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!  :)