Anti-Doping

   There are those who would do most anything to gain an advantage, like doping.  Then there are those who are quite happy being at a disadvantage, like me.
   My 1986 road bike, which I still use and even race, was made for me by Mark Nobilette.  Legions of bikes and bicyclists (including Lance's entire career) have come and gone in the nearly three decades since Mark first selected the Columbus SL tubing and lugs that, together, became the bike I've most come to love more than any other bike.  Why get rid of something that works perfectly well?
   When I race, I often  hear "wow, you still have a steel frame!", or "my father used to have a bike like that."  While a certain reverence creeps into the occasional voice, I can tell from many of the looks and gestures that most of my competitors wouldn't be caught with shaved legs and a tight kit on a boring green steel bike like mine.
   Yet I love this bike.  It was made for me, literally "manufactured," by a master craftsman who has devoted his entire professional life to making works of art that happen to have two wheels and a groupo attached.  That bike replaced another Nobilette that was stolen out of my car after a race in Chicago, which in turn replaced a first Nobilette bike that was totaled by a speeding car near Ann Arbor.  Third time's a charm, I guess.
   Long ago I could shaved about two or three pounds and maybe gotten just a bit faster by going the ubiquitous carbon fiber route.  But why bother?  Most folks carry a bit more weight than they need, or don't train nearly as well as they might, or don't race as smart as they could.  Is a little more frame weight really going to make that much of a difference?  And if it's bike weight that truly does matter, isn't it better to get some lighter wheels and pedals and focus on weight that moves, rather than weight that is fixed? 
   My commuter bike knows this tune.  It's a Cannondale M1000, vintage 1993, which is to say it's suddenly 20 years old, which is to say that it, like its road sibling, has now covered the equivalent of two loops around the earth.  Its dings and scratches and bumps and bruises are too numerous to count.  Its rear pannier rack is so old and worn that one day, with an especially heavy load, I'm quite sure it's going to crack off, and maybe I with it.  Yet I can't get rid of it.  Bike love is complex; for separate but related reasons, I also love this bike. 
   With it I have trained with guys on fast road bikes (with back rack and unshaven legs getting equal stares), pulled sleeping sons in bike trailers, commuted thousands of days and tens of thousands of miles to teaching jobs, hauled tons of groceries and sundry household items, been run into by more than a few cars, and, not least, taken groups of school kids on some of their first bike trips or mountain bike rides. 
   My wife wants me to get rid of it and my sons smirk at it when I ride with them, but I just love it and ride it again.  The original seat is worn so badly that its tan under-layer has now become its dominant color.  The water bottle cage broke off a few thousand miles back, about the time my commutes became short enough to absolve me from the responsibility of replacing it.  The right pedal is comprised of just the spindle and struts, the rest of having fallen off after some long-forgotten calamity. 
   Yet I love these bikes.  They are a part of me, and I a part of them.  They have made me stronger and better than I might have been.  They hardly bear any resemblance to the bikes I see in magazines and races, but these are the bikes that have largely made me into the person I have become, and for them I am grateful.  I hope my sons can have bikes like these one day - but they can't have mine!
 

Family Fun Mountain Biking

   If 2011 included attending one tune-up triathlon (Abu Dhabi), two ironman triathlons (South Africa and Kona) and the hours and hours of training and preparation that led to those multi-sport forays, 2012/2013 have provided a helpful reminder of what allowed for 2011's successes.
   My mother says that if you don't have your health you have nothing.  2012, and now 2013, have allowed me to more fully appreciate the health and strength I depended on - and took for granted - in 2011.  By battling thyroid cancer so soon after being on the podium at Kona, I was able to underscore how personal health is so very much higher on the list than quick swimming, biking or running.
   Inextricably related to physical well being are emotional peace and strength.  2011 allowed for a specific expression of strength, but I wasn't very far into 2012 when just about all of that supposed strength had waned.  As 2012 has emphasized, it takes a whole heck of a lot of time to get in top shape and about no time at all to get out of it. 
   Which is why emotional peace and well being are important - and more transcendent - than being Kona Fit.  And, for me, here is where family plays a huge role, a role that reaches way back earlier than 2011 and looks to extend its reach well beyond 2013.
   Take yesterday's family mountain bike outing, for example. I'd been so busy in 2011 triathlon training and racing that I'd hardly ever ventured off campus to participate in the weekly mountain bike excursions.  Worse, when I had gone mountain biking I'd not thought about taking my family along, so focused was I on training and being competitive.
   Pulling out of Ironmania and gaining a bit of perspective has allowed events like yesterday's to occur.  I was able to watch my wife transfixed by the austere beauty of the arid landscape as she pedaled up, down and around.  A late winter rain had brought a sudden burst of grasses and flowers, a botanical ephemera only fully appreciated when you've had, like we, less than 1cm of rain in 600 days.
   While Hayden is older and stronger, Logan's determination carried him along our 24 kilometers quite well.  Both bumped and jived on their bikes, willing them to go where they wouldn't have naturally, pushing their limits and thereby coming to a truer understanding of themselves. 
   When I watch my boys being active I can't help but feel a certain vicarious affection.  All parents see at least some of themselves in their children; my emotional projections and connections to them are perhaps strongest when they are active, in part, I'm sure, because of how my life has been so strongly defined by the physical.
   In any case, it was a lovely day, a welcome change to the humdrum of cloistered campus living that normally defines our weekends here in Saudi.

No News is Bad News

   Ironman is family, or at least that is what the folks at Ironman would have you believe.  Given that the Ironman is arguably one of the toughest one-day endurance events, I suppose Ironman can lay claim to being part of the Endurance Sports Family.  Andrew Messick,  Ironman.com CEO, was attempting to embrace this aerobic tribe just after the recent bombings at the finish of the Boston Marathon, when he sent out a latter to many thousands of Ironman triathletes, which is to say all in the Ironman Family, expressing the collective and heartfelt sorrow of endurance athletes worldwide for the cowardly and tragic actions of what now appear to be two sadly misguided brothers.
Mr. Messick is certainly entitled to "round the wagons" of the endurance community and remind his family of triathletes that the show must go on, but by calling attention to the tragedy of one race while not bringing nearly as much attention or focus to tragedies in his own races, Mr. Messick runs the risk of being labeled a hypocrite.
   My family had the rare opportunity to travel to South Africa about a month ago.  As much as I would have liked to, we were not there for Ironman South Africa 2013, which was occurring a bit more than a week later.  Instead, we were there to visit a too small bit of this amazingly beautiful country, landing in PE and then driving on the "Garden Tour" to majestic Cape Town 800 km to the west.  Being in PE, thoughts naturally went back to 2011 and IMSA on my 50th birthday.  I had always wanted an actual copy of the 2012 IMSA official race magazine, which ran a feature article by editor Paul Ingpen on this weird guy who trained on a small compound in Saudi Arabia and qualified for Kona, and which mentions and quotes me (okay, the weird guy), and even has a photo of me/weird guy with the 2012 and subsequent 50-54 winner, in various other parts of the magazine.   Thankfully, a bike shop in Cape Town had a few extra copies, and so we picked up the 2012 edition while also getting a copy of the hot-off-the-presses 2013 edition, to be given to the IMSA 2013 triathletes that coming week at race check-in.  While the 2012 edition was fun to read for personal reasons, the 2013 edition said the most by not saying anything about something hugely important.
   At the height of their summer, January 2013 is the half Ironman season in South Africa.  Ironman calls these races 70.3 events (70.3 being exactly half of the 140.6 miles of a full ironman) and it turns out, tragically, that this year's South African edition of the race saw not one, but two, fatalities during the swim, both to men with no previous cardiac or respiratory conditions who were in their 20s/30s and therefore able to be my sons.
   The Ironman corporation and the magazine had ten weeks to sort out a tactful, appropriate response to this tragedy to be placed in their flagship magazine, yet nothing was done.  They were able to feature race results and an article about Abu Dhabi's triathlon in early March, more than a month later than 2013 IMSA 70.3, for one example, but no matter where you look in the magazine not a word is printed about how the 2013 IMSA 70.3  race unfolded - or the two deaths that will forever be associated with the race.  Ironman has been down this road before.
   In 2012 when they had the first (and last) edition of Ironman NYC, a not dissimilar drowning occurred in that race as well. Every news organization on the planet got the news out about the drowning, but Ironman was again mostly mum, only posting the perfunctory, expected, corporate-speak condolences on its website but certainly not getting the big word out to its "Family" of triathletes around the world like it did with the Boston disaster... when it was some other race organization's mess.
   Ironman is very protective of its brand, and rightly so - it has created an idea that has become iconic; it would rather avoid being ironic.  Yet Ironman has been growing its brand at a fast and, some would say, alarming pace.  For increasing numbers of endurance athletes, to be a triathlete is synonymous with being an Ironman triathlete, never mind that the vast majority of triathlons in the world are not Ironman races, and many of those not by a long shot.  No matter, Mr. Messick and company have done such a good job of promoting "Brand Ironman," which is to say the Ironman distance of the sport of triathlon, that its super-sized 3.8k/180k/42.2k swim/bike/run is now the sine qua non standard of virtually every triathlete, like it or not.  Gone, or at least going, are the days when a person got involved with multi-sport races by doing a bunch of shorter triathlon races.  Now, Ironman is the standard by which anything tri-athletic is measured, and Ironman, the corporation, has dealt with this rapidly growing mass of wanabes by creating new Ironman brand races as well as growing the races it already has to overflow. 
   I'm not a great swimmer and never will be.  However, I've done six Ironman races (PB of 54 minutes in Kona), dozens of other triathlons, a number of long swim races, and spent multiple summers life-guarding, allowing for a healthy respect for the sport.  Bike crashes are never fun, and running can make the body feel like it's hit a wall, but of the triad there is nothing remotely more dangerous than swimming.  We are land animals, after all.  Some of us even sink with full lungs!
   Ironman promotes and sells its product very effectively, but my strong feeling is that it is not doing enough to make sure that those who sign up for its races are at least reasonably qualified to safely complete the swim leg under race conditions.  In addition, Ironman can and should do more to keep its swim legs safe.  The recent South African 70.3 had choppy conditions, fairly warm water (26 or so Celsius), a delay to the start on the beach, a run into the water, no or limited opportunities for a swim warm-up just prior to the race, a record number of race entries, and athletes in wetsuits.  Taken one at a time each of these could be considered a potential danger; taken as a composite, and experienced by those lacking just that, they could be lethal - and were for two.
   Ironman can't be blamed for not clearly listing the possible and plentiful dangers in its long races - like all events of this nature, it has an extensive waiver for athletes to sign, and the two who died certainly signed theirs.  However, there has been such meteoric growth in the sport that it's unavoidably true that along with this increase in numbers has been a concomitant increase in numbers of folks with little or no relevant swim training that would adequately prepare for myriad conditions race day.  Many athletes new to triathlon are skipping the shorter triathlons and moving directly into the longer races for their tri-baptisms.  While some of them are undoubtedly strong swimmers and have no problem with this transition to long-course triathlons, many are less strong, with a few even perhaps quite weak.  It is this latter group, inexperienced and under-prepared yet gushing with Ironmania, that would have the most to lose on race day.
   Spec-Savers had been the main sponsor of Ironman South Africa for a decade.  Not long after the 70.3 debacle, Spe-Savers decided not to extend its relationship with the Ironman brand in RSA.  Only weeks after the 2012 NYC Ironman triathletes learned that a 2013 edition of the race had been cancelled.  The 2012 race had sold out in minutes, and at $1000 per athlete, making it possibly the potentially most lucrative of Ironman's burgeoning quiver of races.  Coincidence?
   Both races suggest that Ironman may have a bit of a problem on its hands - how to grow a product that may be potentially unsafe to some of its would-be consumers?  Any solution would be a complicated one, to be sure, but Ironman's best bet is honesty and full disclosure, and on these counts my sense is that it's coming up short - in a long race.