Putting it all together

“Everything you need is already inside” – Bill Bowerman

For the past two weeks, I’ve been trying to find a way to put my Ironman experience into words. The race itself was just the candle on top of the cake. To truly capture the event meant that I would need to start at the beginning. At first I thought this point was the time roughly 9 months ago, when I began to build my base running in knee-high snow drifts, and toughen up my ass by sitting on a 1” wide seat for hours at a time on my trainer bike. But by then, I already knew (or thought I knew) what I was getting into. This really all started long before, during the summer of 2005, when I toed the line in my first multisport race. Whether it was subliminal or not at that time, I know now that my training for Ironman began on that day…during a 400 yard pool swim, a 14 mile bike, and a 5km run. I completely got my ass kicked, both by my competitors and my own body. And it was the most beautiful self-destruction I had every experienced.

The other end of the spectrum happened almost exactly 5 years to the day of my first race. Walking the final 10 miles at Eagleman, my day was destroyed by inflated expectations and false fitness. The fun was gone, and the suffering provided no motivation…without pleasure, there could be no pain. I had hit bottom. My training ended that day, at least from the perspective of “can I do this?”. I took a few weeks off, until I started to miss the bike, miss the pool, and miss my Nikes.

I needed another way, and I found it through Endurance Nation, with their simple philosophy of “why waste hours going slow, when you can get the same returns by ramping up the pace in less time.” Twelve weeks of 2x a day workouts, all with a level of intensity that left me near death at the end of each one. Saturdays with a 4, 5 or 6 hour bike ride, followed by a 6 mile run. And 3-mile pool swims with a 50 mile bike on Sundays. On paper, even now reading it, that looks insane. Hell, it IS insane. But doing one of those workouts…just a single one…gave me the confidence to do the next one. And the one after that. When I started the build-up period, I was a cardboard cutout of who I wanted to be; after the final 12 weeks, I was carved out of stone. The strange tan lines on my back, arms and legs drew stares at the pool, but I considered them the proof that I had paid my dues.

But throughout all of this, I had never done more than 7 continuous hours of training, and Ironman would be significantly longer than that. What about the marathon? My longest training runs were only 16 miles, and those were on fresh legs. My nutrition strategy had worked for my long bike rides, but would it be enough after a 2.4 mile swim, and 112 miles on a bike, to sustain me for a 26.2 mile run? The “what-ifs” list is so long for an Ironman, that no matter how confident you are in advance, you really have no idea how your body will perform on race day.

There was only one way left to answer the questions I had, and that was to start…and finish…the race.