1984 to 2011 - A Retrospective

When I first met my wife 20 years ago, doing another ironman was about the furthest thing from my mind. Pretty much as soon as I’d gotten out of Kona harbor in October of ’87 I’d gone cold turkey with swimming, which had been my weakest event in any case.   And, except for commuting on a mountain bike, I had a road/TT bike that collected dust. For a decade, I did refocus on a passion for running, but even that got old as my body began telling me that other activities made me feel better.

Over the years, students and athletes who knew of my triathlon background would sporadically tell me of TV coverage of Kona’s big October event or some other televised tri, asking me if I’d seen it.  But I never had, and so, for a number of decades, Kona remained well off the back burner of consciousness, a chapter in my life that seemed increasingly vague and unimaginable.

Whenever I pondered Kona and the lessons learned from three races there in ’84, ’86, and ’87, thoughts inevitably returned to ’85, a race I didn’t even do.  It seemed strange, but the more I tried to put that chapter of my life behind me, the more those pages’ unwritten paragraphs spoke to me.  Folks often asked about the ’84 race, but to me the ’84 race lacked punctuation, an incomplete sentence that suggested and implied, rather than clearly stated.

So the ironman remained, outwardly impressive bio in most people’s eyes but inwardly a question mark, a silent, relentless siren song that only I could hear.  I knew that in ‘84 I’d beaten Chris Hinshaw, the following year’s second place finisher, and that during the ’84 marathon leg I’d been gaining on Mark Allen and John Howard just ahead of me in 5^th and 6^th place, especially in the latter stages.  But, as I learned with perspective gained only with time and reflection, ’84 was more broadly special as well.   

’84 was the first time Kona was won in under 9 hours – Dave Scott.  The first time a runner broke 3 hours – Dave Scott.  The first time cyclists broke 5 hours – John Howard and Mark Allen.  The first time a swimmer broke 50 minutes – Chris Hinshaw. The stars must have been aligned that day, since it was also the hottest day on record for a Hawaii ironman; little wonder that it also has one of the highest drop-out rates on record. Four of the top six males in the ’84 race represented 15 past, present or future Kona race victories and countless other triathlon titles. 

Among the top group that day was Dutchman Rob Barel, certainly a harbinger of top finishers to come as the only non-American of the bunch.  Rob would deftly bridge the early world of triathlon with the approaching new millenium by staying amazingly fit and fast, competing 16 years later in Sydney - in his’40s - in the first Olympic triathlon.

Not to be outdone, unknown to most that day was a young guy out of Pennsylvania by the name of Kenny Glah, who finished the first of what has now become 28 consecutive Hawaii Ironman World Championships, an unbroken string of Kona races that no triathlete will touch for a very long time, if ever.

Yet ’84 was pioneering in another way as well since, on that day, the triathlon’s top-dogs apparently realized that in order to keep billing itself as the “World Championship,” a trophy and a handshake would no longer suffice.  No wonder then that ’84 was the last time so much triathlon talent was ever assembled to race an ironman without the possibility of financial reward.  Voting with their feet, fully 75% of top-8 from ’84, including icons Dave Scott and Mark Allen, chose to not participate in ’85.     

On perhaps no other day than October 6, 1984 had the then young sport matured so quickly and begun to define itself so clearly.  And yet in ’85, when I might have been showing folks that ’84 hadn’t been a fluke, I was instead watching race coverage from my living room, happy for Scott T., Chris H. and company but wallowing in a bit of self-pity.  Earlier that year a reckless driver had sent my rear derailleur through my right leg as her car crushed my bike and sent me flying like a rag doll down the country road.  I knew I was lucky to be alive and fortunate to have had successful surgeries and physical therapy, but the competitor in me was heartbroken. 

In ’86, racing again, I was named a member of a four-man U.S. team in a new national team division at Kona, but I put too much pressure on myself to repeat ‘84’s performance and ended up a DNF.  By ’87 I’d finished my graduate work at U of Michigan and was about to enter the full-time workforce, but Kona’s allure snared me one more time.  I finished, knowing that I had to, in almost exactly the time I’d posted in ’84.  But I’d been through too much and my heart had moved on; the ironman, and Kona in particular, no longer pulled on my heartstrings. 

Which is why it was easy for me to promise my new wife in the early ‘90s that I’d never do another ironman.  Never. Less than two years ago, now living and working overseas, my tune still hadn’t changed.  Sure, I’d lived a life of fitness, which included cycling, the less and less frequent swim, and the much less frequent run, but the idea of putting all three together again, especially over such a great distance, just didn’t compute.  Besides, I had a wife, a family, a full-time job, other interests.

 And then the emails began coming from a former training partner who’d fallen hard for triathlon while living in Sun Valley.  We’d done plenty of ski and adventure races together in our families’ shared decade in Seattle, and, knowing of my Paleolithic tri-sport past, he began sharing opinions about his newfound endurance sport love, occasionally asking for advice.  True to form, he rocketed to the head of the class, easily qualified for Kona and, soon after his maiden journey down Ali’i Drive, was wondering if I’d care to meet him in 2011 at the pier.  Naturally, my first thought was about ’85 and the race that wasn’t.  Our exchanges had blown air on the embers of the subconscious; suddenly, I began asking myself the “what ifs” that so often preface life’s big decisions.   

Some guys’ mid-life crises involve fast cars; I got triathlon’s equivalent by updating my road bike by 25 years and purchasing the kind of TT bike I’d only seen in Tour de France coverage.  Meanwhile, it took me three weeks to finally get up the courage to ask my wife if I could dedicate nearly a year at 15+ extra hours a week to a triathlon renaissance.  She appreciated the barrenness of our university compound life, knew that I was about to turn 50, and had come to make peace with her husband’s lifelong love affair with sport.  I promised to do as much of the training in the wee hours of the morning so as not to disrupt family life too much.  And, once I added up all the many costs of re-entering a sport that had gone from pricey to exorbitant, I also vowed that it’d be a one-time deal: October 2011, full stop.  Besides, teachers are generally very busy in October, and I’d been lucky this time to have a school give me the time off for both the April qualifier and the October granddaddy.

27 years is a long time between podium appearances at Kona, perhaps a longer time than any other triathlete can claim.  The world wars were closer together.  Having already experienced the good, the bad, and the ugly at Kona, I knew to take nothing for granted this past October.  The racecourse, the competing athletes, the town, the body - all had changed over the years.  But one thing was for sure: I still loved racing and was determined to fully enjoy this reprise.  In the end a 9:50 fifth place age-group finish was less than seven minutes or about 1% slower than the 9:43 I’d first posted in Kona in 1984 at the tender age of 23 when 10 bananas, a couple gallons of water, and sheer youthful exuberance and naivete had powered me all those 140.6 miles.

It may be a long time before I return to Kona, if ever.  But yesterday, in reading about a 74 year-old Spanish climber who is attempting to become the oldest person to scale all the 8,000m mountains and who has maintained a life of steady fitness to get where he is today, I realized something: I’ve always wanted to be like these kinds of guys.  In fact, given that it was 24 years since my last Kona race and that in 24 more years I’ll be 74, I just may have to think about Kona again in a few more decades….  

Musings of a Teacher/Triathlete

Teachers don't have it easy.  Crowded classrooms and unruly students may challenge some, but if you're a teacher, like millions are, and a triathlete, like thousands of us are, with aspirations of making it to Kona for October's big event, like hundreds have, then you face an uphill battle that makes getting up to Havi a walk in the park.
For starters, of all the possible months in which to hold the Ironman World Championships, from a teacher's perspective, October has to be the worst.
June - August typically contain some variation on summer break, September has Labor Day and its extended weekend, November has Thanksgiving, December/January have Winter Break, February often has Mid-Winter Break or Washington's Birthday, March/April have Spring Break, and May has Memorial Weekend.  What does October have?  Halloween, a workday filled with unusual fashion choices and amped up sugar intakes, but no time off.
Of all the possible months, that fateful decision in 1982, when the Hawaii triathlon powers that once were moved the race from February to October, arguably impacted teachers the most.  Unlike folks in other fields of work and psuedo work, a teacher's "time off" is programmed.  Even in the southern hemisphere, my South African teaching colleagues attest that October is a busy month, as students are ramping up for exams and summer break.
So what is a teacher with dreams of making it to Kona to do?  Well, when I qualified this past year, I had to negotiate time off and begin planning for subs for classes well in advance.  I sat down with my school's principal and superintendent early, months before the qualifier in Port Elizabeth, and talked through the whole plan: going to Abu Dhabi in March to shake off the cobwebs of a 24-year retirement from serious triathlon, then trying to earn the single 50-54 age-group Kona-qualifying spot in April at Ironman South Africa, then, if fate would have me, going to Hawaii in October for the world championships.  I'm fairly sure that they felt they were risking mainly having me gone a day for Abu Dhabi and a few days for IMSA, which conveniently backed up to our Spring Break and therefore meant I didn't have to miss very many days with my students.  Let's face it, as any who have recently tried to compete at Kona well know, the odds of my making it were not good.
However, when IMSA went well and I'd qualified in my first attempt for Hawaii, the first time since 1987, I scheduled a follow-up conversation to remind them of the original plan, however hypothetical it may have seemed at the time.  I waited one week, then two, for their response and final okay, and meanwhile I'd recovered and begun tentatively training for Kona, still not knowing if all the hard work and planning would actually lead to the road back to Kona.  Finally, after what seemed like forever but which was actually less than three weeks, I received word that I could indeed go.
There was just one hitch, of course.  However frugally, I'd had to update my vintage 1980s triathlon equipment in order to even have hopes of competing on the more crowded and talented 2011 triathlon playing field, and I'd been a teacher my entire professional life (and was therefore, unlike a number of my fellow competitors at Kona, was not independently wealthy).  So, just like each of the preceding five days off I'd recently taken, the ten days I'd need to travel the 13 time zones to and fro where I currently live and work and compete at Hawaii's Ironman apparently would be unpaid.
A number of folks on campus tried, ultimately unsuccessfully, to get me some level of sponsorship from the folks at the top here. I tried to lobby upper administration and make the experience part of our students' learning, potentially connecting learning to a teacher's somewhat unusual and arguably interesting non-academic life, but this too proved to be a non-starter.  Then, with only weeks to go before having to leave for Kona, a vocal group of supporters on campus tried to pitch my quest one last time to the upper campus administration.  For a time it seemed like the impasse would be overcome, but then, only days before boarding the plane, I again found that financial help would not be in the cards, that no one wanted to take on the hot potato of sponsoring an employee while having to answer to potential auditors later on, or at least that was the whispered claim.
If you include the past year's three race fees, the travel, the accommodations, the food, the essential equipment, and the lost salary, competing in Kona in 2011 cost more than all the more than three dozen triathlons I did from 1984 - 1987, and that includes three trips to Kona in '84, '86, and'87!  To be frank, some of those '80s races had at least some expenses covered by sponsors.  But most of my expenses back then were covered by me, and to keep expenses down while in grad school at Michigan, most of the races I did were local, or at least regional, which meant I didn't usually have to fly to races.
Still, the widening gap between the sport's financial demands and what increasing numbers of folks modestly possess as discretionary income is balkanizing a sport already regarded as elitist, seemingly inaccessible.
So there I was at the awards ceremony in Kona, my last night in Hawaii, and just by chance I had sat down at a table that included two other teachers.  Excitedly, we compared notes and talked about the amazing week we'd just had.  One guy, currently teaching in Dubai at an international school, had rallied the school community behind his quest and was getting full pay while being gone.  Meanwhile, farther down the table I later met a woman, teaching in Europe, who not only was getting paid but had attracted sponsors, one of whom had paid her air-fare and another of whom had helped her with what all of us know are considerable bike expenses.
And there I sat, disconsolate, shaken, a bit upset even - until the awards were announced - when I realized that no amount of money can compare to being able to mount the podium at a world championship one more time, especially more than half a lifetime after the first and only other time I'd been on the podium, in '84.  Knowing that I'd financially done it all on my own, this time against tremendous odds, gave pause for special thanks to family, friends, and teachers and coaches, some long-ago, who'd first inspired and tirelessly supported.  And I reminded myself that as a teacher and coach, part of my compact with my student/athletes includes planting that seed of possibility by nurturing potential.  My only hope is that if I ever have students able and willing enough to fully embrace this amazing sport of triathlon, that finances won't prove to be the one finish line too far for them to reach.         

Adversity Meets its Maker

The first time I competed in the Hawaii Ironman Triathlon World Championships, back in October of 1984, I had a broken leg. Not completely broken like a compound fracture, but broken enough to be a sizable stress fracture and therefore easily noticed by a radiologist five months later, after a reckless driver doing 50 mph hit me from behind, sending my rear derailleur machete-like through my lower leg and breaking the leg once again, thereby necessitating an x-ray or two.

I can still remember the radiologist's incredulous expression when I told him I'd just finished 7th in the world in the Hawaii Ironman, explaining, delicately and even a bit sheepishly, that an Ironman triathlon consisted of 2.4 miles of swimming, 112 miles of cycling, and 26.2 miles of running. In the weeks leading up to Kona I'd noticed increasing tightness and uncomfortableness just below the patella. Twenty-three years old and naive,  I took this inconvenience merely as a sign to start tapering, which I did. When the radiologist added, "You know, from the looks of this x-ray you're damn lucky your leg didn't just snap out there during the marathon," I realized that attempting two Ironman distance races in the space of three months, which I did between July and October of 1984, was both brash and foolish for my then young, low-mileage body.

In 1983 the folks in Hawaii had rejected my application to compete, even though I'd gone undefeated in a series of triathlons that year and had also won the Michigan State road race for cycling and competed in the USCF Road Race Nationals in San Diego. So by the fall of '84 I was rearing to go and compete in a race about which I'd heard so much, a one-day event that was then, and now, the Mother Of All Triathlons.  I felt I had the mettle to compete at the highest level in the sport; perhaps more significantly, I was still licking the wounds of rejection from '83 and wanted nothing more than to show the Hawaii Ironman folks that they'd made a mistake the year before by not allowing me to come to Kona and compete. In retrospect, I'm fortunate not to have been carted off in an ambulance with a compound fracture of my right tibia. The leg more than held up - moving me from 13th off the bike to 7th by the end of the marathon, and even gaining on Mark Allen (in 5th) and Jon Howard (in 6th) in those delirious final miles - but I was extremely lucky. And I didn't even know it.

Fast forward 28 years to this past October 2011, when I found myself again on the podium at Kona, this time with the 50-54 age group leaders. Six months later, which is to say quite recently, I'm told that I have thyroid cancer after a mysterious bulge starts appearing in my neck, is noticed by my vastly more intelligent and perceptive wife, and I dutifully get it checked out. When I ask a number of the attending doctors how long they think I've had the tumor, based on the size and details of the cyst, 2 - 3 years is their best estimate. Just two years ago places the problem before I even began dreaming of a triathlon renaissance, of getting back into "Kona Condition" and tossing the notion of middle age temporarily out the window.  I had cancer and didn't even know it.  I had a thyroid that wasn't working at all well - better than now, but certainly not as well as it's supposed to - and I just soldiered on, oblivious to the messages it was sending me, determined once and for all to show that '84 had not been a fluke.

As if getting to mount the podium at Kona isn't difficult enough, doing it twice, and despite the added hurdles of a broken leg and cancer, points to the immense power and pluck of the human condition while underscoring its considerable vulnerabilities and frailties. Or is it that a body subconsciously knowing itself to be on thin ice somehow wills itself to go to extremes to affirm its vitality?  If Kona's legendary race can be likened to an orchestral piece one might call "Variations on Accelerated Darwinism in Three Movements," then lurking subtexts like a broken bone or a cancer can only add to the overall human drama of the moment.  Events like Kona may also underscore our bodies' enduring resilience in the face of significant obstacles, and it may be the at-the-time unknown obstacles that are the most significant. Give an athlete a competition and he/she will race. Quietly tell his body that it's in TROUBLE and it may allow itself to go to unusual ends to maintain the game face on game day   

Hardwired to survive at all costs, some of our ancestors' descendents, including this author, even take comfort and derive confidence from the sort of pursuits that would simulate physical deprivations and challenges not unknown to our long-ago forebears.  While our prehistoric predecessors may not have been triathletes, their ability to overcome incredible adversity in their grueling, often ceaseless, quest for safe habitat and adequate food conjures images not dissimilar to those coursing through the psyches  of the legions of runners making the turnaround at the Energy Labs. And perhaps for some subset of those competing at each Hawaii Ironman, it may be when the chips are really down that the racer achieves her/his greatest destiny.

I've had the honor of competing four times at Kona.  Besides the two races mentioned above, I also raced in '86 and '87.  While neither of those races was accompanied by any mysterious plot akin to a fracture or cancer, it's also interesting to note that neither race produced a podium performance.  Of her sickly, accident-prone brother, my sister once said I'm a glutton for punishment.  Turns out, she (and we) didn't know half the story!

The Flipped Race

Back in the '80s, none of my triathlon buddies would have ever accused me of being fast in the water. Never a competitive swimmer while young, like most triathletes, I dipped my feet into the wet world of triathlon's inland lakes and ocean bays by learning how to swim competitively in order to be a triathlete. A land animal, my only hope in most triathlons was to get out of the water not too far behind the top dogs and try to bike and then run down as much of the competition as possible. This was a fine strategy in local and sometimes regional races, but it worked less well whenever up against the top talent. In Hawaii in '84, I had top 10 bike and run splits, but my swim time (57 minutes and change) placed me 72nd overall, more than seven minutes back on most of that day's eventual competition. Indeed, the more I relied on the bike and run, the less confident I became as a swimmer, especially in races against the best. And despite getting into the 54 minute range at Kona, my swim remained through my mid-1980s life as a triathlete a pale, some would say pathetic, pretender to the triad.
 
Twenty-five years later, now with 40,000 miles of running in the body and much of it done on hard surfaces, the body was less willing to run well in training, never mind far. In particular, chronically sore achilles precluded the possibility of training long or hard on hard surfaces. Sure, the body could still churn out a sub-18 minute 5K and get in the 3:35 range for the marathon leg of an ironman in a competitive moment when it had to. But the requisite proper training, especially for the Ironman distance, seemed out of reach, the 50 year old body variously unwilling or unable to undergo the training I'd remembered in younger years.

So, as I made the decision to Go For Kona in November of 2010, and given that I was training in Saudi Arabia, where you could go a lifetime and not see anyone running outdoors, the decision to complete most of the running training on treadmill, indoors, made sense, especially in the summer months leading to Kona, after I'd qualified in Port Elizabeth at Ironman South Africa. Treadmill workouts didn't leave me nearly as beat up and sore. They also connected me to a gym workout world that I'd always avoided but at 50, and losing muscle mass and flexibility, now needed.

Thus began a calculated decision, a risk really, to run sparingly outside while building the lion's share of base miles and eventual speed indoors on the treadmill. While I'd never even dreamed of this kind of approach before, over the years I'd read of a number of top runners who, for various reasons, had used treadmills in their training. Besides, my body and the local weather weren't giving me much choice; in the end, the decision was perhaps inevitable.

All told, about 90% of my running mileage took place on a treadmill. Going into IMSA last April, I'd run a dozen or so times outside, the longest of which was slightly over two hours and 18 miles in duration.  I had a good but not great run in South Africa yet knew that the stakes would be much higher in October. But the running road to Kona was more complicated, the half-century old running body seemingly less willing to abide long outdoor runs, in part due to our whistle-stop six weeks of traveling in the U.S. during June and July, when all training became catch-as-catch-can, and in part due to the insanity of training outdoors in Saudi Arabia most any time in August or September, once we returned.

Perhaps knowing where all this was headed, I focused where I knew I could and must: the bike, and especially the swim. The few swimming folks on our compound took pity on me. An Australian woman, already a swim coach on campus, met me regularly to deconstruct and gradually reconstruct my stroke, while an Englishman, and the only guy on campus who swims daily and well here, took apprentice-me on as a project, giving me the regularity of brutal interval workouts and the clarity of someone always just a bit ahead. Gradually, the swim came around, so much so that by the end of September I felt in as good a swim shape as ever, possibly minus a smidgen of the raw speed of one's 20s.

If anyone would have predicted my 2nd fastest swim time among the top 10 in the 50-54 age group at Kona this past October, just a few minutes slower than Krissy Wellington (who didn't have to contend with the age-group multitudes) land-lubber-me would have called them crazy! Similarly, if anyone would have said I'd run only the 7th best run split of the top 10, I'd have thought them more crazy. Yet changes to one's body during aging are difficult to anticipate; knowing how these changes will play out in the "Kona heat of competition" are even more difficult to predict.

Be that as it may, on October 8, 2011 I knew I'd be playing my two best cards on the swim and the bike, so it wasn't a tremendous surprise when I got off the bike in third and by mile 15 had moved up to second, less than 90 seconds back, and about 15 minutes ahead of my Kona PR pace from way back in '84. And then, perhaps predictably, the years of running, a 2:29 marathon PR, and a personal triathlon history of always moving up during the run met the mid-life reality of insufficient preparation combined with world class competition. Nine hours into racing, pedigree didn't matter, the auto-pilot of survival kicked in, and the late-race Darwinism of out-lasting others in the age group, all in similar stages of delirium, became the only imperative. That I was able to hang on for 5th place remains a mystery, just like life itself.  Okay, I suppose I should thank my swim!

The biggest lesson learned last October may just have been that in every one of us there is this tremendous ability to adapt in order to compete. I still wouldn't consider myself a swimmer per se, but I can say this recent flirtation with aquatic success has sparked a new interest in swimming on a somewhat regular basis, possibly as a cornerstone to a second half-century of healthy living. I may not love swimming the way I long first-loved running, but 31 years after completing my first triathlon I can now hold my head high in the post-race analysis, a bit amazed that for once it wasn't the swim that held me back!                   

Actually, it is about the bike

Lance has it wrong.  It is about the bike. Over the race's three and a half decades, time improvements at the Hawaii Ironman Triathlon World Championships have largely been dictated by drastic enhancements in bike technology. Not always, not for everyone, but in general when times have come down for athletes, they've come down due to improvements in the bike the athlete is riding, with the bike split responsible for a disproportionate amount of the time improvement.  And that includes, to some extent, the average but much less steep improvements in run times, since a better, more relaxed bike time trial position can lead to a more comfortable ride and, therefore, a better chance at the marathon. A bike that allows an athlete to rest once in awhile and to feed better places the athlete in an overall more comfortable position, almost by definition allowing for a faster run.

It wasn't always this way. There's a famous picture of Dave Scott, early on in his career, pedaling away on your basic ten-speed bike of yore - sans aero bars, aero helmet, multiple feeding and drinking options, bar-end shifters, aero wheels and all the rest of the wizardry that's now standard on most triathlon bikes, including on every single bike I saw at Kona last October. In fact, it was probably still only a twelve-speed road frame, with regular road drop bars, that Dave used in '84 when he became the first Kona athlete to break nine hours en route to demolishing the field yet again. Given what's happened to the two-wheeled beast since, Dave's performance remains nothing short of incredible.

How else to explain my 9:46 time at Ironman South Africa and 9:50 at Hawaii this past year at 50 years of age?  These times didn't happen because suddenly at 50 I became a faster runner or swimmer than I was in my prime, or that I was not pushing myself during my PR 9:43 in '84 at Kona. In '84, probably like many, I was on a classic steel road frame bike weighing about 21 lbs. A friend of mine on our college's French language program in the Pyrenees had bought it for me used in the ubiquitous Tour de France watering hole of Pau, for the franc equivalent of $300.  I can still remember how exciting it was to unpack that amazing machine, reassemble the requisite parts, and go for a first ride on and actual European racing bike. I was 21 years old and I was hooked.

For its era, my trusty Zeus was a very fine bike. It won the Michigan state road race in June of '83, went to US Cycling Nationals in San Diego that August, won about a dozen triathlons, completed a 10-hour Ironman in Minnesota in July of '84, and was now primed to perform at its first Hawaii Ironman in October of '84. Indeed, after its owner did his usual so-so swim and exited in 72nd overall, the red Zeus got down to work and blitzed through the 112 mile course in a top-ten bike time that day of 5:23. The '83 Ironman champ and top '70s US cyclist John Howard was the only person to pass us, en route to his  new Ironman record bike time of 4:53, on a day that saw him and Mark Allen become the very first Kona triathletes in history to break five hours on the bike.

Yet as good as Dave, Mark, John and others from the '80s were on their bikes - and they were amazing! - their times would not hold a candle to the times being posted now, and not just by the top dogs, but by increasing numbers of folks, young and not so young, male and female, all of whom compete on faster and faster bikes. In arguably the best cycling shape of my life at 23, and even with a top-ten overall Kona bike split, my 5:23 in '84 was 25 minutes slower than the 4:58 I posted this past October in Kona at the age of 50. Even though my life at 23 was triathlon, and despite having great success both as a bike racer and as cyclist during triathlons, there wasn't much more speed I could have gotten out of that Zeus. Put another way, how else to explain the Kona bike time of a 50 year-old full-time teacher, husband, and father stuck on a very small compound in Saudi Arabia than the pedal poetry of a Scott Plasma TT bike?

So when folks talk to me about how much faster triathletes are today, I remind them that just about all of that time improvement has come due to advances in bike technology. Mark's run-leg record from the '80s still stands, and many of the fastest swim times ever can still be traced back to the '80s. But with cycling times you'd be hard-pressed not to think that somewhere along the way they'd shortened the bike leg by about 10 miles, so incredibly fast are the times being posted today. Indeed, while I was happy to post a 4:58 in Kona last year, breaking five hours at Kona is becoming standard fare in more and more age groups, especially if an athlete hopes to stand on the podium the next evening. And if you're a pro male, breaking 4:30 is the new norm, with the very fastest now able to eclipse 4:20 (even a guy like winner Craig Alexander, who many would not have called one of the top cyclists in triathlon - until his breakout 4:19 bike split in October, that is!).

Indeed, field size creep, the lack of wet suits, and the massive mass swim start almost certainly mean Kona swim times won't be improving any time soon.  Meanwhile, run times have improved, marginally, but mostly because nutrition during the race and general training strategies have improved. Toss in the improved ergonomics of cycling, which makes for an easier transition to the run, and you've got a lot of good triathletes with running backgrounds who can break or come close to breaking three hours now for the marathon leg. Finally, let's not forget that less time on the bike means less time racing, which in general will lead to faster run times because the athlete just hasn't been at it as long.

My dream would be to see each of the top Kona athletes of all time competing in the same swim suits, on the same bikes, and sporting the same shoes in a race for all time. My guess is that some of the top dogs in this new generation would be surprised - and that there'd be some amazing PR bike splits among the older guard!  Forget what Lance says, it's definitely about the bike.

Cooling off in Kona

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

On the game changer, with Red Sea in background

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My better half and I

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

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

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

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

Podium to podium - 27 years

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

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

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

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

David