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.

Cooling off in Kona

Training for an Ironman isn’t simple. At least not at 50. Beginning thirty years ago, when I had my first go at triathlons, training was simple. Okay, at least it was simpler. Sleep, eat, train. Repeat. Do a race. Repeat all. In retrospect, it was quite the life.

On the game changer, with Red Sea in background

Fast-forward half a lifetime, and things have changed just a bit. Okay, they’ve changed a lot. For one, your 50’s aren’t your 20’s. Those of you who have experienced this know what I mean. For the rest of you, hold on. The body that could train hard every day, often twice a day – sometimes, I admit, even three times a day - has handed the reins over to a body that has to be carefully, conservatively, cautiously trained.

Connective tissue is unfamiliar with amnesia; it always recalls the wear and tear you’ve given it in a Santa-esque “it knows if you’ve been good or bad” kind of way. Of the triad, running sends the most “hey, wait a minute!” notices.

And instead of young and single, I’m married, with two boys, living on a research university compound a couple of camel paces from the Red Sea. A full-time teaching job fills the days, effectively pushing all training to either end of the workday, or the weekend. Lots of us know this drill – but in Saudi Arabia? Just for starters, chances are your weekend isn’t Thursday/Friday.

Recollections of scenic, varied cycling in a former life have given way to the Sahara-like reality of a pancake flat network of 11 measly miles of lonely campus cycling. The roads in my neighborhood are like a bad tattoo – unavoidable, immutable, in the very least subconsciously dreaded, especially when the next workout is a ride.

About a mile is the longest distance between stop signs, traffic circles, or stoplights on this compound’s road network. When the goal is to sustain the highest possible speed, hour after hour, knowing that you’re breaking the law about every 1.8 minutes, in a country whose legal system remains enigmatic, adds extra spice to each ride. Yes, I am an inveterate scofflaw and, despite 3,197 moving violations and counting, I’ve been pulled over only once by the ubiquitous campus security. I think they are so surprised that someone, anyone, would train hard outdoors here that most of them take pity on me.

Apart from the chance of being pulled over by security, tedium’s other antidote here seems to be the unanticipated call to prayer from any of the five campus mosques. If you happen to be riding close by at, say, 5:25 am, the muezzin’s peak-volume “Allah Akbar!” from any of the many minaret loudspeakers is guaranteed to break you out of your reverie. One time, riding in the pre-dawn dark, trying to capture the few remaining moments under 100F that day, I was so surprised by the mosque’s call to prayer that I almost jumped out of my skin and crashed the bike. I’ve never been fast in transition; perhaps a recording of a call to prayer would help me?

Of course the call to prayer beats the pack of wild dogs that used to live on campus’s quiet north end. If you ever feel like slow-twitch muscle fiber is all you’re made of, a pack of feral curs nipping at your back wheel will inject a Cavendish-like performance to your next 400m.

And forget racing. Or at least forget racing anywhere near here. Unless your yearly competitive expectations are a single 5K Family Fun Run and a 15-minute circuit bike race mostly against non-racers, one in January, the other in February, competing at anything or anytime else pretty much means heading to the airport and sowing your competitive seeds elsewhere.  Here elsewhere means in a different country, or, more typically, on a different continent. There are no triathlons in this country. My guess is that the swim would be a challenge in one of the world’s most arid regions.  Securing a bike course might be difficult as well.

I wouldn’t dare ride off this compound. In fact, you have to have your wits about you to even drive off campus. Getting passed by a car driving on the shoulder going 120 mph isn’t uncommon in these parts. In two and a half years of living here, I’ve never seen an actual road cyclist training off campus.

The one Saudi triathlete I know, a woman from Jeddah, has to fly out of kingdom, or ride on our paucity of campus roads, if she wants to ride outdoors. Ditto for running. Unless it’s “winter,” about four weeks when temperatures can drop into the ‘60s and ‘70s F and humidity gets put on pause, running happens early or indoors.

Preparing for the qualifier in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, was relatively easy. The race was early April, so the preceding months of Dec. – March provided reasonable weather and, as luck would have it, conditions not dissimilar to those in South Africa.

As it turns out, IMSA, the actual triathlon race, was the easy part. The hardest part about racing my first Ironman in 24 years was dealing with the local beef jerky I should not have eaten the day before the race. Impulse shoppers trying to qualify for Kona, beware. Halfway through the marathon, I had to pay a visit to my first porta-potty in hundreds of endurance races stretching over a lifetime. Barging in on a woman who may well have eaten the same jerky only added to the panic and confusion. Fortunately, an adjacent (and empty) porta-potty beckoned, and in short order I was back out on the marathon course, no longer cringing, waddling and praying for the sweet sight of a pre-fab plastic room with its trademark smelly holding tank.

The lead-up to Kona was quite different. If timing is everything, there were now four good reasons why my already limited-at-age-50 training shrank still more. The list begins with June and ends with September. Chances are your summer heat has got nothing on the blast-furnace notoriety of Arabian heat. To make matters worse, along the Red Sea epic heat often conspires with hobbling humidity to make exercising outside dangerous, perilous, in truth, ridiculous. Indeed, as it turned out, Oct. 8 in Kona was downright cool and comforting compared to the vagaries of summer training on the Arabian Peninsula.

As a consequence of our legendary heat, occasional open water swims in the Red Sea, soothing and even cooling leading up to IMSA, now became impossible – unless you wanted to simulate swimming in liquid the temperature of, say, your own urine.

And with running, the earlier and earlier morning run times needed just to survive the rapidly increasing heat of the final miles finally ran out of “earlier.” My early was so early that even our 7 year-old was falling asleep later than his daddy. Eventually, I had written certifiable running out of the script and was instead relying on dates with our campus sports club’s treadmill – the one to the left, in the relative shade, as opposed to the three on the right, decidedly not in the shade. Even by a window in the comparative cool of Saudi Arabia’s ubiquitous air conditioning, the sun’s power here is insidious, withering. At the air-conditioned gym I’d go through three shirts – one as a rag to control my sweating faucet of a head, another to change into right after getting off the treadmill so folks wouldn’t think I’d fallen in the swimming pool, and a final one to change into to survive the freezing air conditioning of the hallway on the way out. Air-conditioning and indoors go hand-in-hand here. Of course, when’s the last time you raced a triathlon indoors?  Or did Kona with air-conditioning?

As if training for an Ironman in Saudi Arabia during the summer months isn’t enough of a challenge, this was our summer to return stateside and visit family and friends we’d not seen for two years since taking teaching jobs overseas. So, just as intelligent Kona-bound triathletes were honing regimens, striving for consistency, and letting nothing deter them from pursuing their goals, we were living out of suitcases, sleeping in nine different cities in five weeks, and catching up with friends and family - just the kind of transient routine that does wonders for a pre-world-championship training regimen.

My better half and I

To make matters just a bit more complicated, anxiety over damaging the TT bike just purchased led to taking my trusty 1985 steel frame road bike instead, since I knew it’d be repeatedly shoved onto planes and crammed into rental cars. So, for a good chunk of the summer I was trying to squeeze in some sort of watered-down, half-baked, catch-as-catch can Kona regimen that only served to make me more nervous about, and less prepared for, the date with fate ahead.

And then we returned to Saudi Arabia - in early August! – right when no one reasonably sane here would be even considering training. With cycling there was air movement, and so I managed to stay outside, actually cycling, rather than consign myself to yet more mindless indoor workouts. Yet the meager miles of road surface became like a bad meal served over and over. And, in a cruel joke to those in need of maximal road mileage, the campus engineers shut down a sizeable section of the roads toward the beginning of summer, further limiting the already pathetic menu of ride-able surfaces. Imagine swimming in a great lake, then a pond, and finally a bathtub. By August, that’s pretty much what happened to the cycling training map I fondly remembered from my 20s.

In the end, withstanding the constant heat, humidity and monotony paved the way for success at a race well known for its heat, humidity and monotony. We may not have mindless lava, but endless desert is a worthy contender in the art of brain deadening. For some last minute training, I added to the week’s endurance drama by traveling 13 time zones to get to Kona. On the first flight, from Jeddah to NYC, I’d already been on a plane for 12 hours, in a taxi for 1.5 hours, and at an airport for 2.5 hours. Combined total: 16 hours. That was before getting in line at customs. Or waiting five hours during my JFK layover. And I still had continental U.S. and almost half the Pacific to fly across! T1, JFK; T2, LAX. Slower transitions have never been achieved. And I wasn’t even changing clothes - though I probably should have.

To add a final exclamation point to the Kona expedition, on the way back a harried flight check-in person in Kona decided to give my suitcase a Belgian triathlete’s tag (I still wonder if his bag got my tag?), so instead of accompanying me more than halfway around the world home, my bag decided that wasn’t far enough and took a detour through Brussels, and then Frankfurt, before finally making the trip to Jeddah. Too bad bags and bikes don’t earn frequent flyer miles.

Podium to podium - 27 years

In 1984, at the tender age of 23, I somehow finished 7th overall at the Hawaii Ironman Triathlon World Championship.  I was the youngest of the top seven, the only non-Californian among the Americans.  Twenty-seven years later, in October of 2011, at the decidedly less tender age of 50, I came out of triathlon retirement and managed to finish 5th in the 50-54 age group. This time I was the only person in the race who had traveled from Saudi Arabia, where my family and I currently live and work. I was perhaps the only Kona finisher ever to train through an Arabian summer and fly 13 time zones to get to the finish line on Ali'i Drive. These podium finishes at triathlon's hallmark event, one coming early in life, the other placing itself squarely at the half-century mark, have bookended a life of fitness and activity, a life for which I'm tremendously grateful.

Being a part of the fast-growing sport of triathlon in the early and mid-80s provided many lessons, some of which I'd like to share in this blog. Coming back to the sport now, after it has achieved Olympic status, with national, world and Ironman championships beckoning from every page of the calendar and hundreds of thousands labeling themselves triathletes the world over, also lends valuable perspective, and in entries to follow I'd like to share some of those thoughts as well.

However, it's the overarching punctuation of life, ideas gained in the years preceding that first Kona race, and especially the lessons learned in subsequent years away from the sport, that have informed and instructed and which should make themselves known through future entries.

So, if you're intrigued about the sport of triathlon and want to get one athlete's feel for the "then and now," this might be a blog to follow; I will try to update regularly, and I thank you in advance for reading.  Stay tuned.

David