A Forest for rest

A five minute bike ride from our Stuttgart apartment brings you to a simple forest, about 100 acres in total.  Since I'm typically the only one running its crisscross of trails very early on a weekday morning, or a bit later on a weekend, over the past year I've come to think of this sylvan spot as my own, a treasure of trees and the animals, seen and unseen, that attend.  We'll be leaving Germany at the end of this week, and the mental and emotional withdrawals, preceding the physical, have consistently ranked the forest as the biggest loss for me in our move.  I'm already in mourning.
The forest has taught me, again, of the importance of daily outside time, of just being quiet with self in nature.  Bike commutes can help, and after dinner walks with family are special, but nothing compares with an early morning run in one's own forest, the birds ever chirping, the occasional fox, deer or jack rabbit scurrying, and all of it presided over by the ever watchful hawks in the high trees adjacent the fields.
As I've found over the past forty years of competition as an endurance athlete, when training, developing a sense of attachment to place is important.  A good pool with a consistent masters swim program, a strong cycling group with regular rides of varying length and speed, a nearby track program with weekly speed workouts - all these can help the triathlete.  Yet developing a personal, visceral connection to one's own natural environment  is equally if not more important, at least from my perspective.
When I did my first triathlon in 1981 while still in college, the campus arboretum adjacent the college was my personal cathedral, a place I could run and mentally recharge.  A mental map of its running trails is still ingrained in my head.  A few years later, now in Ann Arbor, it was another arboretum that gained my spiritual favor, allowing me to experience its many hills and trails while working my way through graduate school and to a podium finish at Kona in '84, a tricky two-step if ever there was one.  Following Ann Arbor, NYC beckoned, and with it the many treasures of Central and Prospect Parks, both of which I came to know intimately while dedicating myself to running and launching a teaching and coaching career.  Funny, but the trees and trails of New York City linger longer than the many buildings and people.  After NYC, Seattle, home to more than 200 parks, was the next stop, two of which, Green Lake/Woodland Parks, just up the hill from our Ballard home, would become the source of much running and ski-bounding satisfaction in our nearly two decades in the city before leaving for teaching jobs overseas.
Yet none of these can compare with the attachment I've come to feel for the simple collection of trees just down the trail from our apartment here in Plienningen.  In the morning, there is no greater feeling than to achieve a steady pace on a run and be surrounded by trees, this city's lungs.  In the distance, the A8 autobahn churns away, or up the hill I may hear the U3 ubahn whir by, but it's the music of nature that truly envelopes and transports me to runs in the '70s, when woods near home and school snared me forever as a runner and set me quite literally on a life quest of paths less traveled by.
I may never return to these woods again, yet my soul is enriched for having treaded its trails.  Here's hoping many more wooded trails await, wherever life transports.         

Root System

   Funny what a difference a little ball can make.  I'd been a runner all of my life, enjoying any running game as a child and parlaying that love into a string of amazingly gratifying years of competitive running in secondary school and college.  By my 30s I'd run nearly 30,000 miles and hundreds of races, including marathons, half marathons, 10 and 5Ks, as well as dozens of triathlons.  Still, even though my body was beginning to tell me that I'd pushed hard, I kept on running.  Dam the torpedos!
   Gradually, however, running became less fun, the body less able to recover from good runs, the mind less willing to embrace the idea of another run.  So I did what most inveterate endurance athletes do - I began coping by doing other sports, like blading, skiing, cycling, and then swimming, etc.  And I tried to forget running.
   No matter, once a runner, always a runner.  Meaning, any time I had a chance to include some running, like with ski bounding up and down hills with poles, I would will my body to run.
   The only problem is that by 40 running was not only not so fun, it had become downright painful, at least after the fact.  Knees and hips would be sore or tight, and a lower back, which I'd never noticed, would occasionally trigger its presence, especially after longer runs on harder surfaces.  But most of all, my achilles tendons, especially the left achilles, would let me know that they'd put in too many extra hours, without benefits, and needed a break.
   Then along came the mid-century mark of life, a chance to get back into Kona Fit, and I just pretended that all was well.  I mean, if I was going to get through the swim and bike legs, as a lifetime runner I was damn well going to make it through the marathon!
   And, frankly, that was largely my approach.  With the proverbial band-aids and hope, and just enough mileage to be a pretender and contender, I held the running body together just enough and made it through the marathons in Port Elizabeth and Kona, never running the mileage I knew an age group victory at Kona demanded, yet running just enough to fake it through the 42.2K at both races.  For neither event did my weekly running mileage top 25 miles, and let's remember that 25 miles isn't even the distance and Ironman must run!
   Finally, this year, a little green ball came into my life.  I'd tried new shoes of all sorts, inserts of every variety, various stretches and strengthenings, read articles of all persuasions - and at the end of the day it was the little green ball that did the trick.  Cost: less than $5.
   So what do I do?  Twice a day I place this textured ball (bigger than a golf ball but smaller than a tennis ball, with the density similar to that of a little league baseball) under my foot and press down hard.  I then roll my foot around, self-massaging each foot's undercarriage, pushing the ball into the metatarsal, the joints of each toe, the arch, the heel, and essentially any tiny part of the foot I can.  At first I was a bit timid, but now that my foot is used to it, even craves it, I press down with quite a force, taking the time to work the ball into the myriad geometries of the foot, noticing how the foot gives out a silent sigh of relief each time.
   The last year has been telling.  In the lead up to Kona 2011, my running mileage plateaued at about 20 miles a week, with many a week not even reaching that.  I wanted to run more in preparation, but May - Sept. Saudi Arabia was blazing, the tread mills were boring, and my running body was bust.  The finish line at Kona couldn't come fast enough, in part because I had essentially faked the final 10K, in part, let's face it, because the last 10 Kona K are a tough bargain no matter one's condition!
  So I just about quit running altogether, and in the following two years I don't think I ran more than once a month, if that, each time knowing my body would tell me all over again that running was dumb.
   But the little green ball has allowed the runner and me to believe again.  By rekindling the nerves and tissues of the feet and reworking the body's natural root system, I've allowed my feet to reawaken, and I've been as astonished as anyone since, as I've said, I honestly never expected to run much again.
   Why the change?  Our feet are complex, 3-D appendages that, until very recently, lived largely in a similar, unpredictable 3-D world.  Then along came shoes, limiting each foot's mobility. And paved, hard, flat surfaces, forcing the foot to go through repetitive motions each time, recruiting the same muscles, using the identical bones and tendons and ligaments.  And soon the natural foot of the homo sapien was coping with a world it did not know.  Hence foot problems.  Hence foot doctors.  Hence millions and millions of otherwise hopeful, intelligent, active folks, each with foot issues.
   The little green ball attempts to reboot the foot by reawakening the muscles and nerves of the foot and essentially teaching the foot to be its whole, vital, helpful self again.  Thousands and thousands of hard-pavement miles had essentially deadened my feet, forcing them to cope easily in my teens and twenties, but less and less well thereafter.  It was as if I'd been born with a full marching band but was now relying just on the snare drums and clarinets.  You can make music; it just probably won't be pretty!
   Yet now, with the little green ball, my feet are gradually undergoing an unanticipated renaissance.  Where before I dreaded running and looked to other sports for physical outlet, now I look forward to running a few days a week, almost as much as before.  At Kona in 2011, the swimming and cycling propelled me into the top three in the 50-54 age group by T2; now, with the runner in me gradually reawakening, I feel another Kona Comeback is possible.
  I will never reclaim my mid-20s running body, but over the past few months, whenever I'm out on the beautiful trails in Stuttgart's uibiquitous urban forests, I occasionally feel like the young man, now long ago, who ran a 1:10 half marathon and 2:29 marathon.  I know I don't have that speed today, but my happy feet make me feel like a true runner again, and that's a feeling I thought had disappeared forever.  It's like getting back in touch with a long lost friend.
 
   

Cross (Country) Training

Very often it's the unintended or unexpected that impacts the most.  We may train like mad, swimming, cycling and running to no seeming end, only to find that a small change in seat height, or a new sports drink, figured most heavily in the outcome of a race.  In truth, we like to think we know how to steer that ship of life, but we really don't.
Such was the case a few weeks back as we headed to Seiser Alm, a magnificent ski venue in the Italian Dolomites.  We were headed for a week of skiing, and word was the southern Alps (where we were headed) had stolen all of the snow from the north (where we live).  Only problem was that for the first winter in a long, long time, I'd not roller skied, or bounded with poles up hills, or done any one of a number of things Norwegians and others with similar Nordic builds and bent do to go fast on snow.  Settling into life in Germany had taken all of our time, and suddenly here it was, winter, and I needed to be in ski shape.
How then to explain the best week of skiing in my life, much of it at altitude?  Lifestyle, that's how.  You see, rather then explicitly train for cross country skiing, I'd added a much tougher and more wonderful bike commute to my life, replete with big hills, dark woods and plenty of fresh air.  In addition, I solved a long-plaguing foot problem and became a runner all over again, after pretty much having sworn off the chance of ever again feeling comfortable in running shoes.  Finally, when the weather allowed, and even sometimes when it most certainly did not, I got on my mountain bike or road bike and took to the amazing roads and trails of Schwabian Germany, noticing every time that being outdoors is what it's all about around here, no matter your age, and regardless the season and weather.  The net result is that I had inadvertantly trained for skiing, and rather than suffer through a week due to a lack of preparation, I was reminded that your classic multi-sport athlete's active lifestyle may be a good suitor to a variety of endeavors.  
Seiser Alm had simply the most beautiful ski trails I'd ever seen, and to do anything other than ski all over them each day we were there would have been sacrilege, and so I skied on, at first worried that by day three, Tuesday, I'd be spent.  Yet, strangely, rather then feel more tired, the days got easier even as daily mileage climbed.  Before long, I was tackling the biggest climbs and returning to favorite trails, knowing it would soon end but hoping it wouldn't.
Perhaps most interestingly, it was a week where I was able to push physically each day, sometimes for five or six hours, and find that my body is again strong and resilient.  I don't know if I have another Kona Offensive in me, but the week at Seiser Alm has shown that training can come in many stripes, and that this triathlete at least has made one big "transition" since 2012.  Here's to Cross (Country) Training!  
    

The Gift

What can be more special than that first real bike?  I still vividly remember mine, a purple five-speed banana seat Sears and Roebuck special, sent all the way to Accra, Ghana, where my family was living, just in time for Christmas.  My older sister got her new bike at the same time, and try as I might, I could not quite keep up with her on our back veranda, which essentially doubled as our own private race course and the place where my parents entertained, both events occurring sometimes at the same time to comic effect.

Being a father has brought back the fond first-bike memories.  Only this time, sans Sears and minus banana seats, we benefitted from the largesse of skiing friends, with kids just a bit older than ours, who'd already negotiated the fleeting year of beginner-to-future-champion-cycling not uncommon to five year-olds.

So, as I watched our oldest son Hayden grow to the almost-bike-ready age of four, I kept asking him if he was ready to take off the training wheels, and did he want to go over to the only flat, largish space around our neighborhood and become a "real" cyclist?  "No" was the constant reply, and even though I knew he was ready and just needed that final push, I allowed him to come to terms with that faltering balance that seems so hard initially but which becomes unnoticed instinct in short order.  

Finally, one dry early spring Seattle Sunday nearing his 5th birthday, I knew the time was ripe, but I couched the opportunity in "don't worry, I'm not going to let go of you and let you crash," and its slight variant, "it's just a chance to practice for the real thing later, when you're ready."  Reluctantly, he followed me out the door, walking beside me as I rode, proudly, his miniscule, bomb proof, shiny silver bike.

The Silver Bike - Logan's turn 2009

We got to the paved basketball court-cum-bike testing zone at West Woodland Elementary in short order, and soon he was on the bike, attempting to ride and turn and balance and, let's face it, do a bunch of things simultaneously that conflate into one fairly sizable psychic hurdle in the mind of a youngster.  Of course, I knew it wouldn't be easy, and so I held on to the seat post, bent over, getting the usual father back pain, and doing my best to keep up with his spurts and weaves and general gravitational dysfunctions.  I was just another dad willing his son's success, with son slowly, unpredictably, approaching that inevitable fail safe moment experienced by all cyclists.

At one point he pleaded, "dad, don't let go!", but I already had, though I stayed right behind him a bit longer, making it look like my hand was still on the bike, giving my supporting role pretense a bit more life, and allowing him to gain quick confidence.  He was into a turn and heading back when he realized that I hadn't been helping him with balance, and one of those smiles that remain forever ingrained in a father's memory beamed from his face as he realized he could ride a bike.

The Silver Bike - Teaching Logan to ride - 2009

Son number two, Logan, had to ride a bit earlier, of course.  Now about to be the introductory bi-pedal stepping stone for its sixth youngster, the shiny sliver bike was still an amazing machine, with a few more scuffs and dings but as intrepid and indestructible as ever.  Better yet, his older brother had used it and just about all of his older friends coveted it, so it had to be The Bomb.  And, just as before, I played the part of balance-helper and then faker, and in what seemed like a nanosecond we had a complete home of cyclists.

As I said, there is something special about that first bike, especially when it's the first bike of both your boys, not to mention two other families' kids.  So, even though the younger one was outgrowing it and the older one was beginning to look silly on it, we dutifully packed it up in our Saudi shipment in 2009, both parents probably thinking that the boys would soon outgrow it, each probably wondering "honey, so why are we packing this?"

The Silver Bike - Working on bikes in our garage - KAUST, Saudi Arabia 2012

The shiny silver bike, of course, had plans of its own.  Our younger one loved being in a place where you could ride every day of the year, and which was as flat and trafficless as Seattle wasn't, and soon the bike was getting more miles than it'd probably ever bargained for.  Better still, as soon as the youngest was off of it, the oldest often was on it, zipping around on it like a BMX Lawrence of Arabia.  The bike went with us everywhere, and the neighborhood kids couldn't wait to get on it and try it whenever, in a magnanimous and reluctant moment, either of the boys decided to relinquish it.  

Then, four years later and a whole lot bigger, and with alternate "big boy" bikes each, we found ourselves packing up for a move to Germany.  Though the bike wasn't getting nearly the use it had, both boys lobbied hard to have us include it in the shipment north.

The Silver Bike - passed on to its 7th new owner. Saudi Arabia 2013

Yet we knew, just like two sets of parents before us, that the bike would better serve the needs of younger boys and/or girls, planting the seeds of possibility just like it had for our boys.  So, reluctantly, and not without a few tears and regrets, we left the bike with a family with a young boy at the cusp of two-wheel bikehood, hoping that the bike would get into the boy's soul even half as much as it had dug into ours.

I've been thinking about the shiny silver bike recently.  Its legacy, including at least four families now, with kids from all corners of the globe who've happily ridden it, stretches back to a time I've learned more of in the past few days, a reminder that it's the little things in life that very often lead to lasting legacy.  The shiny silver bike was given to us by the Lindahls in 2004. Their two kids, Erik and Elyse, learned how to ride on it, but its origin stretches farther back, into the latter years of the 20th century, to another Kongsberger family many of us have been thinking a whole lot about this week.  You see, although dozens and dozens can claim to have ridden that shiny steel bike, only one person first rode it, and that was Torin Tucker, a person's whose inspiring legacy the cross country ski world has been commemorating this week.  The oldest of the Tucker/Lindahl/Evans kids, it was only natural that Torin would be the lead-off hitter in this amazing bike's game.  Sometimes, we don't know the gifts we give, and I'm quite certain Torin never knew that his parents passed the bike on to the Lindahls or, even if he did, that the Lindahls then sent the bike on to our family.  Torin touched the world in ways that many of us are only beginning to recognize; for one unknowing American boy and his buddies in faraway Saudi Arabia, Torin's gift just keeps on giving by continuing its legacy of smiles and dreams.  Thank you, Torin.     

       

Thinking of a friend

This blog exists in great part due to my friend, Scott Tucker.  In an earlier post I've spoken of our history as training and racing buddies in Seattle and elsewhere.  Scott was and is a standout cross country skier, triathlete, and, most recently, runner, and in part due to his achievements and example I've felt awed and inspired.   It was Scott who contacted me with his Ironmania in 2010, and who then called me from Kona that October and told me to get my triathlon butt back in shape so he could meet me on Ali'i Drive in 2011. Had I not followed his advice, qualified in South Africa and competed in Kona, this sporadic column would never have been.  Good or bad, the writing in this blog is due to Scott's original urgings for me to pack my transition bags and get on the Road Back to Kona.
More recently Scott had been living in Boulder, CO, and working at Pearl Izumi.  Although not as excited about his work designing PI's running shoe line as one might expect, having him there made it even more fun to visit in-laws in the Denver area.  The past few times in Denver, including this past summer, we'd gotten together for rides, general hanging out and having fun, comparing notes on training and racing, and catching up on family news.  His daughter had doted on our boys when they were tots, while his son, though quite a bit older than our boys, had gradually grown into the student/athlete example of father.  A keen math/science mind who just happened to be one heck of a cross country skier, he'd followed his parents' examples and was attending a top college, pursuing his academic and athletic dreams.
Which is why receiving news of his untimely death, at a collegiate cross country race in Vermont, where he was competing for Dartmouth, has sent my heart reeling and my thoughts ever returning to Scott and the anguish he must feel.  Being an endurance athlete exposes you to sometimes relentless pain.  The final miles of an Ironman bring emotional and physical deprivations I'd wish on no one.  All Ironman races aren't created equal; Kona raises the pain stakes even more with its heat and humidity and world championship tableau.
Scott has been through all of this and more and yet, as a father, I am sure that  nothing prepares us for the kind of pain Scott and his family must be feeling just now.
They say that outliving one's own child is the cruelest fate.  As adults, we can have our health setbacks, our troubles at work, our challenges in relationships, etc., but having a child die prematurely is a curse that can't be named, or that at least is so statistically rare that most of us are unfamiliar with its wrenching intimacies in the First World of the 21st century.
Competing for a Division I Ivy League school, Scott's son was doing what any of us would want our sons to be doing.  Sport, especially endurance sport, can provide the kinds of hard lessons and real learning we so hope for our children, and my guess is that is what Scott's son was reaping as a member of Dartmouth's legendary ski program this winter.
Cross country skiing may not be so well known a sport as some, but there isn't a sport out there with higher aerobic returns, which is another way of saying that it's a sport that punishes and demands as much as any endurance sport, even as much as Ironman.  No world class athletes have higher VO2 maxes than the top Nordic skiers, not even triathletes, cyclists or runners.  Although there may sometimes seem a fine line between physical demands of competition and death, in reality the average endurance athlete couldn't be more removed from the sad statistical realities of modern mortality inhabited by those with chronic diseases, or those who make poor choices.
Death in sport is rare, particularly in endurance sport.  While triathlon has lost some swimmers over the years (written about in this blog), death during competition is rare.  Particularly for a strong and healthy college student, in the prime of his life, competing in a sport few of us would associate with the kind of risk more often correlated with contact sports like football and hockey, death is all but unheard of.
Which makes today's news all the more unfathomable.
Last April, after hearing of the tragedy at Boston, I went out for a long run and pushed and pushed, hoping to spiritually complete a few of that Patriot Day's abbreviated miles and abridged races.  Running for them in solidarity, as an expression of brotherhood-through-sport, however, those athletes were unknown to me personally - though Scott, incredibly, was in the race that day.
Today, not coincidentally, I went out on my longest run since completing the marathon leg at Kona in 2011, now more than two years ago.  As I ran, I thought once again about the untimely intersection of athletic competition and premature death.  And while I gave thanks for the health of my family and the visible ongoing growth of my boys, chastened and anguished and on the verge of tears the whole way, I was also reminded to take nothing for granted.  We can't know when our last race will be, just as we can't truly know what the incredible demands of training and competition may really preparing us for.  My thoughts are with Scott and his family in this dark hour, praying for a new dawn ahead.
    

Financial Disparity Comes to Sport

A week or two back, which is to say the week of the 2013 NY City Marathon, a NY Times feature focused on marathon running's "Near Elites."  These are the journeymen marathoners many of us know (and a few of us have been), the ones not quite good enough to be elite distance runners, who don't have the sponsors or the world-class speed, but who do have full-time jobs, and often families, and therefore all sorts of reasons not to train as carefully as they usually do or be as fast as they often are.

With top male marathoners now regularly running under 2:10, and sometimes under 2:05, the Near Elite is a proud and typically unheralded secondary fiddle in a huge and apparently growing athletic orchestra, a warrior who runs in the 2:20 - 2:40 range, yet is well aware that 2:29 (this author's PR) is now an incredible minute per mile shy of the men's world record pace of 4:41/mile!  Thus, the Near Elite knows his place, and while it is clearly not at the edge of the starting line, huddled with the magazine-cover-shot masses of amazingly fast runners from across the globe, he is happy to tuck in just behind, hoping that an osmosis of talent can filter back and pull him along to a hallowed PR.

Yet the Near Elites aren't quite as near as they once were to the top, and this needs examining a bit.  In previous articles I have touched on the burgeoning field sizes and the vastly larger number of huge endurance events occurring across the globe.  At the marquee events in particular, gross participation seems to be the name of the game.  The just finished 2013 NY City Marathon was the largest marathon ever - anywhere - with 50,000 entrants, many of whom paid upwards of $200 to strut their stuff in the Big Apple's five boroughs.  You do the math.  Yet as field sizes have stretched the tape measures toward XXL, you'd think there would be a proportional increase in the both the size and quality of the Near Elites, just as there has been at the very top.  Not so.

The Near Elite article featured a local guy who had run NY City before, had a PR of 2:30, and was hoping to break into the Nearer Elites category by eclipsing 2:30, a goal of many Near Elites.  What was most interesting, to this author at least, is that in his previous NY City marathon he'd run 2:37 to finish 64th overall while, a generation earlier, I'd run 2:29 to finish 72nd overall.  Eight minutes faster to earn eight spots lower in one race do not a trend make.  Yet I'm betting you'd find similar statistics in many of today's bigger races.  Which begs the question: Is sport imitating life?

Legion are the articles about financial disparity. Maybe you, and me, mayors, cities, countries, even whole parts of the globe (like the Eurozone, from where I type) are worried about the growing schism between the haves and the have nots.  This widening economic rift is a fact of life in many parts of the world; persistent and possibly prescriptive going forward in unfortunate ways, this growing gap has many worried.

Intriguingly, if you look closely at America's wealth disparity, the top 1% may be pulling ever farther away from the rest of the field, but the top 1% of that 1% group are pulling away much faster, soaking up unimaginable fortunes along the way, with consequences even paid pundits can't predict.  Those in the now famous "1%" may be fortunate, but the real fortune lies at the top, which is to say that many of those in this economically elite group are actually losing ground on the true leaders of the pack.  They accumulate wealth very fast indeed, but apparently not quite fast enough... not by a few decimal points, actually.

Art can imitate life.  So apparently can sport.  Near Elites, while good, are finding themselves further removed from the heaviest cream at top of the milk jug, yet at the same time they are finding less and less in common with the growing legions, battalions and myriads slogging through the 42.2 K behind them.  In an endurance sports participatory universe seemingly ever expanding, the Near Elite remains the faithful moon, ancillary but quietly proud, dearly hoping not to lose orbital contact to the main attraction planet.  Money or minutes, should we be concerned that virtually all of us are losing ground to the top few?  I'm not sure, but it's an interesting parallel nonetheless.        



  

Appearance Fees Disappearance

First off, full disclosure: I have never received an appearance fee.  I had equipment given to me, plane tickets covered, race fees waived, but I never was in the triathlonic stratosphere with Dave Scott or Mark Allen or the very few rest of them who may, on occasion, have received an appearance fee of some sort.

Yet this week's announcement by a large investment company, that just so happens to own the rights to many of the top marathons (Rock & Roll, etc.), to stop granting appearance money to running's fastest and fittest, warrants examination.

First off, no one is making any real money in endurance sports.  No one.  Some of the best marathoners and triathletes might make six figures in a good year, but Tiger made that yesterday, in a few hours, so the amount of money this company is talking about is relatively small in overall sports economy terms.

Second, the company isn't even talking about how much they're talking about.  They won't mention how much they had been allocating to elite athletes' appearance fees, nor conversely are they willing to mention how much of this they'll be then ploughing back into the sport.  Sounds a bit like robbing Peter to pay Peter's investors, not Paul.

My first concern is that many of the top endurance events are now owned by investment groups and not necessarily any one or any group directly tied to the sport.  Ironman, for example, is owned by an investment fund and not by a group of triathletes who might well know, or care particularly deeply, about this iconic longer version of the sport of triathlon.  This concerns me.

What also concerns are the reasons given, at least publicly, for this change.  Apparently the investors polled athletes competing in their events and say they discovered that most athletes could give a rip about the top athletes in the race.  Many didn't even know who they were, where they were from, or what times they'd recently posted.  In other words, many athletes are in it for themselves.  The sport doesn't transcend them; they, regardless their talent, transcend the sport.

Let's examine this a bit by looking no further than Ironman.  For years now Ironman has layered in more global events for triathletes and would be triathletes, at the same time working carefully to make each of those fields bigger.  The ballooning of events and event size has allowed many more folks to get involved with the sport of Ironman, but it has certainly come at a cost (some of which I talk about in other blog entries..).  While it is apparent to this author that the upper end of the age group fields is more competitive than it was ever before, this Darwinian reality is a function of quantity not quality.  A bit like cats playing around on a typewriter long enough and coming up with a bit of Shakespeare, throw enough folks into a sport and surely a few of them will be good, some exceptionally so, no matter their age.

But what about the rest?  Which is to say, if you just look at the Port Elizabeth 50-54 men's field of 2011, what about the 99+% who didn't make it to Kona, 95% of whom never have a chance of making it to our putative World Championship, even under the best of conditions?  This is the group the investors are talking about.  Indeed, this is the group actually underwriting the sport, the one leading top investment firms to buy out leading endurance races and markets, the same group of non-elite folks the investment house feels it understands.

So, because it says a lot about society today, let's talk about why a majority would care so little about those at the head of the class in their sport as to deny them fairly paltry appearance fees.
Like Ironman, marathon fields keep getting bigger.  The 2013 Berlin Marathon took place last weekend.  A colleague participated, finishing in 4:25.  It was her first marathon, but no sooner had she done it then she had to decide if she was going to do it again, 51.5 weeks early, if she had any hope of gaining entry into the October 2014 field of 40,000+.

Today, even second or third tier events fill up quickly.  Want to do a major race in 2014?  Chances are you've already signed up.  The investment portfolios purchasing major endurance events know this fact.  Apparently, the majority swift are now of the keyboard variety, the ones who gain access to websites just after midnight, when entries often open up, and who fill up the fields to the cliche events of their choice.

And while the top times remain fast and may even on occasion get faster (2013 Berlin was a world record for the men, IMSA 2011 was a world Ironman record for the women, Kona 2011 was a World Championship record for the men - to cite the races mentioned here), in general times aren't getting faster as fields balloon.  Average marathon times keep creeping upward (my colleague was hardly alone at the finish in Berlin), which means that the lion's share of folks in the legions of endurance races now out there for consumption are finishing farther and farther behind folks they never knew and can't become.

At the expense of being a bit unpopular, it is this author's view that technology is possibly also leading to changes in people's opinions.  Could there be a connection between dropping appearance fees and the rise of the "A is for Apple Products" generation?  If at least some conscious time is spent connecting virtually with sites that parrot my opinion, chatting with folks I have already "friended", and basically having routine thoughts and feelings confirmed but not challenged, how can I be asked to reach out to someone I don't know?  Many live in a world that reflects back to self, a world in which we live with and work near people like us and rarely mix with others.  This is a world in which partisans are reality, are sole basis for judgement, damn the others, even if it means making Congress dysfunctional and bringing the US government to a halt.  

Given that sports are the ultimate metaphor for life, is that the way our races are becoming, polarized, disconnected?  At Kona, the pros are now a separate race from the amateurs.  If many age-groupers paid little heed to them in the past, chances are they are doing less so now, when even the fastest among the non-pros have no chance of catching those who largely struggle do it for a living, most of whom won't win any money that day.  And why were the pros separated from the rest of the field?  Because the owners of Ironman at the time caved to pressure from TV, which had a difficult time disentangling the pros, and particularly the pro women, from the top ranks of the rest of the field.  Ironman presented the change to the pros as a bonus... while at the same time cutting back on the size of the pro field and keeping the overall prize money steady.  Message: we really only need the very best of you, and then only on our terms.

No wonder many of the world's best stay away from Kona now.  Kona already forces the world's best to qualify year after year for the race.  That means at least two ironman races need to be devoted to Kona each year.  I was a pro once, and the two ironman races I did in '84 led to a breakout Kona performance - and a stress fracture in my right tibia for good measure.  A pro essentially needs to dedicate his or herself to the Kona assault (just like the rest of us), and then know that on average he or she has a 1 in 5 chance of winning money, and about a 1 in 20 chance of winning real money, of the variety that might pay barely year's expenses.

My prediction is that private investment funds owning endurance events, while lucrative potentially to the fund's investors, will ultimately do little for sport.  Much like private health insurance, privately held ownership of races solely for the investment opportunity will swell fields and highlight mass brand appeal while selling the soul of the race or family of races.  Terminating appearance fees will lead some pros to leave the sport, and for a guy who used to gain no small amount of inspiration from the top pros (and still does), leaving these guys off the starting line is a sad day for sport.  It begs the question: Who should be making the big decisions about any sport's iconic events?  

    

Life's Second Chances

   Two years ago, in the lead up to Ironman South Africa and then Kona, I knew I had a problem.  For two decades, only when I ran, my feet had been telling me that they weren't healthy.  Achilles would ache, feet would be sore, and running, frankly, was too often not the barrel of fun it had been way back in the '70s, when I first fell in love with the sport.
   Yet here I was in 2011, swimming and cycling well, with time on my hands to train, and excited to be having the opportunity to get back into top tri form at the golden age of 50.  Problem was, my feet just weren't cooperating - just when I knew I had a few marathons to run, tired, off the bike, when feet aren't known to be at their best.
   In 2011 the marathon in Port Elizabeth was fine (3:35ish), but six months later, when I got to Kona, I simply could not run without pain, not even a little bit.  What was worse, the lingering pain after any run, sometimes lasting days, was enough to gut the mileage I'd hoped to run in the lead-up to the Worlds.  Like many others that day, I made it through the lava fields during the marathon, but it wasn't pretty.  Formally accustomed to passing runners during the final leg of any triathlon, I found myself in survival mode, in retreat in the standings and, like a soldier who must fight on, hoping to limit the losses.  I still don't know how I hung in there for 5th place in the 50-54 age-group, but I can tell you it wasn't because of running preparation or running mileage or any of the rest of it.
   After Kona, my feet told me that they'd had enough.  In fact, pretty much generally my body told me it had had enough.
   The achilles problem I knew I'd had was now literally tied up with a plantar fasciaetis syndrome that seemed to be redefining my poor feet in a very bad way.  A guy who had once been told by a doctor that he had the "perfect feet for running" knew he was a far cry from that world, with little hope of returning to health that he could see.  
   For about six months I did no running, and instead only biked and walked and swam and strengthened and stretched.  Oh yeah, and I also found out that I had thyroid cancer, which has a way of putting a dampener on running, and pretty much everything else in your life.
   A year post-op, with the thyroxin/calcium/vitamin D balance continuing to come into focus, a new place to call home in Stuttgart, Germany and, more specifically, some of the most amazing places to run that any urban area could boast, my feet are going through a bit of a renaissance, though not by chance.

Here's how:

A) Four months back, when visiting the States and about to move to Germany, I finally decided that I wanted to run well again, without pain, but that I needed a new game-plan.  52 just seemed too young to give up on running, a sport which had so defined my life.  I knew that just resting, etc., wasn't going to work, that the pain would just return, and that I had a more fundamental problem that had to be addressed by someone who knew feet for better than I.  It just so happens my father-in-law in Denver knew of a guy in the shoe/foot business who, he claimed, was an expert in analyzing feet and mitigating foot problems.  We went to see him at his shoe/orthotic store, and I must say I was fairly skeptical when I saw that most of the clientele seemed non-athletic, and certainly not triathletic.  Yet this guy took one look at my feet, felt underneath my arch carefully with his hands, and quickly told me that I had the typical syndrome of those blessed with high arches who are of a "certain age."  Apparently, he told me, my tendon to my big toe was tighter than a drum, and that was leading to all sorts of problems, including the fascaeitis and the tendonitis and probably just about any "itis" that can be attached to a foot problem.  To begin treating the problem he proposed a regimen of regular stretching and strengthening for the foot and, perhaps most importantly, he sold me a basic pair of inserts, which I have been using religiously, as I promised him I would.  The changes began almost immediately.
B) About three weeks later we were visiting the other set of our boys' grandparents, which is to say my parents, when we happened to be in Traverse City for the day and happened to walk into the only running store downtown.  My wife noticed a small, textured ball for sale, read the claim that it helped keep feet healthy, whereupon we purchased it.  Again, I was skeptical that something so small and unassuming would help.  I'd used tennis balls to massage my feet, with only limited results, so my feeling was that something related would only work the same way.  Yet I began using it each day, sometimes two or three times a day, and the changes were evident quickly.
C) We (my wife has her own foot issues) also agreed to have an in-house pair of supportive shoes, which we would wear, since the foot guy said that going barefoot, especially on hard floors, can be a problem for those with a foot problem.
D) Stretching the foot and foot muscles, and strengthening that general area, has also been part of the regimen.  Each day I stretch as soon as I get up, and throughout the day I stretch on a fairly consistent basis, though now I give special attention to the feet, two appendages I had pretty much ignored for most of my life.  My respect for feet is growing, and with this their health is gradually returning.
E) I also got a new pair of running shoes, a pair of trail running shoes, and with all the other changes the improvements only became easier.

   The difficult part is separating the above components and passing on helpful commentary.  As a math teacher, I can tell you that having four or five variables in a single equation is unsolvable, at least uniquely, so there's really no telling what is making the biggest difference in all of this.
   However, I can say that I'm running again, and that a "long run" is up to about an hour or 7 or 8 miles, which is a whole heck of a lot farther than I was running, ever, the last few years, if I ran at all.
   The inserts feel quite helpful, and I know that I need them on the rare occasions that I have gone without them.  The little ball is perhaps making the biggest difference, however.  It has given vitality and strength to the undercarriage of the running platform, making my feet feel healthy and strong again in ways that I'd forgotten my feet could feel.  The stretching and strengthening helps.  Moving out of Saudi and the constant reliance on treadmill running helped.  So did moving to a city with miles and miles of great running trails, with beckoning fields and forests to run in.
   The process is ongoing.  My feet are much better, to be sure, but years and years of willful ignoring will not be undone in a few months, and so I'm taking the long view and working toward gradual changes in foot health.  Like my return to general health and fitness over the last year, this new lease on foot health has been fun and unexpected.  If I'm patient and smart, I expect to be running totally pain free shortly - something I honestly thought I'd never do again as I limped across the finish in Kona two years ago.       

Power to the People! (er, Age Groupers...)

By cascading the swim starts and offering triathletes optional start times, Ironman has decided to deal with its growing swim safety issue, and growing PR headache, by treating the symptom rather than attacking the disease.  WTC is packaging this newest change as "greater choice" for its ironmen and ironwomen, but in reality the privately held company that holds exclusive rights to Ironman worldwide is hoping that by allowing triathletes to self-seed according to expected swim times, many of their overcrowded triathlons will become safer, at least during the swim.
I've been fortunate enough to have toed the starting line with some of the best athletes in the world.  Starting at the same time as the best, while potentially humbling, is also a great gauge of personal performance, a chance to say you've rubbed shoulders (or perhaps wetsuits, bike handlebars, or Nordic skis) albeit briefly before the gun, with some of the best.
2:29 may have been a very satisfying PR marathon at New York City, but it paled in comparison with Juma Ikanga's blazing 2:07 performance that same day.  A 9:43 performance at Kona back in '84 may have been good enough for 7th place overall, but it was a far cry from Dave Scott's record-breaking, first-ever, sub-9-hour performance at Kona that same October day.
WTC has already removed the pros from the mass-start Kona field, thereby insulating the putative professionals in the sport from potential challenges of the faster age-group swimmers.  In so doing, it has allowed the pros, and in particular the media, to better isolate and focus on the "real show" of the generally faster pro competitors - no matter that 95% of the day's competitors aren't professionals.  Throughout the day, the pros know where they are relative to their competition, and WTC makes them feel extra special by providing them their own feed zones, where they can place their own drinks and foods.
The age-groupers, meanwhile, who, let's remind ourselves, pretty much bankroll the whole operation at Ironman Inc., compete in obscurity, wholly lacking any helpful information about their age-group standings throughout, and even after, the race.  After finishing my Kona qualifier at Ironman South Africa in 2011, for more than an hour post-finish repeated queries to race officials and volunteers at the finish line, in the massage tent, and at the refreshment tables turned up nothing in the way of helpful information about how I'd done.  Only after collecting my pre-race bag of personal affects and turning on my phone did a call from my father-in-law - in Colorado of all places, who had been following the race via internet and calls to friends and family - confirm my standing at the top of the age group.  It was the only time in the previous 11 hours that I had any idea where I was in relation to my age-group competition!  Given the multiplicity of technological applications for all sorts of things these days, it doesn't take a great deal of imagination to conjure a world in which all triathletes can have a better sense of how they're doing relative to the competition, in real time, pretty much throughout the race.  Why has Ironman not allowed this?
Competitive sorts want to be in the exact same race under the exact same conditions as the next guy.  With WTC's current thinking, a slow swimmer could presumably self-seed for a later swim start, thereby experiencing potentially different race conditions than the faster swimmer who may have started three or four waves earlier.  A 6:30 swim start (pros) may not seem all that different than a 7:30 swim start (slower fish), but I'll trade an hour of early-morning-Kona Cool relative for a late-afternoon hour of Energy Lab Meltdown any day, and my guess is so would others.
The wave starts make me nervous for a few other reasons as well.  By hosting a processional of athletes, rather than one specific, self-contained race, lifeguards will need to be stationed throughout the swim course for a very long time, especially given that the later swimmers to start will presumably be many of your slowest.  And that's just the swim.  How about the marathon?  By stretching out the start times, WTC is indirectly asking its volunteers, who already put in amazingly grueling hours race day, to hang in there just a bit longer.  If I'm a volunteer at Kona, I'm potentially seeing runners from just before noon until midnight (or more, if WTC sticks with the 17 hour rule and goes to wave starts on the swim).  By any measure, that's a long day - a good deal longer than many of the competitors' days, particularly in Kona.
Apart from lengthening the days of those who already give so much so that we can compete in this crazy sport of ours, the wave swim starts make me nervous for another reason as well.  Ironman wants us to think the wave starts are for our own good, and that they'll make the race safer and more manageable for all.  Yet WTC is clearly in this business to make a ton of money.  By dividing a field of 2,000 by four and creating groups of roughly 500 in the water, my hunch is that Ironman executives will be tempted to allow those groups to grow.  After all, they've been in the business of sending off waves of more than 1,000 swimmers at a time for a few decades now; putting groups of 600 or 700 in the drink will seem paltry in comparison - and readily defensible.
Yet, given the current information blackout for age-groupers, wave starts will only add further dissonance to those there to race against the best, no matter their age.  Did that guy up ahead on the bike start before me, with me, or after me?  Given the prevalence of varied transitions, potty breaks, penalty time-outs and such, it'll be anyone's guess with the new wave starts.

So here are my suggestions:

• Nix the wave starts and get back to one race, and that includes the separate pro start.  So what if the pros think they're special?  Dave Scott and Mark Allen are legends of the sport, right? They seemed to survive starting with the entire field again and again okay, and I don't ever recall either of them complaining about the mass swim start...
• Mandate an open water swim test for any first-timers to any 70.3 or full Ironman.  Given that WTC has marketed Ironman as the be all, end all of triathlon, it's hardly a surprise that there are increasing numbers of inexperienced triathletes competing at 1.2 and 2.4 mile swims.  The swim is your insurance underwriter's nightmare, so as part of the application process, put in place a swim-qualifying procedure.  You shouldn't just get to pay your money and sign up for a 70.3 or full.  I didn't.  In fact, it was a number of years, and more than a dozen triathlons later, before I did my first Ironman.  The Ironman distances daunted me, as they should anyone, and in my gut I knew that I wasn't ready in '82, or '83, years when I entered most any triathlon and bike race I could find in the midwest, winning most of them.  By the time I'd competed in my first Ironman distance triathlon in July of '84, I'd been a triathlete for three years, swum a season in college, competed in more than a dozen triathlons, and worked on my modest swimming for four years.  Beyond a fat payment for entry, is Ironman demanding enough of its entrants?
• Forget about differentiating age groups during the swim, but beginning with the bike have each age group competitor easily identifiable by race officials and fellow athletes.  All kinds of systems could be tested, but as a competitive age group triathlete I should be able to scan the field around or in front of me and be reasonably able to tell which ones are in my age group.
• Chip technology should allow for age-group standings to be constantly updated, making it possible to have large monitors around Kona, at Havi, at the Energy Lab, and at the finish (for examples) posting the positions in each age group.  Technology has meant that all folks (and not just athletes) want accurate information in real time.  WTC risks comparison to the Catholic Church unless it comes out of the Dark Ages and lets people have access to the information they want, when they want it. 
• Now comes perhaps the most controversial suggestion.  Kona bills itself as a World Championship.  Yet hundreds of triathletes compete each October who actually didn't qualify.  They may be there because they've done dozens of Ironman competitions and therefore get in on sheer volume and determination (and a lot of money).  Or they may be there because they've paid more and increased their odds of getting in by lottery.  Or they may be there just through the long, long odds of lottery.  Or they may be there by special invitation from WTC.  Yet what other athletic world championship does this?  So, my suggestion: only allow folks who have actually, verifiably qualified to compete at Kona; not doing so just depreciates the experience for the majority who got there the hard way.  Limiting Kona fields to 1500, and qualifier fields to verifiable swimmers, and getting rid of all the hangers on will allow for safer mass swim starts.  Rather than more money to WTC, isn't that what we really should be after right now?

That first triathlon

The race posters greeted me every day as I walked by and headed down to the lake. 1/2 mile and 1 mile open water swims tantalized the open water swimmer in me.  The weather was a balmy 80, with negligible wind - a perfect day for a swim.  The lake - Green Lake in north Seattle - was one I knew probably more than any other, had even swum in many times and run around more times then just about anyone alive.
Yet I'd never swum across it, and frankly, with memories of lake weeds tugging at my shoulders and visibility anything but Kona's, I'd honestly never even thought about swimming across it.  The poster, however, promised those who entered the race(s) the possibility of swimming across the lake once for the 1/2 mile, and twice for the just-after 1 mile; gluttons could do both events and crisscross to their hearts' content.
Race morning broke, Logan kindly offered to walk down to the lake and take in the excitement with me.  Soon, cuddled together and chatting away while looking out at the far-off swim start half-way around the lake, I realized that holding my 8 year-old son and talking about whatever floated through our minds was way more fun than suiting up and doing another race.  So, we took the morning's races in, cheering on various folks finishing up the swim as they strode up the concrete steps to the finish line banner.
Like all 8 year-olds, Logan eventually grew bored watching anonymous swimmers repeatedly exiting the water, and asked to play at the nearby playground.  That is when I engaged in conversation the man who'd been next to us for a few minutes, obviously a competitor in the 1/2 mile swim recently completed.  Perhaps a father like me, he'd apparently noticed my Kona Ironman visor and soon told me that he was looking forward to his first triathlon, in August, in Victoria, B.C., a sprint tri that would involve a 800m swim like the one he'd just completed in the morning's race. I could hear the excitement in his voice as we began talking about his expectations for his first triathlon race, his preparations and training, and pretty soon he was asking me for pointers on improving his just-completed 26 minute 800m swim time.  Like many beginning triathletes, he was having a hard time keeping his head in the water while breathing and was therefore wasting a good deal of energy.  As we talked, memories of my first triathlon, now incredibly more than 32 years ago, filtered back through my conscious, helping me appreciate this man's excitement and anxiety.  Elemental, triathlon combines transcendent sports all athletes can appreciate, and this man was looking forward to that first time of being able to combine activities he'd probably done off and on since early on in his life into a single race.  Perhaps because it harkens back to that first bike ride, swim lesson or game of tag, triathlon inspires us all, again and again.
I don't remember the man's name or the race he's entered, but the tingle of nerves associated with his frank assessment of his impending mass swim start is something all triathletes feel.  I explained how Kona's swim felt and prayed that he'd have a gentler go of it in Victoria!  :)

50+ and Faster than ever!

Like so many things these days, the article was forwarded by a friend.  The interview with cyclist Kevin Metcalfe in Slowtwitch, a website dedicated to triathletes, reminded me of an article I've been ruminating on, the gist of which goes like this: if you take care of yourself and play your cards right, vast improvements in technology can allow for continued improvements as a competitive athlete, particularly on the bike.  I know I've expressed thoughts on this idea before in another posting. However, recent personal events, and now Kevin's story, have conspired to prompt a postscript.
Kevin is a 50-54 inspiration, a paragon of fast cycling who happens to be the age of many a competitive cyclist's fathers.  Since he's probably 53 and I'm certainly 52, I'd like to call him a peer, but he recently went 49:29 for 40K on a bike, and I'm fairly certain I can't do that - at least not this week (this latter bit being the thesis of Kevin's larger message to each of us, not braggadocio).  By setting a national record (while breaking his own!), Kevin continues to show what might be possible for others, like Kevin, with more than a half century on the odometer.  And that's particularly why I like his bio.
What makes Kevin's story so fascinating is that he has stayed active and fit over the years but has continued to fine-tune his training protocols, leading to some astonishing accomplishments.  During Kevin's competitive life, which is to say during mine and countless others', the cycling world has seen unparalleled changes in technology, leading to faster and faster bikes.  For at least a few, this has opened the door to unprecedented feats.
Over the past four years, and by luck, not design, I've run an informal personal experiment: I've gotten older (whew!) but have continued to do the same KAUST bike race on the same course with pretty much the same group of folks.  Picture a small compound in Saudi Arabia, replete with many inactive folks and a few sundry diehards on bikes and you have a sense of what our motley group was like.  In 2010 the campus was completely brand new yet lacking a culture of activity, so a group of us sat down with the powers that were then and organized a bike race, an event which has since become a regular on the KAUST activity calendar.  This being the Arabian peninsula, our February date still had to answer to possible temps approaching 100F, so for the adults we decided to make the race about 10 miles on a closed loop.
In 2010 I'd not yet caught the Kona Reprise bug, so cycling three times a week with friends, or alone, comprised the lead-up to the race.  I'd never raced any of the guys I was training with, so it came as some relief that I was able to break away from the pack with about a mile to go and gain about 10 seconds on the field.
In 2011 things were vastly different.  I now had the idea of returning to Kona to compete at a top level again in my sights, was only a month out of the tune-up Abu Dhabi Triathlon and two months out of my qualifier at Ironman South Africa.  Although I was cycling more, I was also running and swimming a fair amount, and the cycling I was largely doing was attempting to get me ready for a 112-mile TT and not a 25 minute road race.  Still, being in the best shape of my middle-age life must've helped, and I again  broke away from the pack, this time a bit earlier, allowing me to gain maybe 20 seconds on the peleton by the finish.
2012 was different yet again.  Though I didn't know it,  thyroid cancer had already walked in my body's front door, uninvited, and was making itself right at home.  A lack of motivation and general lethargy was explained away on a protracted Kona recovery and the general demands of being a father, husband, and full-time teacher.  For the first time I was scared, unsure of what to expect.  I hadn't ridden nearly as much as 2010 and certainly not as much as 2011, and my legs just didn't have that feeling that all prepared cyclists generally possess as they go into competition.  I had begun having increasing, unexplained cramping, mostly in my legs, and this, combined with a paucity of mileage, made me nervous about my ability to defend my consecutive titles.  So, like any aging cyclist who knows he can't break away due to the lack of an aerobic base, I relied on my racing experience and attacked on the penultimate turn, gaining just enough anaerobically and tactically before that last stretch to avoid a final sprint I knew I couldn't possibly win.  It was a victory, but by the narrowest of margins to date.
In January 2013 Jennifer and I flew to London to interview for jobs and came away with positions at the International School of Stuttgart, so going in I knew the 2013 edition of the annual KAUST bike race was going to be my last. Although I'd ridden my '86 Nobilette road bike for each of the previous editions of the race, this time I decided to run an informal experiment and ride my 2009 Scott Plasma, the same one I'd ridden in Port Elizabeth and Kona, the one I'd gotten from my buddy Scott Tucker, who in turn had purchased it from a guy who'd had it a year.  Every other KAUST cyclist of repute was on a carbon fiber steed of some variety, so rather than trot out the same steel bike once again, I decided to somewhat meet them on their own technological terrain and for a change ride a bike that was made in the same century as theirs.  And, just to add spice to the race and get a good workout, I decided before the gun to attack early on and let the chips fall where they may.  Nine laps and 25 or so minutes later I found myself lapping the field and still going strong, ahead by 3 minutes.  The extra calcium I'd taken the previous 24 hours had staved off the dreaded cramping, now a regular feature of my life, and the modest miles of training had proved just enough to hold the 42 - 44 kph pace. Although I was older than I'd ever been, had just battled cancer, had only ridden a few times a week and never pedaled longer than an hour at a go, being on a carbon fiber bike made all the difference and emphasized once again what a huge difference this technology has meant for the sport of triathlon (not to mention all cycling sports).  Instead of gaining seconds over the course of the race on a steel bike, I was gaining minutes, or the equivalent of about 20 seconds per lap, or around 18 seconds per mile.  Looking at the differential between steel and carbon fiber, this time gap would grow to 25 or 30 minutes over the course of an Ironman-distance bike leg, underscoring once again the predominant time savings over the course of the race for most triathletes.
Apart from being more crowded than it was in the '80s, the swim at Kona hasn't changed much.  Same for the run; apart from a different course, triathletes still have to slog through 42+ km of the marathon.  The cycling leg, on the other hand, is vastly different than it once was, delivering many riders a half hour or more faster to the run than it would have two or more decades ago - all thanks to cycling technology.  I'll write more about this evolution in pedaling revolutions shortly and what, in part, this means for the sport.  For now, suffice it to say that the bike allows guys like Kevin and me to compete as well as, if not better than, the guys we were a generation ago.               

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.           

Mourning for Boston

As a former Boston Marathon participant, I did the only thing of support and solidarity I could think to do this morning:  I ran. 

I ran for the runners who lost loved ones. 

I ran for the many more runners whose loved ones are now permanently maimed. 

I ran for all the countless supporters of running, the curious, the visitors, the innocent bystanders who just happened to be in the finish line area on Monday.

I ran for the runners who couldn’t finish the race, the ones who suddenly found themselves running in the opposite direction, away from a finish line they had so long dreamt of, who were now confused, shocked, bewildered, disbelieving of the ghastly act that had transformed their hallowed race.

I ran for the families near and far who quickly learned of the tragic events unfolding but could not now get in touch with the competing son or daughter who had cell phones not on them but tucked away in race bags at the finish line.

I ran for the thousands of race organizers and volunteers who each year help to make this a world-class event.

I ran for those running and attending in memory of the school kids lost in the Newton school massacre, who now have more unbearable psychic baggage to go with the still raw memories no one should have.

I ran for all the families who have lost loved ones to senseless acts like this.

I ran for the first responders, the medics, the nurses, doctors, the policemen and firemen and especially surgeons who had seconds to make often life or death decisions on Monday.

I ran for my buddy Scott Tucker, the same guy who talked me into getting back into Ironman racing less than three years ago, who had finished the race in a very respectable 2:48 and was with friends celebrating a mile away when he heard the booms and then the disturbing news began filtering into their restaurant.

But, as the father of an 8 year-old boy who loves sports and has witnessed more than a few of his daddy’s races, I ran especially thinking of 8 year-old Martin Richard, the youngest of Monday’s victims, who was most likely near the finish line on Monday to cheer on a relative in the race.

I think of what his family must be going through, the long years ahead, and my heart goes out to them.  I can’t imagine being his father just now, so I will do this: whenever I run I will think of Martin Richard.

But tonight I’m going to hug my 8 year-old just a little bit tighter as I kiss him goodnight. 

David Evans, April 17

P.S. Boston Athletic Association puts on the Boston Marathon, and the head of the B.A.A. is Dave McGillivray, a titan in the New England endurance world and the former race director of the Bay State Triathlon.  In 1984 I flew from Michigan to Boston for the Bay State Triathlon, placing second overall in a fairly competitive field as I recall.  At the awards ceremony, Dave came up to me and asked me what my plans were and I told him that I had signed up to do Hawaii that October.  He said keep him mind and that, if I did well in Kona, he'd talk to the guys at Saucony for me and get me on their national triathlon team.  Well, 7th place at Kona got me on the Saucony team... at least until the bike/car accident of April of '85.  I haven't been in touch with Dave since, but I can't imagine what a week it has been as head of the Boston Marathon!  

WTC - Is it World Triathlon Corporation or Where's The Cash?

The entry fee for the 1984 Hawaii Ironman was $75.  As strange as it sounds now, until then that was the most I'd ever paid for a race of any kind, and about triple what I was paying for other triathlons at the time.  Growing just by the rate of inflation since, that $75 entry would be a paltry $166 in 2013. But we all know that won't even cover the swim costs in Kona this October.  Okay, inflation may not be a fair comparison, since many costs have out-stripped the inflation rate.

How about comparing Kona's cost to the increase in college tuition?  Well, let's move to 1985, the first year Kona's entry weighed in at triple digits and became a then mind-boggling $100.  If you compare that $100 entry fee to the T-Rex of educational costs, the much-in-the-news insane college tuition increases over the past few decades, Kona's entry is still the heavyweight. If Kona were a typical US college that increased its fees in step with the average of its academic brethren, it would cost about $650 now, not the approximately $800 - $1000 it does.

So Kona's cost is growing leaps and bounds faster than inflation and even a leap or two faster than college tuition.  What gives?  Well, theories abound, but my feeling is that somewhere along the way from being born Ironman, one race with a few determined souls, period, to becoming the juggernaut World Triathlon Corporation, with series upon series of Iron Girl, IronKids, 70.3,  and 5150 races, not to mention a quiver of a few dozen ironman qualifying races across the globe (and let's not forget the modifiers of Ford, Timex, et al.), Ironman, the idea, lost its way in the corporate-speak and branding-fixated world in which we live.  And in losing its way it sold its soul, or should I say it decided to pass on the cost of selling the soul of triathlon to each of us, like it or not.

Yet, other than being a teacher who knows he's likely to have to mortgage his family's future if he hopes to do another Kona qualifier/Kona Ironman sans sponsor, what irks me most about Kona is how it has made us a "Top 1%" sport financially even though we've really only been a Top 1% sport physically, and even then only sort of.  The Ironman calls itself a World Championship, yet increasing numbers of the top pros are deciding that the WTC isn't particularly nice to them and that Kona isn't as lucrative and great an experience as they can get elsewhere.  Especially if prize winnings are the main motivator, as a former pro and knowing how "take it or leave it" Ironman has become, I'd probably stay away as well unless I knew I had a pretty darn good chance of cracking the top five and the real money that only begins to pay expenses.  The guys at WTC have figured out the pro game as well; they now invite fewer pros than ever before and every one of them has to qualify each year, even the top folks!

In terms of sheer number of podium spots, Kona in many ways is a world championship for the age group triathletes, not the pros.  Many of the top pros may stay away, or not earn the requisite points to be invited, but age groupers around the world all know that Kona is the dream, the big enchilada, the bona fide imprimateur on that Triathlon C.V.  Thousands upon thousands of age group triathletes vie for precious few Kona age group spots each year, making the age group competitions arguably the very most competitive "races within the race" that Kona has become.  With all due respect to the pros, even a little bit of digging into Kona times will indicate that in most any given year the top five spots in a number of age group races are closer and more fiercely challenged than those in the pros.  To cite a very personal example, in 2011, when I placed fifth for the 50-54 age group at Kona, I was about a mile back from the winner when he finished.  Which means that five of us were still quite close after a very full day of racing that included numerous lead changes and top-five reconfigurations.  In the pro race Craig Alexander was almost a mile up on second place by the end, and while his performance speaks for itself (and remains the record), the men's pro race was over well before Craig zipped down Ali'i Drive.

Yet the folks at WTC don't really care that much about the age groupers either.  What they want is the money, and the more of it the better.  How else to explain the "Legacy Age Group Athletes?"  Not sure who these folks are?  Well, picture an independently wealthy jet-set person with loads of time, a flexible schedule, and an urge to do more than a dozen ironman races across the globe and you've got an idea.  It's this very group that WTC is targeting when it invites those "special" hundred entrants to Kona.  Never mind the times they post or how they fare relative to others in their age group, Kona wants them.  Or should I say Kona wants their money.  And what better way to get cash than the Costco way of purchasing in quantity.  Never mind that a world championship is putatively about quality...

But WTC doesn't stop there.  At the very same time thousands upon thousands of age groupers are desperately trying to get a measly qualifying spot, somewhere, somehow, and even though a full hundred coveted spots have already been given away to the quantity-trumps-quality high rollers mentioned, WTC gives us the "General Age Group Lottery," which subtracts another hundred spots from the 1800 Kona thinks it can handle (another issue altogether, and one that I will take up in a future post).  Lest you think this is a truly impartial lottery, think again.  In this lottery, quantity (read: money) is again king, for you have to keep entering year after year in order to remain viable and work your way up the lottery food chain and increase your chances.  Apparently, each year a triathlete enters the lottery she gains another point, sort of like being able to enter your name multiple times in a drawing and thereby ever so slightly increase your probability of getting selected.  The catch is that if you miss a year of lottery entering you lose all these credits and have to start the process over.  And, of course, it costs to enter the lottery.  In fact, just to make the money-as-WTC-mantra logic clearer, you can actually increase your lottery chances by paying more, becoming a member of the "Passport Club," and thereby entering a more select group.  Again, quantity smites quality at a "world championship," and although anecdotal conversations with triathletes who've entered the lottery would seem to indicate that anyone's chances of getting to Kona this way are rather dismal, WTC, of course, isn't going to divulge how infinitesimal these chances are - but they'll be happy to take your money nonetheless.

Implicit in most anyone's definition of World Championship is the idea of merit.  Folks are deemed the best in the world - the world champions - presumably because they've demonstrated that they're better at something than anyone else, at least on a given day if not over a much longer period of time. Yet credibility rests on competition.  As I've often said to those who, after a race, have asked me how I've done, it pretty much depends on who shows up.  Winning a race is relative to who you're competing against.  I've been fortunate enough to have won dozens of races, but it was a 7th place in Kona way back in 1984, in which I "lost" by nearly an hour to this guy called Dave Scott, that has conferred the most satisfaction.  Why?  Simply because on that day, and unlike any of the previous 8,000+ days of my life until then, I had the privilege to race the best in the world. 

Will the best long-course triathletes in the world continue to turn out every October for Kona's race?  My sense is that as Ironman gradually prices itself into the stratosphere and thereby effectively out of most folks' financial orbits, it will gradually behave less like the athletic meritocracy it once was and more like the global, brand-obsessed, monolithic event production company it has become.  Sort of like the family who went to watch a fight, only to have a hockey game break out, Kona may gradually become the place where mostly well-heeled tri wanabes go to see and be seen, with a somewhat, sort of, it is if we say it is! "World Championship" occurring at the bacchanal week's end.  One thing's for sure: the Ironman Merchandise Tent will have extended hours and long lines all week...