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.
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.
