IronMan Lake Placid 2011: Race Report - life changing indeed

A good Samaritan had some feedback about most of my race reports.  She wondered why I did these events because my race reports were always humorously painful and horrendous sounding.  I understood this as an inherent truth and was surprised at her surprise. 

Of course races are painful and horrendous; that’s why we do them.

It also is great material for humorous blog postings.  I couldn’t make this stuff up!

But that reaction made me realize that I am missing one very important race report.  I have neglected to tell you dear readers about the MOST painful one ever, and consequently the most gratifying: my very first Ironman.

Picture Lake Placid in the summer of 2011.  Nervous athletes are gathering and eating carbohydrates in antler decorated and taxidermy enriched dining rooms.  Tree bark and wallpaper with forest creatures seems to cover everything sitting still.  Plaid is clearly the fashionable pattern this summer.

If upstate NY could do Vegas, it would be Lake Placid.  I swear it’s like stepping foot on a movie set.  Wonderfully foreign and deliciously perfect.  It was, and still remains, one of my most treasured locations.

Since you’re picturing things already, please now complete this image by adding dangerously hot temps and sweat gland exhausting humidity.  In the week leading up to the race, there was a fantastic heat wave in the area.  Talk in the Ironman village could be overheard making wagers on how many people would die this year from a heat stroke.

I found the situation very calming.

But alas, the night before the race the clouds began to build.  A cool breeze would occasionally surprise you from the North.  The rain began, bringing with it cooler temps and terrifically low humidity.  In an unexpected gift from baby Jesus himself, the weather on race day was forecasted to be about as perfect as any athlete could ask.

But that’s enough about antlers and temperature.  Let me tell you where my head was on race morning.

Keep in mind that this was my first full Ironman.  It was therefore my first experience with working out like a ninja for 6 months and then being asked to taper.  Try taking a child with ADHD, giving him a Big Gulp full of Red Bull, and topping it off with a nice bump of cocaine.  Then tell him to sit still.  That is what tapering feels like before your first Ironman.

So, with my fingernails chewed down to the quick and a bald spot on my left arm where I had been obsessively scratching as a newly developed nervous tic, I woke on race day at some ungodly hour to eat my breakfast.

You read my blog.  You know I am an eater.  I could be hospitalized with the stomach flu and ask when dinner was being served.  Some athletes have trouble eating on race morning.  I tend to steal their food.

Clearly, getting my breakfast down was a non-issue.  First potential hurdle: cleared!

Now you go to the transition area to set up for the race.  If there are more tense places on this Earth, I hope to never see them.  This is where you witness and perhaps display the following behaviors and events: off-the-wall pre-race rituals, shrill nervous laughter, bouts of panic and cold sweats because you aren’t sure you remember how to put air in your tires, duct taping any number of clever little baggies with some sort of sugar laden goop, stretching, standing in line at the porto-potties, checking your nutrition bags, filling water bottles, trying to shimmy into the tightest piece of clothing ever imagined by man (the wetsuit), realizing you have to pee the moment you finally get in that wetsuit, spending more time that expected considering just peeing where you stand (it is a wet suit after all), freaking out because you forgot your helmet, nervous laughter again when you realize it was on your head, wondering why you put on your helmet while getting ready to swim, telling the person next to you who looks like they will throw up at any moment how funny it was that you put on your helmet, jumping over a rack of bikes when that guy does indeed lose his breakfast, putting on sunscreen even though the sun hasn’t risen yet, trying to memorize where your bike location is in this massive sea of bikes, fussing with every possible thing on your person and equipment to ensure it is in perfect working order, wondering what the hell you’d do if you found something not in perfect working order, along with other general psychotic behavior that is easily justifiable seeing that it’s race morning. 

Honestly, by the time they announced we were to start walking down to the lake for the swim start, I was a nervous wreck!  You know what makes that feeling worse?  Actually getting to the swim start.

Have you ever seen 2,000 people in funny colored swim caps all getting ready to start an Ironman?  Have you ever been smack in the middle of them?  I wish I had a clever analogy for you, but my artistic abilities fail me.  Never have I felt tension and energy quite like I feel right before the swim begins in this length of race.  This being my first Ironman, it hit me like a brick dropped out of a plane.  Blam!

The nice man was saying something encouraging over the speaker, I can only imagine, as I didn’t have the available brain capacity to understand English at this point.  It was purely visceral.  I was an animal in a life or death situation.  I was an antelope that just saw the eyes of a hunting lion. 

The cannon went off signaling the pros to begin.  Someone was singing our national anthem.  The energy was swelling and retracting like a living being, feeding ravenously by 2000 athletes and the shores crammed full of anxious spectators.  Breathe Woodard, just breathe.

The countdown.  The cannon.  Chaos. 

If you’ve ever been to a fish farm and seen the massive pools absolutely crammed with poor fish, that is what the race start feels like.  You are surrounded by rubbery flesh of thrashing legs and arms, you get kicked in the face, punched in the head, your heel connects with something cartilaginous that you can only guess was someone’s nose, you want to stop to apologize but have no idea who you just hit.  Like I said, chaos.

I was maybe 100 yards in and felt a change.  I was starting to panic.  Regardless what I tried to do to change it, I just couldn’t breathe.  My heart was racing, my wetsuit felt tighter and tighter on my chest, disorientation was creeping in.  Not knowing what to do, I stopped swimming to tread water (to the delight of those behind me, I’m sure).  I went back to my breath.  It took me about 30 seconds or so, but it passed.  I realized I was just fine.  “Just relax, swim, breathe, enjoy,” I repeated over and over again.

Not more than 5 minutes later, I was actually smiling.  It’s hard to swim and breathe while smiling, by the way.  But I was!  I don’t know what happened that caused such a shift, but I was having a blast!  Every time I connected with another swimmer, I was delighted!  I was doing a freaking Ironman!  This was awesome!

I got through the first loop of the swim and was feeling great.  My only hope for the swim was to finish fast enough to not get disqualified, and to not die.  So far, I was 2 for 2.

Loop 2 was far less violent than the first as the pack was spreading out nicely.  While it did take me longer because of less drag, it went much faster in my mind.  The most amazing part of the swim in Lake Placid is the presence of a bright yellow rope under the surface of the water.  There is no need to spot where you are going.  Just follow the rope.  Why they don’t put this on all race courses is a complete mystery.  I finished my full swim and was feeling wonderful.  Amazing start!

And then, the best surprise ever.  Just outside of the swim exit are the most beautiful people you see all day: the wetsuit strippers.  These people are volunteers whose job is to tell people to lie down on their back, grab the wetsuit by the neck, and rip that sucker right off!  What is normally a 6 minute individual struggle of slippery frustration, they get done in about 7 seconds.  Genius.  I kissed my wetsuit stripper.  On the mouth.  I don’t think he liked me as much as I liked him.  It was like high school all over again.

But here’s the rub (pun intended and to be elaborated upon below): on the shores of Mirror Lake there is sand.  Being a slow swimmer means that most of the other athletes have already run through that sand and tracked it up to the ground where you get your wetsuit stripped.  When I lay down to get my wetsuit yanked off, I was lucky enough to get a decent amount of that sand inside my tri suit shorts.  These are the shorts I was about to ride 112 miles in. 

You see where I’m going with this, don’t you?

The moment I sat on the saddle of my bike, I knew I had a sandy situation.  A reasonable person would have stopped, grabbed a bottle of water, shoved it south underneath the seam of their underwear inspired tri shorts, and washed away the sand.  I am not a reasonable person as it turns out.

Something goes funny with your brain during a race like this.  Why I didn’t think to take said course of action is a question I will never have the answer to.  Yes indeed, I rode all 112 miles while sitting on the equivalent of sand paper.  That makes you clench up a bit, now doesn’t it?

The first loop of the bike course was pretty uneventful really.  I ate what I was supposed to, nothing went wrong, I was enjoying myself.  I also was trying to just go nice and slow.  I had no idea how fast I should be going, but I knew a marathon was looming and I’d heard that if you went out too hard on the bike, your run would be toast.  So indeed I just peddled along and enjoyed the scenery while adamantly ignoring the bone rattling friction in my sandy undercarriage.

I was half way through and just started my second bike loop when I saw some dude running on the other side of the street.  “What an idiot,” I said to myself.  “Doesn’t he know there is an Ironman going on today?”  It took me a few moments longer to realize that he not only knew there was a race going on, but that he was winning it!  That’s right, I sure had just started my second 56 mile loop on the bike while TJ Tollakson (the guy who won that day) was starting his marathon.  He was exactly 56 miles in front of me.  There was still a chance I could catch him, I reasoned.

The rest of the bike ride was much like the first.  I took a little longer to appreciate the stunning scenery of the area and struggled a bit more on the last few miles of climbs, but overall it went as expected.  Took me about 7.5 hours to do the whole thing.  For my first time, I didn’t know if that was good, bad, or otherwise, but I didn’t care.  I was still going!

And now, let’s run a marathon.  Running a marathon in an Ironman is a whole different beast altogether than a standalone marathon.  In a standalone, you hit a wall where you feel like your body is shutting down, you can’t possible continue on.  That wall usually hits around the high teens in mileage for me.  In an Ironman, my first wall hit somewhat sooner than that.

The first 2 miles or so felt delicious.  Finally off of that damn bike, and most importantly, no more sandpaper grind of the giblets.  And then, the first of many walls…BLAM!  For that matter, the entirety of the 26.2 miles of running was a cycle between extremes: desperate pessimism and pain at one moment, illegal substance like euphoria the next.  The marathon is a case study in bipolar-induced disorder.

When I felt low, I had no hope of continuing on.  At times even walking seemed impossible.  Instead of taking it mile by mile, you start taking it one landmark at a time.  “Once I hit that street sign, I’ll start running.  Ok, I just walked past that street sign and am pretty sure I’ll combust if I run right now.  Look, see that house up there?  Once I pass that house I’ll run again.  I hate that house!  How did I walk here so quickly?  If I had a bottle of liquor I would stuff my spandex shorts in the neck of the bottle, light it on fire, and burn it down fire-bomb style.  Who builds a house out here in the middle of nowhere anyway?  Freaks!”  Once you realize landmarks are not working for you, you start taking it by each individual step.  “Ok Woodard, the next thing you are going to do is move your left foot forward.  1…2…3…MOVE!  Ok Woodard, now you are going to move your right foot forward.  1…2…” And so on…

But the funny thing is, if you just keep moving in the right direction, those periods of seemingly unimaginable despair begin to fade away.  You hit this period of neutrality where you no longer wish for a freak accident to come along to kill you, but you’re also not happy with yourself for doing this.

And then, directly from the cosmos and hippie-love, you get happy.  Clinically diagnosable happy.  Not that I’ve ever tried drugs at all (I swear Mom), but that is what it is like (or so I’ve read).  The colors of the flowers get brighter, you want to say positive things to fellow athletes, your head buzzes pleasantly, butterflies flutter merrily around you.  There is a strong possibility you are experiencing hallucinations, but you make peace with it.  It’s the closest you’ll ever be to being dropped in a Disney movie.  I starting singing a sweet falsetto tune and I swear little woodland creatures came out to cheer me on and sing on the chorus. 

There were violent swings back to despair and then stomach-lurching jumps right back to Cinderella’s castle.  Back and forth, over and over.  It was during this run that I realized the secret to an Ironman: just manage the moment you’re in.  Don’t think about what’s coming ahead and don’t freak out about what you’ve left behind.  Just be in that moment and manage it.  Take it one step at a time when you’re hurting.  Ride the wave of joy when you have it.  Just keep going.

And isn’t that quite a bit like how we should live our life?  When things are bad, you get through it.  When things are wonderful, take the moment to fully appreciate it.  Don’t fret about the future and don’t despair about the past. 

Maybe that’s what keeps bringing me back to Ironman; it’s like living a full lifetime in the span of a few hours.  If you can be present in the current moment during a race, you learn to do it throughout your life. 

When extreme athletics meets life-changing principles, you tend to go back for another lesson.  Find me another opportunity for that combo and I’ll probably do it.  Until then, look for me at the next start line, squeezed into a wetsuit, with a puzzled look on my face while I decide if I should run off to the porto-potty or just pee where I stand.