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!