A song, a story, a slog, a surprise
a snaking, non-linear Ironman Canada race report
This August I went to Penticton, British Columbia, and came home with an comically oversized medal. This is how it all came about.
The Song
If you’re going to be foolhardy enough to indulge in the expense and efforts of pursuing an Ironman journey, why would you not go full Main Character and give yourself theme music?
My first time — nine years ago!— I had signed up on something of a lark. I was living in DC and feeling homesick for California, Lake Tahoe was a place that had always held a special place in my heart, and the time felt right to take a big leap. I was still naive about motivation and training volume and burnout, but I had the presence of mind to get myself a mantra to stick with early on in my training. It came wrapped up in a neat bow as Ben Folds Five’s “Do It Anyway,” a fairly silly piano bop with a sledgehammer of a message that carried me through many mornings of getting up early to stumble to the local pool before work, or go out for another long run in the mid-Atlantic summer heat, etc., etc. Bottom line: You made a commitment and you can still physically take this current step even if you don’t consciously want to. It helped! I finished smiling.
The not-so-secret sauce to a successful theme song for multisport is that there’s no room for vagueness or nuance. You’re going to be tired a lot of the time and not have all your brainpower available to parse abstract turns of phrase. (As a chorus, “It sucks but do it anyway!” is perfectly unambiguous.) When I decided in […sigh] September 2020 that I was ready to give Ironman another shot, I didn’t have a song at the ready.
I’ve written about it before so no need to rehash it here, but the covid-19 pandemic coincided with a number of other changes, large and small, that gelled into an encompassing sense of grief, loss, and vacancy. I wanted to race an Ironman again for the big dumb reason that it would give me something familiar to strive for, an opportunity to realize a win and turn a page. I needed a song to reflect that urge. It took quite a while and a lot of input from friends before I landed on one that clicked: Gossip’s “Move in the Right Direction.” I mean, check out this first verse:
One step closer, I’m feeling fine
Getting better one day at a time
Moving forward with all of my might
I’m heading toward a new state of mind…
Meatball pitch right over the plate there!
The hilarious part is that I then missed three opportunities to finish a race:
- IM Coeur d’Alene (June 2021) — bike accident and arm injury; withdrew
- IM California/Sacramento (Oct 2021) — record-setting rain, wind, flooding; race canceled on morning of
- IM St. George (May 2022) — high heat + bad choices = crapped out on the run with 6 miles to go
So it felt prudent to start over when I got to Penticton. The thing is, nothing really seemed to fit musically. My mood had changed since I got home from St. George. I got halfway through writing a race report that kept taking bitter turns and eventually had to put it out to pasture. This was going to be my last bite at the apple and I just wanted to finish. I made it all the way to raceday without having a song in mind. And it wasn’t even until I got halfway through the 180 km (112 mi.) bike course and I began to feel fatigue setting in, that it danced into my head unbidden.
Easy to bitch, easy to whine
Easy to moan, easy to cry
Easy to feel like there ain’t nothing in your life
Harder to work, harder to strive
Harder to be glad to be alive
But it’s really worth it if you give it a try
I’m not going to claim it’s any great work of musical genius, but it absolutely fit the moment and kept me pedaling, so thank you Cowboy Mouth.
The Story
It didn’t even occur to me that I’d been on this treadmill of gearing up for a race for two years at this point. I was just riding the ebb and flow of training, while slowly feeling my body getting less willing to support long day after long day of workouts, while still somehow not getting enough time in the saddle.
(Bike mistakes had been my main downfall in St. George. In the background was the realization that I had not put in an adequate number of long days to prepare for that course. The most immediate issue, however, was that I had made the fateful choice to try renting a bike instead of bringing my own along. I was unhappy with the way my carbon-fiber Cannondale was performing lately and thought I could get a boost form renting something newer and nicer. Turns out Raceday Wheels didn’t have the make/model I’d ordered, the bike they’d reserved for me was too small, and the derailleur on the bike I got refused to perform. Suffice to say, I don’t recommend them.)
I was also developing a keen awareness of my formerly-cavalier attitude to nutrition. I had been battling leg cramps, having under-measured the volume of electrolytes I needed. I brought a combination of Nuun (fizzy stuff to go into water), SaltStick capsules, and Hotshot (a mystery concoction of cinnamon and some other very unnatural-tasting ingredients that purported to soothe angry leg muscles.) I was also burning out on sweet/sugary calories and needed to pivot to more savory options.
There was a lot I’d forgotten since 2013, my first and only finish. Some things hadn’t changed, but the free time I had enjoyed at 35 felt a whole lot sparser at 44. Pain has to be avoided and addressed immediately, soreness is a given but can be managed, but fatigue is the real killer. (You can still use achy muscles so long as you accept the discomfort; you can’t make tired muscles do what they’re not equipped to handle.) I was only one age group higher than I’d been at Tahoe but I felt very far from where I’d been then.
Underneath all this grumbling, there is a story: a guy who’d dug himself into a hole and had one shot to pull himself out. He’s started to lose sight of what this was all in pursuit of, and needed to see the endgame. Someone a little fat (by triathlon standards) and slow (by triathlon standards) who had coasted (by triathlon standards) to the starting line and just needed to see it through. It’s not the most compelling story — person with expensive, time-intensive hobby decides to see it through one last time so he can hang up his shoes and pivot to something a little less taxing.
Welcome to my reverse midlife crisis, where I decide to stop making garish, eyebrow-raising choices for the time being.
The upshot is that this was going to be my retirement. One last long race, then a break from getting up early on Saturdays to crisscross Marin and from booking up my midweek evenings with track/spin/pool sessions. What’s going to replace it? Something less totalizing. More books. The occasional happy hour. I’ll find out when I find it.
But first I had to make it through this day.
The Slog
Raceday: August 28, 2022. I got up early, as one does. I had tried to play it cool since — I think you see the theme by now — all I wanted to do was finish. No great shakes. But the nerves still got to me. Thankfully, the weather had taken a kinder turn and was no longer as groaningly hot as it had seemed just a few days earlier. I opted for a shortsleeved trisuit (instead of sleeveless) to give my shoulders some sun protection and make me a wee bit more aero.
The swim was going to be my happy place. It was the discipline I was in the best shape for, and the water temperature was delightful — not too hot, as had been rumored. The downside: I had decided to take an old wetsuit that I’d hacked off the forearms and lower-legs, so I wouldn’t overheat. The seal wasn’t quite as tight on the openings so it dragged a bit in the water, just enough to notice. I took it easy all the way through, keeping up a steady pace but saving my strength. I finished in 1:22:47, a little over my hoped-for 80-minute goal (and a little slower than my St. George time of 1:18:18), but I was in high spirits.
T1 was over in 8:02 — I refuse to skip my sunscreen-slathering! — and I headed out on the bike. The merciless thing about IM Canada is not the 6,000+ feet of climbing, but the fact it’s heavily concentrated in the back half of the course. I flew through the first 40-ish miles (with no more than a few short climbs and some long, breezy descents), admiring the shady and stunningly picturesque course along the Okanagan Highway. Then, onto Highway 3 and the first climb: up 1,200 feet in 7 miles. Here’s where I first felt Not Good.
People I’d been previously keeping up with (like my longtime training buddy Angela) easily started to pull away from me. I was no longer powerful, I was A Man At The Limit Of His Training. I could blame it on having a not-fancy road bike (true), or on the gravitational demerit of being a for-triathlon-hefty size (true), but I have to cop to it: I did not set myself up for success here. I do not use my trainer. I sometimes go to spin class. I mostly relied on long training rides, on conditioning-through-fun-stuff. It was not enough, I know.
Nonetheless I made it up that first hill, and I descended, and I enjoyed the rolling miles that followed. I dove into my special-needs bag and made my volunteer look away as I reapplied anti-chafing lotion to my undercarriage. I rode on and there was a second hill, both more drawn-out overall (15 miles of it!) and with steeper grades. I made it to the top of that and enjoyed the glorious descent. I peed on the bike and I enjoyed that too.
[The biggest failing of my St. George experience had been not getting enough electrolytes (or liquids in general) on the bike ride. I did not realize until after 8 hours and 37 minutes on that horrendously hot course that I had never once needed to urinate, and that should have been a blaring alarm that something was wrong.]
There was a third, maddening hill — the “and back” portion of an out-and-back finger away from the main course, but I did not care because that meant I was set up for a smooth return to Penticton. I came in with a bike time of 7:09:38, and for that I was very happy. I was virtually assured a dignified finish. T2 took me 10:51, which I can only shrug my shoulders at. I did not get sunburned and I was not unduly hungry.
Onto the run! This was going to be a tough one — every marathon is, but especially one coming after eight-and-a-half hours of effort outside in summertime. I knew I was not in top running shape; I had put braces on my left knee and right ankle to protect against (further) injury and told myself I needed to pace it. I was aiming for an average of 13 minutes a mile, and through a consistent run-walk combination I stayed with it for most of the way.
The first portion of the run was going to be the worst: it had the most elevation gain, and it was still warmer and sunnier at 3:30 pm than is ideal for me. (As I said on Strava, I hate hate hate heat… just because the conditions weren’t as bad as they could have been didn’t mean they weren’t still bad.) All the same, I was feeling a world better than I had in St. George — at that race, I was so depleted I couldn’t even jog for more than a few seconds and I shambled at a walk for 20 miles before getting (improperly, but mercifully) swept off the course.
Here in Penticton, I just had to get through the first 6 miles of hills and it would be flat going from there. I committed to walking the uphills and made it through that first leg decently well. After a brief cameo from my friends Rob & Quan (cheering on the sidelines), I began the final two loops through the streets of Penticton. The broad, flat avenues lined with buildings provided some desperately-needed shade; every time I was able to hide from the still-punishing sun, I felt my energy level rise. My (much fitter) housemates Steph & Matt, who’d started out later in the overall lineup and who I’d espied briefly in the bike course, finally caught up with me here.
My overcompensation on electrolytes and anti-cramping remedies also caught up with me about halfway through. I stopped for a discreet pee break in a convenient portable and discovered my effluent was brown, like cola brown. Now, I am a hydration fanatic. I have had an irrational fear of kidney stones since childhood, I rarely go out without a water bottle at hand, and I cling fastidiously to the idea that for good health one has to pee clear at least once a day. This was a horror story.
Luckily, I soon crossed paths with Andria, a wise and no-nonsense voice of reason from our house (there to cheer on her husband while recovering from her own injury). “You will have water and sugar, NO MORE SALTS,” she advised, and kicked me into gear. Not long after, my own husband popped up on the side of the road, holding up a handmade tri-fold poster featuring pictures of me and our cat. (He gets me!) We kissed and I cruised onward.
As the last miles ticked down, I was euphoric. I’d had so many non-starts and near-misses over the years. I was on track to close out my tri career by achieving a personal best. (Best of two Ironman finishes, yes, but nine years older and much less dedicated now). I was surrounded by people who wanted to see me succeed. I had a slight calf cramp, but not enough to bring me to a halt. And then I saw the chute.
Finisher, 14:38:38. Nearly an hour ahead of my time at Tahoe in 2013. It felt great.
The Surprise
I did not end up having a major epiphany to bring it all together. What ended up being surprising for me, perversely, was how natural and uneventful it was to accept that this was the end of my triathlon/Ironman journey after some 14 years. It was easy — a relief! — to walk away, but it was hard to let go. I had embedded myself in a world that rewarded dedication but also didn’t really need me; I threw myself into it and got my feelings hurt along the way more than I’d like to admit. I invested a lot of myself, my attention, & my drive to something that was both ultimately frivolous and still important to my development as a person.
I never found my “why” beyond a cheeky, insubstantial Why not? (But sure: Achieving things is fun. Staying fit feels good. Camaraderie can be nourishing. Etc., etc.) That carried me through for a while, but it wasn’t enough to keep going. For 2023 and beyond I’m looking for a new balance; more ROI on time spent, on relationships built, and on physical sustainability.
Ultimately I didn’t know what I was doing this for, but I did it anyway. A lot of it hurt, and humbled me; it was hard, but it was good.
