A few of my colleagues here at the Competitor Group and I are batting around the idea of creating a subscription-based website to provide tools, information and resources for triathletes seeking to qualify for the Hawaii Ironman. Specifically, it would offer:
- A sophisticated online training log
- Unlimited access to Ironman and Ironman 70.3 training plans designed by yours truly (for reference, my 24-week Ironman plans sell for $84.95 on TrainingPeaks)
- A downloadable e-book entitled, How to Qualify for the Hawaii Ironman
- Comprehensive insider reviews of all 22 official Ironman qualifying events, including tips for travel, each leg of the race, transitions and so forth, as well as maps, photos and video clips, plus the ability for members to add their own insider tips
- Personal profile pages where members can post photos, training and racing updates, etc. and connect with other members
- Forums on topics ranging from specific qualifying events to training to equipment to nutrition
- A comprehensive library of articles by yours truly on every conceivable topic that’s relevant to Ironman training and racing
- Video lessons on freestyle swim technique and more
- Special deals on products from official sponsors of the website
- Opportunities to win prizes, including an annual grand prize such as an all-expenses-paid trip to Kona for Ironman week
My question for you is, Do you see value in this idea? Can you quantify it? If you are a member of the target market (i.e. a triathlete aiming for Kona), please take the poll below. Thanks!
Before the men’s 10,000 meters was run at the 2009 USA Outdoor Tack & Field National Championships, my Competitor Running colleague Sean McKeon and I engaged in a top-three prediction contest. My picks were:
1. Galen Rupp
2. Dathan Ritzenhein
3. Tim Nelson
And what do you know? I nailed it. When I boasted of my picks later to one of the guys from Flotrack, he said, “Wow. Even Dathan?”
Why doesn’t Ritz get any respect? The dude was ninth in the Olympic Marathon just last year, beating Ryan Hall. And I was just about the only person who picked him for a top 10 there, too. But before that all he ever did was win a couple of national cross-country championships, run a 61-minute half marathon and 8:11 for two miles, make the 2004 US Olympic Team at 10,000 meters, win an NCAA cross country championship (outkicking Ryan Hall in a classic race), and going back to high school, win two Foot Locker cross country championships and a freaking bronze medal in the World Junior Cross Country Championships. The dude is a straight-up fantastic runner, but people always forget about him. Why?
Well, I know why. Because he’s had almost as many downs as ups. Injuries screwed up most of his college running career, and since he decided to focus on the marathon a couple of years ago he has been overshadowed by Ryan Hall.
I’ve had a personal acquaintance with Ritz since I attended a party he hosted at his former home in Boulder after the 2006 USA Cross Country National Championships. I’ve had a special rooting interest in him ever since, and I always feel a vicarious sense of vindication when he does something special - as he did today.
Sixth in the World Championships 10,000 meters in Berlin. 27:22.28 - fourth-fastest time ever run by an American, second-fastest by an American-born runner. Beat Beijing bronze medalist Micah Kogo of Kenya. Crushed Galen Rupp.
It’s always fun to see an American runner do well in a major international competition, but it’s even more fun when you know the runner personally. Earlier this year I recruited Dathan to write a blog for Competitor Running, and he’s been doing a great job with it. I know he will post something about his race soon, and I am eager to read it. You’ll find it here.
I have an inside tip on what Ritz’s next race might be, and if it happens, it’s going to be very exciting. Stay tuned.
I forget who it was - Michael Sandrock, maybe? Someone like that - who wrote a story about the first time he ran with Frank Shorter. This was back when Shorter was at or near the height of his powers. The gold medalist told whoever it was - let’s just say Sandrock - that he was going for any easy 10-miler, and would he (Sandrock) like to come along? Of course he said sure and they hit the roads together. Immediately Sandrock was shocked by how slowly Shorter ran. He thought, well, maybe the dude’s just warming up, but the dude never went any faster. Before starting, Sandrock had feared that he would have trouble keeping up with Shorter, but by the end of the run he was thinking, shit, I could beat this guy!
The next day Shorter took Sandrock to the track and tore him limb from limb.
From this experience Sandrock learned the value of checking your ego at the door and truly running easy on your easy days. This practice was rare enough in the elite ranks of American distance running at that time that Sandrock did not know what to make of it initially, but he soon learned just what to make of it.
Today I did my first long bike ride with a world-class triathlete, Eneko Llanos, a two-time Olympian, ITU Long-Distance Triathlon world champion, XTERRA world champion, three-time Hawaii Ironman World Championship top-10 finisher, and 2008 Kona runner-up. Before the ride I was apprehensive about not being able to keep up with Llanos, but I need not have feared, not because Llanos couldn’t have torn me limb from limb if he had wanted to, but because Llanos apparently knows what Shorter knew: there is a time to go easy.
About 20 miles into the ride, feeling almost let down, I could not help but ask Llanos, “Is this pace okay?”
“Yes, it’s perfect,” he said. Seeming to sense my disappointment, he asked, “Why, do you want to go faster?”
“No, no,” I said hastily. “I’m here to serve you.” For that is how I looked at the situation. But a moment later I asked, “Do you always go this slow in your long rides?”
“Yes,” he said. But from my interview with Llanos a few days earlier I knew that, overall, his training program emphasized intensity more than volume, and he rides plenty fast at least a couple of times a week. Just not in his long rides.
But I may be giving you a false notion of how slow we rode together. It wasn’t that slow. We rode 101.35 miles, from Carlsbad to Temecula and back. It was a mostly flat route with a few rolling sections and a couple of gigantic climbs. We averaged 19.1 mph - about 18.5 on the way out and a hair under 20 on the way back. And while I was somewhat disappointed by the experience at 20 miles - the nature of my disappointment being that I had wanted to feel Llanos’ strength on the bike and to be strengthened by my hopeless efforts to match his strength - by the end of the ride I was delighted, because I realized that the ride was very easy for me too. How cool is this? I thought. I just rode five and a half hours with the guy who might win Ironman this year and I didn’t slow him down and I feel as if I could ride another 50 miles!
Almost all of my targeted peak races turn out to be disasters for one reason or another. They are regrettable, forgettable duds. For this reason, my best memory of each training cycle is almost always something unexpected, like a single perfect workout or a shockingly awesome low-key tune-up race. I am well on my way toward another peak race catastrophe in Ironman Arizona. And I have a feeling that today I got what I will get out of this training cycle - and it’s something.
The biggest climb on the route we rode today was an absolute killer on the inbound leg, starting at 66.5 miles. It was about 2.5 miles straight up at a pretty steady gradient of 6 or 7 percent. Llanos and I ground our way up it side by side. After several minutes, he looked ahead and asked, “Is that where we turn?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Good,” he said.
Now, I’m not kidding myself. Climbing is my strength and Llanos’ weakness. I am in the best cycling shape of my life and Llanos was doing his first ride of more than 3.5 hours since placing second in Ironman Frankfurt last month. But in saying that one word, “Good,” Llanos made me feel better about myself as an athlete than all but a very few of the race results I’ve ever achieved. His word afforded me a brief moment to bask in the glow of knowing that I had made one of the best triathletes in the world work hard. Let’s face it, there’s a needy child in each of us and the needy child in me relished that word like pudding.
I really like Eneko Llanos, by the way. He has that Mediterranean, easy-come, easy-go thing going on, which you don’t see in a lot of professional triathletes, and he seems to feel he has nothing to prove. He was clearly not even tempted to put me in my place during our ride together. I’ll be rooting for him in Kona, where he will perform at a level so far above my best it’s not even funny.
Way back in 1995, the founder of Triathlete Magazine, Bill Katovsky, hired me as an editor for his latest magazine creation, Multisport. Bill was not the sort of person I would have expected the founder of the world’s first triathlon magazine to be. He had only a mild interest in the sport and he hated the stereotypical triathlete. Bill was a literary guy, who in fact created a couple of very good literary magazines after leaving Triathlete. I remember that Bill would often disparage competitive triathletes for putting their heads down on the bike and pedaling as fast as they could through beautiful environments that they never really saw because they were not looking and were going too fast.
I saw his point. As I got to know the sport and the people in it I discovered some truth in Bill’s criticism that many competitive triathletes seemed to be racing through life with blinders on. But Bill was slow, and I suspected that his criticism was partly based on envy. I doubted he would have chosen to go slow if he’d had the option to go fast, and I also doubted that going fast would necessarily interfere with his or anybody else’s ability to live in the moment and fully absorb the rich experience of triathlon.
At the time Bill hired me I was a 205-lb. former runner, but when I had been a runner I was mad for speed. Yet as hell-bent as I had been to get faster, this disposition had not interfered at all with my capacity to relish the feelings and senses of pacing along a dirt road on a crisp autumn afternoon with the foliage exploding in a riot of color all around me, and all that crap. And when, inevitably, my work as an endurance sports magazine editor inspired me to get back into running and later to take up triathlon, I fell right back into that mad-for-speed mindset, which again, I found, enriched rather than elided my experience of the sport.
It is understandable that, when today I express my overall disappointment with my level of achievement in endurance sports, some of my readers should tell me that I am being too serious and am too focused on results and should focus instead on simply enjoying the day-to-day process of training. Yes, it is understandable. But I consider it bad advice. Because it’s not a case of either/or. An athlete can choose to care about speed and thereby put himself at risk of being disappointed if he fails (repeatedly, as the case may be) to achieve the level of speed he yearns for and at the same time thoroughly enjoy the feeling of burning lungs on a long hill climb and the camaraderie that a few training buddies experience on an epic Saturday ride, and all that crap.
In fact, while those who congratulate themselves on a Zen capacity to live in the moment as athletes feel sorry for me for bellyaching when I come up short of a PR by so many seconds in a race, I turn right around and feel sorry for them for missing out on the truly spiritual experience of trying absolutely as hard as one can to get absolutely as much as one can out of one’s body. There’s nothing else quite like it. There is a beautiful purity in making a total commitment to fight for every second. One’s entire life becomes organized around a single principle, and yes it’s a silly principle, to be the very best runner or triathlete one can be, but it has the same effect as any other such principle (e.g. “What would Jesus do?”), which is to make one feel incredibly alive.
The risk here is that this commitment to speed requires one to become somewhat dependent on certain outcomes, much as falling in love makes one vulnderable to a broken heart. If the goal is to get faster, failing to get faster hurts. But as they say, it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
I deeply regret that I burned out on running in my senior year of high school and quit the sport for eight years. I am bitter about the many injuries and other setbacks that have prevented me from achieving my higher goals as an athlete. I look back on my athletic career as a qualified failure, much as a baseball player who toiled for several years in the minor leagues and retired having never seen the Big Show might look back on his career as a qualified failure. Sure, he made it pretty far, farther than most, but he did not make it as far as he wanted to go.
And yet, while feeling like a failure is bad, having lived through giving all I’ve had to be the best I could be is good, and the magnitude of that good is much greater than the magnitude of the bad of my having failed, and I never could have been enriched by the good of trying without having chanced failing. Moreover, I certainly would not have enjoyed the training and races and ancillary aspects of being an athlete any more than I have done if I had chosen not to be mad for speed. The idea that one must stop to smell the roses is complete bullshit. You can smell them just fine on the fly.
At the risk of being a little too combative, I want to tell those who suggest that I have missed out on the simple pleasures of being an athlete, “Are you fucking kidding me?” When I first tasted it in 1995, I loved the life I have chosen so much that I changed the very trajectory of my existence and immersed myself in it completely and have remained thus immersed ever since. Ironically, until I met Bill Katovsky I was going to be Bill Katovsky - a literary writer. But I became an endurance sports writer so that I could experience the endurance life all day every day.
Multisport’s offices were located in Sausalito, in Marin County. If you’ve ever spent time in Marin County, you know that its air is filled with the scent of eucalyptus, especially in the headlands, in the shadows of which Sausalito is nestled. It was there that my endurance rebirth occurred. My olfactory bulbs were filled with the scent of eucalyptus as I performed those plodding early comeback workouts. I will always associate that scent with the totality of the endurance experience; it will always make me ache with nostalgia for my long life as an endurance athlete. I love that smell.
Yesterday I had the pleasure of interviewing last year’s Hawaii Ironman World Championship men’s runner-up, Eneko Llanos of Spain. We talked for 31 minutes. My questions were focused on this year’s Hawaii Ironman, because I think it’s very interesting to hear a top contender talk about the nuts and bolts of trying to win our sport’s Super Bowl. I’ve always hated NBC’s television coverage of the Hawaii Ironman because it assumes that the professional race is not interesting enough to be the central focus of the program. While Llanos is an interesting enough person to merit an NBC-style human interest profile in Triathlete - he’s our November (pre-Ironman issue) cover boy - I don’t feel like writing a general feature profile about him. I want to write specifically about his mission to win the Big One: training, strategy, tactics, nuts, bolts. If no one else likes it, I will.
Anyway, if you’re at all interested in such a read, you will have to wait until October to slake that interest. But I will tease you here with one quote from the interview. As a triathlete myself, one of the things that interests me about the Hawaii Ironman pro race is that it is a true race. The top men, especially, cannot focus on themselves and optimal individual pacing through the swim, bike and run, as you and I do. They have to try and beat everybody. I can’t even imagine doing an Ironman that way. For whatever reason, many pros actually won’t admit to racing instead of pacing in Kona. I think they think it betrays weakness to their rivals. But Llanos was honest. Unable to assume he would be, I asked, “To what degree do you do your own race in Hawaii and to what degree do you key off the other top men at the front of the race?” Here’s what he said:
In the swim I just try to go as fast as I can. If I have somebody in front of me I try to swim with him. I don’t really pace myself because I just want to be with the leading pack. I just try to swim as fast as I can.
For the bike it is the same in the beginning. There is always a group starting together after the swim, so the first hour, two hours, is very hard. It is very important to be in the lead group, because if you try to pace yourself, you’re going to lose the group. So you are going much faster in the beginning than you want to go. But it’s a race, a competition, and you can’t let people go. So I just try to be with the best bikers and survive and get to the run in the best position. It’s more strategic than pacing.
In the run it depends. Last year I was alone for most of the run, so I tried to pace myself. But if you are with a group it changes things. You may try to stay with guys or to drop them. It depends how the race goes.
We’ve all laughed at this joke. What makes it funny? The fact that the doctor’s utterance sounds perfectly sensible but is in fact totally absurd. Presumably the movement that hurts the patient is one that is required for a normal life, so not doing it to avoid pain is no solution at all. Perhaps there is no other solution, but the doctor should help the patient exhaust all other possible solutions before telling the patient to stop doing that.
Coach/fellow athlete/self-appointed expert: “What seems to be the matter?”
Athlete: “I’m injured.”
Coach/fellow athlete/self-appointed expert: “You tried to do too much. Stop trying to do so much.”
A lot of coaches and athletes and self-appointed experts who laugh at the doctor joke presented above commit the very same absurdity in reflexively assigning “doing too much” as the cause of every injury.
On the one hand, this mindless parroting of received wisdom sounds perfectly sensible. By definition, every overuse injury is caused by doing too much. But the one-size-fits-all advice to do less is no solution at all in most cases of overuse injury because the athlete is an athlete and cannot be the athlete he wants to be if his chosen solution to every pain is to do less. That’s a straight path to doing nothing.
In my experience, very, very few endurance athletes try to maintain unreasonably high training loads. Most endurance athletes at most times take on training loads that are more or less appropriate to their experience and fitness levels and are necessary to the achievement of their race goals, which are themselves seldom unreasonable. In other words, they have a right to expect to be able to do the training they want to do. Injuries are not always irrefutable proof that the athlete is training too hard. Except when the athlete has obviously done something way over the top, an injury should be treated simply as a barrier to the athlete’s being able to train as hard as he wants to.
At the elite level everyone thinks this way. When a few years ago Kara Goucher suffered injury after injury that kept her off many a starting line and caused her to get her ass handed to her in the few races she did run, she did not conclude that she was training too hard and needed to train less. Her goal was to be a world-class runner, and it is well understood that it is necessary to train very, very hard to be a world-class runner. So instead of training less, Goucher found solutions (it wasn’t any single thing) that enabled her to train more without breaking down.
Not all endurance athletes can train at the world-class level without breaking down, but very few even want to, and most non-elite endurance athletes can train healthily as hard as they want to if they take the elite attitude toward injury. The training load is not the problem. The training load is what must be preserved, because it is the necessary means to the desired outcome of reasonable performance goals. Naturally, most injuries require a temporary reduction in training load, but only rarely should an injury say to the athlete, “Don’t ever do that again.” Nine times in ten, the correct message is, “Try another door.”
There was a time in the past when I could not run 40 miles a week without getting injured. But by treating my injuries as the problem instead of my mileage I was eventually able to run 80 miles a week at a significantly lower injury rate. Thank heavens I didn’t listen to those who told me I was doing too much at 40 miles a week!
Recently I suffered a swimming-related injury despite swimming at only a fraction of the volume I have swum at in the past. Was I not doing too much when I swam more in the past, and am I now doing too much at drastically less yardage? Duh. No. I had a technique flaw that put stress on a particular muscle. If I continue to swim with that flaw, then yes, 6,000 yards a week is too much. But if I do the intelligent thing and correct it, then 16,000 yards a week may not be too much.
In THE RUNNER’S BODY I wrote about a study in which runners trained two groups of novice runners for a road race. One group was given a sensible, volume-graded training plan that eased them into running and gently coaxed them along with slow, safe, gradual mileage increases. The other group was just thrown into a hard routine that never changed, right up to the race. The injury rate in each group was tracked. The injury rate was exactly the same in both groups.
Injuries happen. Almost never do they occur purely because an athlete is trying to train harder than is reasonable.
The closest genetic relative of our species is the chimpanzee species. When a pair of unfamiliar chimpanzee males happen upon each other in the wild, they fight to the death. Every time. Chimpanzees are savage animals.
We have our better nature too, without which we would not have so cleverly created sports to sublimate our savagery. Is it any wonder, then, that athletes so often perform their best when angry? This is as true in the endurance sports as in the violent and ballistic ones. Lance Armstrong is the too obvious example, but he is not atypical of champions. He did the greatest of many great things when steam was coming out his ears. Throughout his on-and-off career he has gone out of his way to get pissed off expressly so he could win. Lance doesn’t love to win; he hates to lose. That other chimpanzee is not familiar and Lance wants to bash his goddamn brains in. People think Lance’s war is just the title of a book. No, it’s also a complete summation of his career - which he has thoroughly enjoyed.
I was thinking about these things this morning when Triathlete editor Brad Culp walked into the office. I shouted across the partition, “Anger is an endurance athlete’s best friend in a race. Nothing enables you to master the suffering of a race like boiling rage.”
Brad loves to disagree with me. “I could not agree with you more,” he said in a tone half-grave, half-amused. “That is one hundred percent accurate.”
It is. And it only makes sense. Chimpanzees utterly depend on their anger for their individual survival. Anger readies them to fight for their very lives. In as much as they are athletes, anger raises their performance to the highest level.
Get it?
I have not raced angry very often. The first time I remember racing angry was when I was fifteen, about to turn sixteen. My best friend and teammate and nearest running rival, Mike Holmes, and I moved down from our normal distances to form a 4 x 800m relay team with a couple of other teammates. Neither of us had ever run a competitive 800 before and we had no idea how fast we could run the distance. But we both knew one thing: we had to beat our best friend.
It was totally out in the open, of course, we being best friends. We talked straight shit, competing to come up with the funnier put-down. I hope it was I who came up with the funniest put-down, because Mike handed my ass to me in the relay. I ran a 2:12. Mike blasted a 2:04. When Mike told me his split, smiling, I was devastated. I remember sulking like an overgrown baby all the way home in the back of my parents’ car.
I made sure to run the 800 again in the very next meet a few days later. Mike gave me the pleasure of a rematch. But I really wasn’t interested in beating him any longer. I accepted that he had just moved out of my league, and congratulated him on it. I just wanted to get closer. But what little I wanted, I wanted that with a vengeance. I continued to burn with the humiliation I had suffered in the relay. So I ran angry, and I ran 2:07. Boom. Five days, five-second improvement. Anger.
The first time I rode a bike angry was at the Half Vineman Triathlon in 2002. I was training for my first Ironman that summer. Story of my life, the process had been marred by injury. I had just come off swimming and running injuries very similar to those that are foiling my Ironman training today. I was angry, but my swimming and running were too weak to be done angrily. So I put it all into the bike. I told myself that T2 was really the finish line. There was no run. When I was done with the bike leg, I was done, so I might as well crush it.
And I crushed it. I started in a later wave and passed suckers like they were being literally sucked backward by an apocalyptic vaccuum the whole way. With about ten miles to go and all of the tough hills behind me I cranked the volume all the way to eleven, mashing the pedals with reckless disregard for energy conservation. My face was a hideous, bulging-eyed mask. I grunted audibly in a steady rhythm, like an annoying bench presser in a coed gym, a good bit anaerobic now.
My 56-mile split was 2:28 something, faster than all but one female pro’s bike time, and while far slower than the top male’s split, it was great for me. The very best I could do. Satisfying.
Oh, and how was my run? Not great. I think I covered the half marathon in 1:25 and change (a few weeks later, with a bit more running fitness, I ran a very respectable 35:30 10K on the tough LA Triathlon course), but that was about all I had expected coming into the race, given my recent injury. The ride - the anger - didn’t hurt it.
Injury has now put me in a place of riding angry again, daily, in training. I am taking out the frustration caused by my swimming and running injuries on my bike. Actually, most fittingly, since it is fundamentally a bodily mutiny that is the cause of my anger, I am taking it out on myself through the bike. And I am finding it to be a most satisfyingly healthy way to let it all out. Today I came home after work, put on some angry music, loud, hopped on my CycleOps and cranked out 12 x 1 minute at 400+ watts. It was excruciating. I went to a place of misery I have not gone to in a few months. It was purifying, as always.
As I told a friend recently, triathlon is a hobby and a hobby is meant to be enjoyed. Misfortune has made it impossible for me to enjoy triathlon in the way I wanted to enjoy it, so I am scouting around for an alternative way. Most concretely, I am scouting around for a way to still be motivated for Ironman Arizona. One way might be to ride the bloody 112-mile bike course as fast as god will allow me. To ride angry. To treat that race as a chimpanzee death match. As a long cycling time trial featuring a mandatory 2.4 mile warm-up swim and an optional marathon cool-down run.
Seriously, I will do the best I can in that run in good faith, but if I can’t train for it, then it will be a disaster regardless of how hard I go at the bike, so…
One of my favorite poems is “The End of the World” by Archibald MacLeish. It goes like this:
THE END OF THE WORLD
Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb
Quite unexpectedly to top blew off:
And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing — nothing at all.
These lines have always resonated most harmoniously with the frequency of my soul’s vibrations. As I interpret it, the poem is existentialist. Life has no inherent meaning. When the tent blows off the circus of distractions that we create to give life meaning, we are confronted with the absolute nothingness that is always everywhere around it.
Some say we should give up the circus voluntarily before the tent blows off and embrace the nothingness, because although this is very difficult to do, there is a more certain happiness to be found in this embrace, once achieved. My older brother Josh, a zen Buddhist, holds this viewpoint. But my own viewpoint has always been that embracing the meaninglessness of life is so difficult that most of us are better off creating the best circus we can muster and doing our level best to keep the tent securely suspended above it.
I was quite young and did not yet possess the mental sophistication to comprehend these ideas when I discovered that I was always happiest when I was pursuing big dreams and goals, particularly in writing and sports. At times, with rejections and injuries and such, the big top has been torn off these dreams and goals, leaving me to confront the horrible nothingness beyond, but it has always been possible to put a new tent in place quickly, and so all in all I have always felt that this recipe for happiness has worked for me.
I do sometimes glance over the proverbial fence and see greener grass in my brother’s acceptance of the yawning void. Over the years my wife has repeatedly expressed her fear that I am on a collision course with a devastating final loss of the tent, because the circus I have chosen to create for myself, like the circus that most other people create, lacks the force and coherence to last an entire lifetime. She is a Christian - one of the six or seven real Christians on earth - and therefore does not need a circus in a way that seems different from the Zen way on the surface but is really exactly the same underneath. I’m talking about love, of course. A lucky few discover the black void to actually be a breathable atmosphere of pure love. It is not a meaning they must create and maintain; it is simply there.
I cannot rule out the possibility that the circus I have created is doomed to die before I do, but frankly I do not fear it, because I am wise enough to see that the pain would transform me most fortuitously. But I also cannot rule out the possibility that my circus, although imperfect, will last, and that I will never regret having chosen it.
All of the foregoing is apropros of my latest loss of the covering tent, which is the storm of injuries I mentioned in yesterday’s post. It’s really amazing how vulnerable you are when you stake the meaning of your life on silly distractions. One of my favorite running quotes, which you’ve probably heard me mention before, is former marathon world record holder Ian Thompson’s line, “When I am happy I am running well, and when I am running well I am happy.” Usually I quote this line by way of making the point that one’s running has to be viewed in the whole context of one’s human life, and that finding fulfillment outside of running will only help one find fulfillment in running. But in the present context, we can understand Thompson’s words as a confession that he chose to make running the meaning of his life, such that, if his running was not going well for any reason, like stubbing his toe, he could not be happy.
I feel your pain, Ian. My running is not going well, and I am not happy. A few short days ago, I excitedly looked forward to five-hour bike rides. Now 20 minutes in the saddle feels like an eternity. A few short days ago, loved my work. Now I am counting the hours until I can retire. All because my leg hurts.
I am writing these words not to enjoy the bitter pleasure of feeling sorry for myself and even less to make you feel sorry for me. This blog, started with no clear purpose, has evolved to become a forum to express the truth of the endurance athlete’s experience. As such, the less filtered it is, the better. I’m just expressing the truth of what I am experiencing now, knowing that I am not the first and will not be the last to feel such feelings.
The dominant themes of my life as an endurance athlete have been pain, frustration and disappointment. This is because my chief motivation to pursue endurance sports has been the desire not merely to participate but to excel, but my body is extremely fragile and has never been able to withstand the stress of the training required to excel. My body has simply broken down more times in more ways than the body of any other endurance athlete I’ve known or heard about. I dare anyone out there to match my injury resume. I am the Humpty Dumpty of endurance sports, the Tiger Woods of overuse injuries.
Since returning to endurance sports in my mid-twenties after an eight-year college and post-college hiatus I have enjoyed just enough stretches of injury-free training to keep alive the hope of truly realizing my body’s athletic potential, but never enough to actually realize it. The greatest tease yet came earlier this year when I stayed healthy through some 16 weeks of the highest-level run training I have ever done and consequently reached the highest level of running fitness I have ever reached, only to fall apart just in time to miss out on the reward of racing better than I have ever raced.
After the bitter disappointment of April’s Boston Marathon I looked ahead to Ironman Arizona (November 22) as my next and possibly last chance to prove what my body was born capable of before age snuffed my prime. But this time my hopes were not even teased. Right away I suffered an injury that ruined my run training, and three months later I remain at square zero. My swim training also went badly from the start, not due to injury but instead because I had not swum for years and had forgotten how and could not remember how no matter how hard I tried. But then, while swimming last Friday, I tore my right rhomboideus major and I’m probably looking at a good ten days to two weeks out of the pool.
My bike training has gone well, at least. Until yesterday. Yesterday I planned to ride 100 miles, but my bike broke 15 miles into the workout and I had to call a taxi to rescue me. By the time I got home I was burning with rage. The fact that every inhalation caused a stabbing pain to shoot through my rib cage, thanks to that scapular muscle tear, did not help matters. I put my rage to productive use by hopping on my indoor trainer and churning out 240 watts for 90 minutes. Those numbers would have given me some satisfaction if an emerging pain on the medial side of my right knee (my first-ever cycling injury, not including low-back pain?) had not sucked the luster from them.
This morning I was hopeful that eight days of no running at the end of last month plus a very careful return to running in the last two weeks plus three ASTYM treatments and endless icing and stretching and strengthening exercises would allow me to run for two hours pain free at a shuffling pace of ten minutes per mile on the treadmill, but after just four miles I could read the handwriting on the wall and hopped off to limp home.
About once a month I sleep wrong and wake up with a stiff neck that hurts and annoys me all day. Of course, last night was one of those nights. So now I can’t swim, run, breathe deeply, or turn my head and I have various levels of pain in my neck, mid-back, knee, Achilles tendon and foot (yes, the plantar fasciitis still has not gone away).
Each time I plunge from the wall and break into a million tiny pieces and fail to resist the temptation to whine about it, my wife tells me that maybe god is trying to tell me to slow down a bit. In the past I have always dismissed this advice. After all, god allows tens of thousands of people to train harder than I do without incident - why not me? But I’m beginning to think that maybe she has a point. Perhaps, for whatever reason, it is just not meant for me to achieve my dreams as an endurance athlete.
I have always known that eventually I would have to change my athletic mindset from competitor to participant. But I always figured that age would force that change, not repetitive non-age-related bodily mutiny. But here I stand (or sit, rather, as standing hurts - not that sitting doesn’t hurt) in the late autumn of my prime, besieged by yet another bodily mutiny that has stolen my last or at best next-to-last chance to do the best I was born capable of doing, and I’m thinking that the time to accept a change of mindset is now upon me.
I have quit endurance sports dozens of times before. But I always came back, because it’s who I am. My motivation to continue training for Ironman Arizona is just above zero; the strength of the temptation to quit endurance sports yet again and to work on my bench press is hovering at 9.5. I have seen this movie enough times, however, to know that I cannot quit. And yet I am falling apart, and feeling old for the first time in my life, and as dispirited as I have ever been. So what is the way forward?
I need to forget about Hawaii, forget about speed and performance and improvement altogether, and join the ranks of participants. I need to find a way to simply enjoy the fifteen weeks of training ahead of me and, if I make it there, enjoy Ironman Arizona. There is plenty of enjoyment to be had in the simple acts of swimming, cycling and running, at any speed, and I know that I am blessed to be able to swim, bike and run at all. Well, okay, granted, I cannot actually swim or run right now, and if my knee does what it is threatening to do, soon I will not be able to bicycle, either. But it’s not as if I’m paralyzed. With a little rest I will be able to swim, bike and run again - slowly, in modest amounts - and there is plenty of joy to be found in that, if I can only, finally, learn how to stop yearning for more.
Until July 2007 I had never run 10-minute miles. Even when I took up running at age 12 I ran faster than that. But in July 2007 I crewed for Dean Karnazes in the Badwater Ultramarathon and got my first taste of 10-minute miles. My crewing duties included taking turns with the other three crewmembers pacing Dean. I wanted to get the full crewing experience so I took my first turn when Dean was still on the floor of Death Valley and the temperature was still 115 degrees.
At that point Dean was still feeling good and still running 10-minute miles, which is not slow in the Badwater Ultramarathon. (Indeed, the men’s course record of 22:51:29, which was set that year, represents a pace just over 10 minutes per mile.) I jumped in and ran 27 miles with him. At first the pace felt uncomfortably slow, despite the heat. But before long I settled into a nice, hypnotic rhythm, and I even came to appreciate why Dean prefers to run slowly over tremendous distances to running faster over shorter distances, as I had always done.
It was fun. Running 135 miles at that pace would not have been fun, but it was quite enjoyable for the 36 total miles I covered at Dean’s side. (I took a second, nine-mile turn later in the race.)
Nevertheless, I have not run 10-minute miles since then. Until now. Now I find myself 15 weeks and two days out from an Ironman triathlon with a nagging Achilles tendon injury. To have any hope of attaining the level of running fitness I will need to achieve my race goal I must continue running despite the injury as best I can. But I certainly can’t run normally. I can walk just fine, as can most people with Achilles injuries. It is an injury whose pain symptom is tied very closely to speed. As running speed increases, stress on the Achilles tendon increases exponentially. Thus my usual 7:00 miles are out of the question, and the very idea of speed work is laughable. But again, as I said, I can walk without pain.
And I can run 10-minute miles without pain and without setting back the healing process that will eventually allow me to run faster. So that’s what I’m doing. On the one hand, when I step onto the treadmill (sorry, Chuckie) and start running 10-minute miles I feel demoralized. It’s not just that I am thinking, How will these few 10-minute miles help me run 26 consecutive 7-minute miles off the bike in Phoenix? I am also thinking, Running this slowly is beneath me. Sure, call it arrogant, but I get teased about it at work. Mercilessly. But on the other hand, once I get going, I kind of like it, just as I liked it in Death Valley.
It’s very easy, after all. No strain. I can just let the alpha waves take over and meditate, or pay much closer attention to the golf tournament on TV than I can when I’m running faster.
The only other downside is that it takes an eternity to cover any significant distance at this pace. This weekend I’m hoping my Achilles tendon will stay quiet enough to allow me to run two hours. If I succeed, I will cover 12 miles. Twelve measely miles for two hours’ work!
I should just be grateful that I am able to run at all, and really I am. And as long as I can log enough of them, I don’t think these 10-minute miles are really such bad preparation for my Ironman marathon. We’ll see.
