifting when I was a kid.  I'm sure its importance was overstated then, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be a component of your overall strength workout when you're beginning your sixth decade of life.

I've got 25 lbs. in each arm, and I'm focusing on slow, steady, and symmetric movements as I go from (left) full extension to (below) contraction.


Some studies have shown that once you reach 40 you begin losing about 1% of your muscle mass per year.  Many adults begin noting that metabolism drops off about this age, and that they can't eat as much without weight gain.  By strengthening your body and maintaining your muscle mass, metabolism gets a boost.

Don't let your upper arms drop below horizontal.

Avoid holding your breath on this one.

 This (right) is quite a difficult exercise and must be done carefully.  Here are the keys:

• Don't let your butt drop below a slight elevation, as shown.
• Place feet about a foot apart.
• Rotate elbows in circular motion while keeping them in position shown. 
• Exercise ball should be slightly under-inflated and not too big.
• Keep breathing!

Strength comes from the core.  This is a good one.

This is a variation on the theme of the sideways plank, with a greater emphasis on balance.  Here is what to focus on:

• Keep extended arm above the body and in the plane of the legs and lower arm.
• Don't let the hips drop.
• The weight-bearing upper arm needs to be perpendicular to your body.
• Find your balance and get the body still before beginning your reps.

• You can do a regular plank with upper leg resting on lower leg.
• Or you can raise the upper leg a bit and create an isometric contraction, highlighting abductors.  
• Best of all, this is a great way to gain range of motion and strength by raising and lowering upper leg through the full range.
• I have ball rest against the wall, but if you're brave you can have ball be free...
• Again, body position is important, so use mirrors or others' feedback to keep you honest.  

Bend at the hips, keep legs straight.

This one is my most recent addition.  It's a dead lift, with straight legs, that focuses on the legs of the back leg, particularly the upper hamstrings and gluts.  After a few hours of the bike leg's TT position this exercise helps maintain strength and power.  

Lance Lanced - Thoughts on Doping

We like to believe, need to believe, especially when it comes to our champions. And no one, arguably, was a more iconic champion than Lance Armstrong. At least up until today, August 24, 2012.

Lance seemed to transcend sport. Precocious, brash, but above all immensely, often scarily talented, Lance seemed to defy all odds. If cancer was racking half his body, well, he overcame it, even if it meant nearly killing himself in the process. You see, he'd been defying odds all along.

If 15 year-old Lance got out of the water with the top pros in the triathlon, then he full well expected to stay with them on the bike. If 18 year-old triathlete Lance decided to have a go at the national championships in cycling, then he didn't expect to just hang with the pack at the front, he made a pack of one off the front and broke away in what would become typical Lance fashion. If 21 year-old now-only-bike-racing Lance took on the best in the world at the world road racing championships, he again expected, and achieved, audacity, even if the day's cold numbing Oslo rain might seem anathema to any other boy from Texas.

And, well, there were the seven Tour de France victories, the Olympic medal, the other accolades and victories too many to recount here. And let's not forget the books that gave the laymen, so removed physically and emotionally as mere mortals must be, intriguing insights into Lance's world, the foundation he started and which is nearing a half a billion dollars in raised funds to fight cancer.

Yet somewhere along the way, and probably longer ago than many of us can appreciate or care to know, Lance got lost. Fractions and smidgens can separate great performances; truly great champions are expected to win their competitions, especially when they're close. No one knows this better than the athletes who delight us with these infinitesimal gradations, often day after day, year after year, preferably at the top of the podium waving the bouquet and kissing the young ladies.
  
Obviously, there will be much speculation about the whys, whens, and hows of this sad tale. Was it after the fight with cancer, once he'd already stared death in the face and made it blink first? Did he feel that his new, slimmer, lighter body needed that extra edge to win the only race mere mortals care about when it comes to bike racing, the Tour de France, a race he'd never come close to winning before cancer? Did he feel that the poisonous cocktail of drugs and chemotherapy was already more than anything EPO and its chemical brethren could deal him? Or was it before that, perhaps at the behest of an older and cynical cycling curmudgeon who'd not been able to make it clean himself and figured, perhaps naively, that teenager Lance couldn't either? Was it that Lance, lacking a father, and perhaps craving a male mentor, and wanting to be accepted and included in his new-found sport of cycling, obliged a stronger, established rider on the US team and began a long and complicated journey most of us are only beginning to fathom today? Or was it even before that, which is to say before cycling alone dominated his life at 17, going on 18, when Lance was a triathlete in his mid-teens, when he was especially young and impressionable and yet already, clearly and unusually talented? 
  
If so, he would not have been the first triathlete to dope.  Scott Molina failed a post-race drug test in Nice, France, in the mid-80s and then was banned for life from the Nice race, at the time, along with Kona, one of only two standout races in the young sport. We know that Lance had access to this coterie of triathletes of which Molina was a leader and growing legend. Was Molina part of a larger performance-enhancing drug culture in triathlon? No matter, was Molina an early and poor influence on Lance? We may never know. 
 
Testing was all but non-existent in those early days of the sport. I know I was never tested, then or now, despite dozens of triathlon wins and Kona podium finishes in 1984 and 2012. Even today, and despite all evidence to the contrary, testing is shoddy at best. As the New York Times and other reputable newspapers reported just this summer, doping is alive and well in age group cycling. It doesn't take a huge imagination to extend doping's reach into a sport that requires similar athletic talent and even more training time and commitment.
  
No matter where Lance's ethical fork in the road occurred, whether during his triathlon or cycling years, he knew doping had to remain out of the script, tacit to all who knew cycling for the distorted beast it had become but never admitted to a naive lay public that wanted its champions served up readily, with a plot line easily understood. It was a well-worn path of a lie others before him knew well; it was a falsehood Lance was apparently only too willing to subsume as a means to cycling immortality.
  
Instead, immortality has given way to ignominy, fame to infamy, and again we are left scratching our heads and wondering, sadly, for what might have been.  

Many key ingredients in an athlete's life can lead to lifetime competitive success.  Surely, biology plays a role, but since it's pretty tough to choose your parents, altering their chromosomal impact remains (at least for now) the stuff of fiction.  When it comes to things we might modify over which we do have some control, most aspiring athletes seek answers through changes in things like riding miles, stroke technique, running shoes, or nutritional supplements - it's a very long list!  While improvements can come about through careful alterations to these sorts of things, an often overlooked area that can have a huge impact on athletic performance is just good ole lifestyle.

Lifestyles have changed rapidly in recent generations, and at no time has that change been more pronounced and accelerated than it is right now.  Technology is rapidly changing our world, and those with the greatest access to new technologies are arguably changing their worlds the fastest.  For a species that may have taken thousands if not millions of years to evolve, such rapid change can't be all good.  In general we are more sedentary than we used to be, have access to more food more often than we used to, are considerably heavier than we used to be and, because we tend to live longer, have more chronic diseases than ever before.  While it is easy to say that an Ironman triathlete's life is hardly in keeping with the norm - and almost by definition has to be otherwise - we are part of this greater, bulging, not so healthy world, and it affects us whether we like it to or not.

So here's my thesis: the results of a life lead fairly intentionally probably had a bigger impact on my recent return to Kona and a 5th place age group finish than did the specific training I did in the months leading up to the race.  Sure, the swims, bikes and runs helped get me on the podium once I was at Kona.  But what got me to Kona in the first place?  Or, looking back just a few months earlier, what allowed a 50 year-old American male to make a rapid and successful transition from mid-life to world-class?  No one factor predominates; in no particular order, these might be the underlying habits that paved the Road Back to Kona:

• Avoid the car.  Better yet, if at all possible, since so many of us commute to our professional lives, combine your commute with exercise and bike commute.  I've never let a job tie me to the daily grind of car commuting.  Instead, I've used getting to work as a means of exploiting some combination of car-pooling one way and cycling the other, bike commuting both ways, taking public transportation- bus, subway, ferry - and using the connecting walks/rides as exercise.  Of the more than 100,000 miles of riding miles in my legs, my nearly 20 year-old commuting bike can claim nearly 50,000 miles of them.
• Avoid "labor saving devices."  Use a push mower.  Wash dishes by hand.  Knead your own bread.  Chop your vegetables.  Rake leaves.  Sweep with an actual broom.  Essentially, do your best to make your body the power source so often provided by engines.  This past summer I gave a short talk at my 30th Carleton College reunion on the importance of an active lifestyle.  We've allowed technologies and other putative conveniences to mortgage our health and consign us to the sofa.  Instead, stay more fit by reclaiming your active self.     
• Avoid the car again.  If it's true that at any given moment most cars are within five miles of home (and I'm told it is), then by extension it must be true that many if not most car uses are at least arguably unnecessary.  The bike remains the workhorse of the world because of its utility, efficiency, and comparatively low cost.  When we lived in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, most all of our errands and quick trips were done by bike, even though we owned a car.  A willing pair of legs, a good set of panniers, and even a trailer, can alleviate the need for a car just about every time.  Make the bike the go-to vehicle, not the car.
• Keep your weight steady.  Through good genes and, increasingly, careful habits, since 1980 when I stopped growing, I've been able to keep my weight a fairly steady 155 lbs., +/-2%.  By avoiding mindless snacking, eating only when hungry, keeping the diet balanced and, above all, maintaining an active lifestyle, body weight tends to fluctuate less.  If recent studies are correct, and it's the sometimes tremendous fluctuation in weight that comes with the weight gain/weight loss cycle that is unhealthy, then keeping your weight steady is a doubly good thing.  Additionally, maintaining steady weight and a good Body Mass Index allows a person to more readily transition back into serious sports with fewer health risks.
• Stay strong.  After 40 years of age, most males begin losing about 1% of their muscle mass per year.  Being active and fit can surely help forestall some of this normal pattern in aging, but the truth is that the seemingly automatic muscle strength and tone of the late teens and twenties becomes more and more of a rarity as we get older.  That said, I decided early on in my Road Back to Kona that I'd make a regular core exercise and strengthening regimen part of my overall training game plan.  In part, living and training in Saudi Arabia like no other Kona-bound triathlete was, I knew that I'd be spending a fair amount of time indoors anyway due to summer conditions leading to October's Hawaii race.  But, like it or not, I also knew that I just wasn't as strong as I had been in my 20s and that, unless I wanted to increase my risk of injury, once the training volume started kicking in I'd better complement the tri-sport component with careful attention to strength, flexibility, coordination, and even balance. 
• Don't overtrain.  I'm old enough to remember the days of wanton over-distance training.  Sadly, it was a distance-addicted cross country running coach who turned me off to collegiate running in my first months of college in the fall of '78.  One week my mileage topped out at 128 miles - and I was just 17 years old!  The previous season, in high school, I'd maybe been running a third of that mileage; the change was just too abrupt.  Probably from that moment onward, I gained a healthy distrust of adding mileage for no real reason other than bragging rights.  Even in the '80s when I won two dozen triathlons and placed 7th in the Hawaii Ironman, my mileage was always embarrassingly puny compared to those of, say, Scotts Molina, Tinley, and certainly Dave.  Being in graduate school during those years was a tempering influence to mindless mileage and overtraining, but there is possibly no greater antidote to over-training in one's mid-life than being a husband, father and full-time teacher.  Rather than worry about training too much, quite the opposite is true when sports take a back seat.  When I look back on my Road Back to Kona training log and add up the entries' hours, I'm pleasantly surprised to see that high volume weeks topped out at 15 - 17 hours, nothing more.

   Other non-swim/bike/run factors certainly played a role in my Road Back to Kona, but the above six represent the most significant ones.                  

1984 to 2011 - A Retrospective

When I first met my wife 20 years ago, doing another ironman was about the furthest thing from my mind. Pretty much as soon as I’d gotten out of Kona harbor in October of ’87 I’d gone cold turkey with swimming, which had been my weakest event in any case.   And, except for commuting on a mountain bike, I had a road/TT bike that collected dust. For a decade, I did refocus on a passion for running, but even that got old as my body began telling me that other activities made me feel better.

Over the years, students and athletes who knew of my triathlon background would sporadically tell me of TV coverage of Kona’s big October event or some other televised tri, asking me if I’d seen it.  But I never had, and so, for a number of decades, Kona remained well off the back burner of consciousness, a chapter in my life that seemed increasingly vague and unimaginable.

Whenever I pondered Kona and the lessons learned from three races there in ’84, ’86, and ’87, thoughts inevitably returned to ’85, a race I didn’t even do.  It seemed strange, but the more I tried to put that chapter of my life behind me, the more those pages’ unwritten paragraphs spoke to me.  Folks often asked about the ’84 race, but to me the ’84 race lacked punctuation, an incomplete sentence that suggested and implied, rather than clearly stated.

So the ironman remained, outwardly impressive bio in most people’s eyes but inwardly a question mark, a silent, relentless siren song that only I could hear.  I knew that in ‘84 I’d beaten Chris Hinshaw, the following year’s second place finisher, and that during the ’84 marathon leg I’d been gaining on Mark Allen and John Howard just ahead of me in 5^th and 6^th place, especially in the latter stages.  But, as I learned with perspective gained only with time and reflection, ’84 was more broadly special as well.   

’84 was the first time Kona was won in under 9 hours – Dave Scott.  The first time a runner broke 3 hours – Dave Scott.  The first time cyclists broke 5 hours – John Howard and Mark Allen.  The first time a swimmer broke 50 minutes – Chris Hinshaw. The stars must have been aligned that day, since it was also the hottest day on record for a Hawaii ironman; little wonder that it also has one of the highest drop-out rates on record. Four of the top six males in the ’84 race represented 15 past, present or future Kona race victories and countless other triathlon titles. 

Among the top group that day was Dutchman Rob Barel, certainly a harbinger of top finishers to come as the only non-American of the bunch.  Rob would deftly bridge the early world of triathlon with the approaching new millenium by staying amazingly fit and fast, competing 16 years later in Sydney - in his’40s - in the first Olympic triathlon.

Not to be outdone, unknown to most that day was a young guy out of Pennsylvania by the name of Kenny Glah, who finished the first of what has now become 28 consecutive Hawaii Ironman World Championships, an unbroken string of Kona races that no triathlete will touch for a very long time, if ever.

Yet ’84 was pioneering in another way as well since, on that day, the triathlon’s top-dogs apparently realized that in order to keep billing itself as the “World Championship,” a trophy and a handshake would no longer suffice.  No wonder then that ’84 was the last time so much triathlon talent was ever assembled to race an ironman without the possibility of financial reward.  Voting with their feet, fully 75% of top-8 from ’84, including icons Dave Scott and Mark Allen, chose to not participate in ’85.     

On perhaps no other day than October 6, 1984 had the then young sport matured so quickly and begun to define itself so clearly.  And yet in ’85, when I might have been showing folks that ’84 hadn’t been a fluke, I was instead watching race coverage from my living room, happy for Scott T., Chris H. and company but wallowing in a bit of self-pity.  Earlier that year a reckless driver had sent my rear derailleur through my right leg as her car crushed my bike and sent me flying like a rag doll down the country road.  I knew I was lucky to be alive and fortunate to have had successful surgeries and physical therapy, but the competitor in me was heartbroken. 

In ’86, racing again, I was named a member of a four-man U.S. team in a new national team division at Kona, but I put too much pressure on myself to repeat ‘84’s performance and ended up a DNF.  By ’87 I’d finished my graduate work at U of Michigan and was about to enter the full-time workforce, but Kona’s allure snared me one more time.  I finished, knowing that I had to, in almost exactly the time I’d posted in ’84.  But I’d been through too much and my heart had moved on; the ironman, and Kona in particular, no longer pulled on my heartstrings. 

Which is why it was easy for me to promise my new wife in the early ‘90s that I’d never do another ironman.  Never. Less than two years ago, now living and working overseas, my tune still hadn’t changed.  Sure, I’d lived a life of fitness, which included cycling, the less and less frequent swim, and the much less frequent run, but the idea of putting all three together again, especially over such a great distance, just didn’t compute.  Besides, I had a wife, a family, a full-time job, other interests.

 And then the emails began coming from a former training partner who’d fallen hard for triathlon while living in Sun Valley.  We’d done plenty of ski and adventure races together in our families’ shared decade in Seattle, and, knowing of my Paleolithic tri-sport past, he began sharing opinions about his newfound endurance sport love, occasionally asking for advice.  True to form, he rocketed to the head of the class, easily qualified for Kona and, soon after his maiden journey down Ali’i Drive, was wondering if I’d care to meet him in 2011 at the pier.  Naturally, my first thought was about ’85 and the race that wasn’t.  Our exchanges had blown air on the embers of the subconscious; suddenly, I began asking myself the “what ifs” that so often preface life’s big decisions.   

Some guys’ mid-life crises involve fast cars; I got triathlon’s equivalent by updating my road bike by 25 years and purchasing the kind of TT bike I’d only seen in Tour de France coverage.  Meanwhile, it took me three weeks to finally get up the courage to ask my wife if I could dedicate nearly a year at 15+ extra hours a week to a triathlon renaissance.  She appreciated the barrenness of our university compound life, knew that I was about to turn 50, and had come to make peace with her husband’s lifelong love affair with sport.  I promised to do as much of the training in the wee hours of the morning so as not to disrupt family life too much.  And, once I added up all the many costs of re-entering a sport that had gone from pricey to exorbitant, I also vowed that it’d be a one-time deal: October 2011, full stop.  Besides, teachers are generally very busy in October, and I’d been lucky this time to have a school give me the time off for both the April qualifier and the October granddaddy.

27 years is a long time between podium appearances at Kona, perhaps a longer time than any other triathlete can claim.  The world wars were closer together.  Having already experienced the good, the bad, and the ugly at Kona, I knew to take nothing for granted this past October.  The racecourse, the competing athletes, the town, the body - all had changed over the years.  But one thing was for sure: I still loved racing and was determined to fully enjoy this reprise.  In the end a 9:50 fifth place age-group finish was less than seven minutes or about 1% slower than the 9:43 I’d first posted in Kona in 1984 at the tender age of 23 when 10 bananas, a couple gallons of water, and sheer youthful exuberance and naivete had powered me all those 140.6 miles.

It may be a long time before I return to Kona, if ever.  But yesterday, in reading about a 74 year-old Spanish climber who is attempting to become the oldest person to scale all the 8,000m mountains and who has maintained a life of steady fitness to get where he is today, I realized something: I’ve always wanted to be like these kinds of guys.  In fact, given that it was 24 years since my last Kona race and that in 24 more years I’ll be 74, I just may have to think about Kona again in a few more decades….  

Musings of a Teacher/Triathlete

Teachers don't have it easy.  Crowded classrooms and unruly students may challenge some, but if you're a teacher, like millions are, and a triathlete, like thousands of us are, with aspirations of making it to Kona for October's big event, like hundreds have, then you face an uphill battle that makes getting up to Havi a walk in the park.
For starters, of all the possible months in which to hold the Ironman World Championships, from a teacher's perspective, October has to be the worst.
June - August typically contain some variation on summer break, September has Labor Day and its extended weekend, November has Thanksgiving, December/January have Winter Break, February often has Mid-Winter Break or Washington's Birthday, March/April have Spring Break, and May has Memorial Weekend.  What does October have?  Halloween, a workday filled with unusual fashion choices and amped up sugar intakes, but no time off.
Of all the possible months, that fateful decision in 1982, when the Hawaii triathlon powers that once were moved the race from February to October, arguably impacted teachers the most.  Unlike folks in other fields of work and psuedo work, a teacher's "time off" is programmed.  Even in the southern hemisphere, my South African teaching colleagues attest that October is a busy month, as students are ramping up for exams and summer break.
So what is a teacher with dreams of making it to Kona to do?  Well, when I qualified this past year, I had to negotiate time off and begin planning for subs for classes well in advance.  I sat down with my school's principal and superintendent early, months before the qualifier in Port Elizabeth, and talked through the whole plan: going to Abu Dhabi in March to shake off the cobwebs of a 24-year retirement from serious triathlon, then trying to earn the single 50-54 age-group Kona-qualifying spot in April at Ironman South Africa, then, if fate would have me, going to Hawaii in October for the world championships.  I'm fairly sure that they felt they were risking mainly having me gone a day for Abu Dhabi and a few days for IMSA, which conveniently backed up to our Spring Break and therefore meant I didn't have to miss very many days with my students.  Let's face it, as any who have recently tried to compete at Kona well know, the odds of my making it were not good.
However, when IMSA went well and I'd qualified in my first attempt for Hawaii, the first time since 1987, I scheduled a follow-up conversation to remind them of the original plan, however hypothetical it may have seemed at the time.  I waited one week, then two, for their response and final okay, and meanwhile I'd recovered and begun tentatively training for Kona, still not knowing if all the hard work and planning would actually lead to the road back to Kona.  Finally, after what seemed like forever but which was actually less than three weeks, I received word that I could indeed go.
There was just one hitch, of course.  However frugally, I'd had to update my vintage 1980s triathlon equipment in order to even have hopes of competing on the more crowded and talented 2011 triathlon playing field, and I'd been a teacher my entire professional life (and was therefore, unlike a number of my fellow competitors at Kona, was not independently wealthy).  So, just like each of the preceding five days off I'd recently taken, the ten days I'd need to travel the 13 time zones to and fro where I currently live and work and compete at Hawaii's Ironman apparently would be unpaid.
A number of folks on campus tried, ultimately unsuccessfully, to get me some level of sponsorship from the folks at the top here. I tried to lobby upper administration and make the experience part of our students' learning, potentially connecting learning to a teacher's somewhat unusual and arguably interesting non-academic life, but this too proved to be a non-starter.  Then, with only weeks to go before having to leave for Kona, a vocal group of supporters on campus tried to pitch my quest one last time to the upper campus administration.  For a time it seemed like the impasse would be overcome, but then, only days before boarding the plane, I again found that financial help would not be in the cards, that no one wanted to take on the hot potato of sponsoring an employee while having to answer to potential auditors later on, or at least that was the whispered claim.
If you include the past year's three race fees, the travel, the accommodations, the food, the essential equipment, and the lost salary, competing in Kona in 2011 cost more than all the more than three dozen triathlons I did from 1984 - 1987, and that includes three trips to Kona in '84, '86, and'87!  To be frank, some of those '80s races had at least some expenses covered by sponsors.  But most of my expenses back then were covered by me, and to keep expenses down while in grad school at Michigan, most of the races I did were local, or at least regional, which meant I didn't usually have to fly to races.
Still, the widening gap between the sport's financial demands and what increasing numbers of folks modestly possess as discretionary income is balkanizing a sport already regarded as elitist, seemingly inaccessible.
So there I was at the awards ceremony in Kona, my last night in Hawaii, and just by chance I had sat down at a table that included two other teachers.  Excitedly, we compared notes and talked about the amazing week we'd just had.  One guy, currently teaching in Dubai at an international school, had rallied the school community behind his quest and was getting full pay while being gone.  Meanwhile, farther down the table I later met a woman, teaching in Europe, who not only was getting paid but had attracted sponsors, one of whom had paid her air-fare and another of whom had helped her with what all of us know are considerable bike expenses.
And there I sat, disconsolate, shaken, a bit upset even - until the awards were announced - when I realized that no amount of money can compare to being able to mount the podium at a world championship one more time, especially more than half a lifetime after the first and only other time I'd been on the podium, in '84.  Knowing that I'd financially done it all on my own, this time against tremendous odds, gave pause for special thanks to family, friends, and teachers and coaches, some long-ago, who'd first inspired and tirelessly supported.  And I reminded myself that as a teacher and coach, part of my compact with my student/athletes includes planting that seed of possibility by nurturing potential.  My only hope is that if I ever have students able and willing enough to fully embrace this amazing sport of triathlon, that finances won't prove to be the one finish line too far for them to reach.         

Adversity Meets its Maker

The first time I competed in the Hawaii Ironman Triathlon World Championships, back in October of 1984, I had a broken leg. Not completely broken like a compound fracture, but broken enough to be a sizable stress fracture and therefore easily noticed by a radiologist five months later, after a reckless driver doing 50 mph hit me from behind, sending my rear derailleur machete-like through my lower leg and breaking the leg once again, thereby necessitating an x-ray or two.

I can still remember the radiologist's incredulous expression when I told him I'd just finished 7th in the world in the Hawaii Ironman, explaining, delicately and even a bit sheepishly, that an Ironman triathlon consisted of 2.4 miles of swimming, 112 miles of cycling, and 26.2 miles of running. In the weeks leading up to Kona I'd noticed increasing tightness and uncomfortableness just below the patella. Twenty-three years old and naive,  I took this inconvenience merely as a sign to start tapering, which I did. When the radiologist added, "You know, from the looks of this x-ray you're damn lucky your leg didn't just snap out there during the marathon," I realized that attempting two Ironman distance races in the space of three months, which I did between July and October of 1984, was both brash and foolish for my then young, low-mileage body.

In 1983 the folks in Hawaii had rejected my application to compete, even though I'd gone undefeated in a series of triathlons that year and had also won the Michigan State road race for cycling and competed in the USCF Road Race Nationals in San Diego. So by the fall of '84 I was rearing to go and compete in a race about which I'd heard so much, a one-day event that was then, and now, the Mother Of All Triathlons.  I felt I had the mettle to compete at the highest level in the sport; perhaps more significantly, I was still licking the wounds of rejection from '83 and wanted nothing more than to show the Hawaii Ironman folks that they'd made a mistake the year before by not allowing me to come to Kona and compete. In retrospect, I'm fortunate not to have been carted off in an ambulance with a compound fracture of my right tibia. The leg more than held up - moving me from 13th off the bike to 7th by the end of the marathon, and even gaining on Mark Allen (in 5th) and Jon Howard (in 6th) in those delirious final miles - but I was extremely lucky. And I didn't even know it.

Fast forward 28 years to this past October 2011, when I found myself again on the podium at Kona, this time with the 50-54 age group leaders. Six months later, which is to say quite recently, I'm told that I have thyroid cancer after a mysterious bulge starts appearing in my neck, is noticed by my vastly more intelligent and perceptive wife, and I dutifully get it checked out. When I ask a number of the attending doctors how long they think I've had the tumor, based on the size and details of the cyst, 2 - 3 years is their best estimate. Just two years ago places the problem before I even began dreaming of a triathlon renaissance, of getting back into "Kona Condition" and tossing the notion of middle age temporarily out the window.  I had cancer and didn't even know it.  I had a thyroid that wasn't working at all well - better than now, but certainly not as well as it's supposed to - and I just soldiered on, oblivious to the messages it was sending me, determined once and for all to show that '84 had not been a fluke.

As if getting to mount the podium at Kona isn't difficult enough, doing it twice, and despite the added hurdles of a broken leg and cancer, points to the immense power and pluck of the human condition while underscoring its considerable vulnerabilities and frailties. Or is it that a body subconsciously knowing itself to be on thin ice somehow wills itself to go to extremes to affirm its vitality?  If Kona's legendary race can be likened to an orchestral piece one might call "Variations on Accelerated Darwinism in Three Movements," then lurking subtexts like a broken bone or a cancer can only add to the overall human drama of the moment.  Events like Kona may also underscore our bodies' enduring resilience in the face of significant obstacles, and it may be the at-the-time unknown obstacles that are the most significant. Give an athlete a competition and he/she will race. Quietly tell his body that it's in TROUBLE and it may allow itself to go to unusual ends to maintain the game face on game day   

Hardwired to survive at all costs, some of our ancestors' descendents, including this author, even take comfort and derive confidence from the sort of pursuits that would simulate physical deprivations and challenges not unknown to our long-ago forebears.  While our prehistoric predecessors may not have been triathletes, their ability to overcome incredible adversity in their grueling, often ceaseless, quest for safe habitat and adequate food conjures images not dissimilar to those coursing through the psyches  of the legions of runners making the turnaround at the Energy Labs. And perhaps for some subset of those competing at each Hawaii Ironman, it may be when the chips are really down that the racer achieves her/his greatest destiny.

I've had the honor of competing four times at Kona.  Besides the two races mentioned above, I also raced in '86 and '87.  While neither of those races was accompanied by any mysterious plot akin to a fracture or cancer, it's also interesting to note that neither race produced a podium performance.  Of her sickly, accident-prone brother, my sister once said I'm a glutton for punishment.  Turns out, she (and we) didn't know half the story!

The Flipped Race

Back in the '80s, none of my triathlon buddies would have ever accused me of being fast in the water. Never a competitive swimmer while young, like most triathletes, I dipped my feet into the wet world of triathlon's inland lakes and ocean bays by learning how to swim competitively in order to be a triathlete. A land animal, my only hope in most triathlons was to get out of the water not too far behind the top dogs and try to bike and then run down as much of the competition as possible. This was a fine strategy in local and sometimes regional races, but it worked less well whenever up against the top talent. In Hawaii in '84, I had top 10 bike and run splits, but my swim time (57 minutes and change) placed me 72nd overall, more than seven minutes back on most of that day's eventual competition. Indeed, the more I relied on the bike and run, the less confident I became as a swimmer, especially in races against the best. And despite getting into the 54 minute range at Kona, my swim remained through my mid-1980s life as a triathlete a pale, some would say pathetic, pretender to the triad.
 
Twenty-five years later, now with 40,000 miles of running in the body and much of it done on hard surfaces, the body was less willing to run well in training, never mind far. In particular, chronically sore achilles precluded the possibility of training long or hard on hard surfaces. Sure, the body could still churn out a sub-18 minute 5K and get in the 3:35 range for the marathon leg of an ironman in a competitive moment when it had to. But the requisite proper training, especially for the Ironman distance, seemed out of reach, the 50 year old body variously unwilling or unable to undergo the training I'd remembered in younger years.

So, as I made the decision to Go For Kona in November of 2010, and given that I was training in Saudi Arabia, where you could go a lifetime and not see anyone running outdoors, the decision to complete most of the running training on treadmill, indoors, made sense, especially in the summer months leading to Kona, after I'd qualified in Port Elizabeth at Ironman South Africa. Treadmill workouts didn't leave me nearly as beat up and sore. They also connected me to a gym workout world that I'd always avoided but at 50, and losing muscle mass and flexibility, now needed.

Thus began a calculated decision, a risk really, to run sparingly outside while building the lion's share of base miles and eventual speed indoors on the treadmill. While I'd never even dreamed of this kind of approach before, over the years I'd read of a number of top runners who, for various reasons, had used treadmills in their training. Besides, my body and the local weather weren't giving me much choice; in the end, the decision was perhaps inevitable.

All told, about 90% of my running mileage took place on a treadmill. Going into IMSA last April, I'd run a dozen or so times outside, the longest of which was slightly over two hours and 18 miles in duration.  I had a good but not great run in South Africa yet knew that the stakes would be much higher in October. But the running road to Kona was more complicated, the half-century old running body seemingly less willing to abide long outdoor runs, in part due to our whistle-stop six weeks of traveling in the U.S. during June and July, when all training became catch-as-catch-can, and in part due to the insanity of training outdoors in Saudi Arabia most any time in August or September, once we returned.

Perhaps knowing where all this was headed, I focused where I knew I could and must: the bike, and especially the swim. The few swimming folks on our compound took pity on me. An Australian woman, already a swim coach on campus, met me regularly to deconstruct and gradually reconstruct my stroke, while an Englishman, and the only guy on campus who swims daily and well here, took apprentice-me on as a project, giving me the regularity of brutal interval workouts and the clarity of someone always just a bit ahead. Gradually, the swim came around, so much so that by the end of September I felt in as good a swim shape as ever, possibly minus a smidgen of the raw speed of one's 20s.

If anyone would have predicted my 2nd fastest swim time among the top 10 in the 50-54 age group at Kona this past October, just a few minutes slower than Krissy Wellington (who didn't have to contend with the age-group multitudes) land-lubber-me would have called them crazy! Similarly, if anyone would have said I'd run only the 7th best run split of the top 10, I'd have thought them more crazy. Yet changes to one's body during aging are difficult to anticipate; knowing how these changes will play out in the "Kona heat of competition" are even more difficult to predict.

Be that as it may, on October 8, 2011 I knew I'd be playing my two best cards on the swim and the bike, so it wasn't a tremendous surprise when I got off the bike in third and by mile 15 had moved up to second, less than 90 seconds back, and about 15 minutes ahead of my Kona PR pace from way back in '84. And then, perhaps predictably, the years of running, a 2:29 marathon PR, and a personal triathlon history of always moving up during the run met the mid-life reality of insufficient preparation combined with world class competition. Nine hours into racing, pedigree didn't matter, the auto-pilot of survival kicked in, and the late-race Darwinism of out-lasting others in the age group, all in similar stages of delirium, became the only imperative. That I was able to hang on for 5th place remains a mystery, just like life itself.  Okay, I suppose I should thank my swim!

The biggest lesson learned last October may just have been that in every one of us there is this tremendous ability to adapt in order to compete. I still wouldn't consider myself a swimmer per se, but I can say this recent flirtation with aquatic success has sparked a new interest in swimming on a somewhat regular basis, possibly as a cornerstone to a second half-century of healthy living. I may not love swimming the way I long first-loved running, but 31 years after completing my first triathlon I can now hold my head high in the post-race analysis, a bit amazed that for once it wasn't the swim that held me back!                   

Actually, it is about the bike

Lance has it wrong.  It is about the bike. Over the race's three and a half decades, time improvements at the Hawaii Ironman Triathlon World Championships have largely been dictated by drastic enhancements in bike technology. Not always, not for everyone, but in general when times have come down for athletes, they've come down due to improvements in the bike the athlete is riding, with the bike split responsible for a disproportionate amount of the time improvement.  And that includes, to some extent, the average but much less steep improvements in run times, since a better, more relaxed bike time trial position can lead to a more comfortable ride and, therefore, a better chance at the marathon. A bike that allows an athlete to rest once in awhile and to feed better places the athlete in an overall more comfortable position, almost by definition allowing for a faster run.

It wasn't always this way. There's a famous picture of Dave Scott, early on in his career, pedaling away on your basic ten-speed bike of yore - sans aero bars, aero helmet, multiple feeding and drinking options, bar-end shifters, aero wheels and all the rest of the wizardry that's now standard on most triathlon bikes, including on every single bike I saw at Kona last October. In fact, it was probably still only a twelve-speed road frame, with regular road drop bars, that Dave used in '84 when he became the first Kona athlete to break nine hours en route to demolishing the field yet again. Given what's happened to the two-wheeled beast since, Dave's performance remains nothing short of incredible.

How else to explain my 9:46 time at Ironman South Africa and 9:50 at Hawaii this past year at 50 years of age?  These times didn't happen because suddenly at 50 I became a faster runner or swimmer than I was in my prime, or that I was not pushing myself during my PR 9:43 in '84 at Kona. In '84, probably like many, I was on a classic steel road frame bike weighing about 21 lbs. A friend of mine on our college's French language program in the Pyrenees had bought it for me used in the ubiquitous Tour de France watering hole of Pau, for the franc equivalent of $300.  I can still remember how exciting it was to unpack that amazing machine, reassemble the requisite parts, and go for a first ride on and actual European racing bike. I was 21 years old and I was hooked.

For its era, my trusty Zeus was a very fine bike. It won the Michigan state road race in June of '83, went to US Cycling Nationals in San Diego that August, won about a dozen triathlons, completed a 10-hour Ironman in Minnesota in July of '84, and was now primed to perform at its first Hawaii Ironman in October of '84. Indeed, after its owner did his usual so-so swim and exited in 72nd overall, the red Zeus got down to work and blitzed through the 112 mile course in a top-ten bike time that day of 5:23. The '83 Ironman champ and top '70s US cyclist John Howard was the only person to pass us, en route to his  new Ironman record bike time of 4:53, on a day that saw him and Mark Allen become the very first Kona triathletes in history to break five hours on the bike.

Yet as good as Dave, Mark, John and others from the '80s were on their bikes - and they were amazing! - their times would not hold a candle to the times being posted now, and not just by the top dogs, but by increasing numbers of folks, young and not so young, male and female, all of whom compete on faster and faster bikes. In arguably the best cycling shape of my life at 23, and even with a top-ten overall Kona bike split, my 5:23 in '84 was 25 minutes slower than the 4:58 I posted this past October in Kona at the age of 50. Even though my life at 23 was triathlon, and despite having great success both as a bike racer and as cyclist during triathlons, there wasn't much more speed I could have gotten out of that Zeus. Put another way, how else to explain the Kona bike time of a 50 year-old full-time teacher, husband, and father stuck on a very small compound in Saudi Arabia than the pedal poetry of a Scott Plasma TT bike?

So when folks talk to me about how much faster triathletes are today, I remind them that just about all of that time improvement has come due to advances in bike technology. Mark's run-leg record from the '80s still stands, and many of the fastest swim times ever can still be traced back to the '80s. But with cycling times you'd be hard-pressed not to think that somewhere along the way they'd shortened the bike leg by about 10 miles, so incredibly fast are the times being posted today. Indeed, while I was happy to post a 4:58 in Kona last year, breaking five hours at Kona is becoming standard fare in more and more age groups, especially if an athlete hopes to stand on the podium the next evening. And if you're a pro male, breaking 4:30 is the new norm, with the very fastest now able to eclipse 4:20 (even a guy like winner Craig Alexander, who many would not have called one of the top cyclists in triathlon - until his breakout 4:19 bike split in October, that is!).

Indeed, field size creep, the lack of wet suits, and the massive mass swim start almost certainly mean Kona swim times won't be improving any time soon.  Meanwhile, run times have improved, marginally, but mostly because nutrition during the race and general training strategies have improved. Toss in the improved ergonomics of cycling, which makes for an easier transition to the run, and you've got a lot of good triathletes with running backgrounds who can break or come close to breaking three hours now for the marathon leg. Finally, let's not forget that less time on the bike means less time racing, which in general will lead to faster run times because the athlete just hasn't been at it as long.

My dream would be to see each of the top Kona athletes of all time competing in the same swim suits, on the same bikes, and sporting the same shoes in a race for all time. My guess is that some of the top dogs in this new generation would be surprised - and that there'd be some amazing PR bike splits among the older guard!  Forget what Lance says, it's definitely about the bike.