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.
