Hello Slowtwitch! I figured this audience would find my short story entertaining, useful, tragic, and humorous, thus I am writing it and sharing it widely! I was supposed to be racing Ironman Hawaii this week as Bib #2233, but will not be participating, and figured race week is as good of a week as any to post my story.
The short version: I had a chronic series of stress fractures in my femur—the longest and strongest bone in the human body. A run workout likely led to a crack in the bone. Two days later, one powerful breaststroke kick in the pool broke it clear in two!
The long version:
A little background on me. By way of introduction, my name is Jordan Bailey. I grew up on the Southern tip of Lake Michigan in Northwest Indiana in a small beach community called Ogden Dunes. As a kid I always knew how to swim being so close to Lake Michigan, but, unlike my wife, who was a much more accomplished swimmer competing from age three through college, I did not pick up the sport competitively until high school. In my early youth, I did all of the normal ball sport activities that most kids do, but it was somewhere around the 5th grade when I squared around for a bunt playing baseball and was beamed right square in the face that I knew ball sports were not really for me. So when I arrived in high school I figured I would join the swimming and diving team.
Mind you, by all high school time standards, I was a horrible high school swimmer, but as many triathletes on this forum know, swimming is all about feel for the water. Certainly swimming all of those yards for four years set me up quite well for my much longer term triathlon career, but my triathlon journey started after my freshman year of high school. That summer, I had been tooling around on a used 30 pound mountain bike as a form of cross training. I thought to myself, well I have two out of the three disciplines down and how hard can running be, so I signed up for a local sprint YMCA triathlon.
In that particular triathlon, I came out of the water towards the front of the race. I hopped onto my 30 pound mountain bike, started vigorously pedaling away at 10-12 mph, and of course was immediately humbled by all the folks zooming past me on much lighter road and triathlon bikes. But, as they say, after that race, I was bit by the triathlon bug and have been involved as an athlete training and competing ever since.
I did my undergraduate work in Bloomington, IN at Indiana University, home of the iconic Little 500 Bicycle Race immortalized in the 1979 Academy Award Winning film, Breaking Away. As a student, I raced all four years in the bike race for one of the upstart independent teams named the Black Key Bulls. Throughout college, I continued to race triathlons during the summers but mainly focused on the shorter distance events with a few 70.3s sprinkled in. It was not until after college that I finally put in the requisite run training volume that I felt comfortable making the jump to the Ironman.
I did my first Ironman at IM Mont Tremblant at the age of 25 finishing with a respectable time of just under 10 hours for my first go at the distance. A few years later, with additional knowledge and more serious and focused training, I tackled Ironman Wisconsin finishing 4th overall and was able to punch my ticket to the Ironman World Championships for 2016. I went into that edition of Kona the fittest I had ever been in my life, but like most male, amateur triathletes, the big island got the best of me as I completely overcooked myself unraveling and self-destructing in spectacular fashion!
Fast forward to the pandemic. It was December of 2020, we were still very much in the doldrums of covid and a former Little 500 teammate texted nine other Black Key Bulls alumni and me, convincing us all to sign up and race the 2021 Ironman Chattanooga. The thought process was that despite being spread out across the country, this would give us all something to look forward to and raise us all out of our mental covid funks. Of the 10 of us, three of us had raced an Ironman, another three had raced a triathlon, and the rest were going into the event blind (though to be fair they were all past endurance athletes with backgrounds in either cycling or running).
I like to say that it is pretty much impossible to have a perfect Ironman race because the event is so long and the best thing you can do is minimize as many mistakes and adversity that come your way over the course of a multiple hour race. As a relatively strong swimmer, I queued towards the front of the rolling start. I was maybe the 10th amateur to hop into the Chattahoochee River that morning to start my race. I had my Garmin set to auto split every 500 yards and distinctly remember glancing at my watch after the first 500 split and laughing in the water at how absurdly fast it was due to the current. It was way faster than any shaved and tapered time I could ever do in a pool.
Well, that really set the tone for the day and from that point forward I tried to maintain the most positive attitude I could about the experience and the race. It was also helpful that in addition to my own support crew that came to cheer, I also had the encouragement and applause from all the family and friends of the other nine buddies that were also racing out on the course. At the end of day, my time was the best of my five Ironman attempts, it was the first time I had ever broken nine hours, it was the first time I was ever the first overall amateur at an Ironman race, and I had punched my ticket to the 2022 Ironman World Championships in Kona. Those are all impressive goals and feats accomplished, but the thing that I was proudest of at the end of that long day was that out of the 10 of us that had toed the starting line, all 10 of us made it to the finish line!
During my 2016 campaign for Kona, it would be an understatement to say I was high strung. Being older and wiser from that experience, my goals for 2022 were 1. To finish 2. Have fun with the journey and the day 3. Make it really more of a vacation than being stressed out about the race. Overall, I had a good 2022 year of training. Fitness wise, I definitely was not in career best shape, but I certainly had better fitness in the water than in 2021 and I was close to my 2021 fitness levels on the bike and the run, so I felt good with how things were progressing and building and I approached the Kona race day.
As an endurance athlete, niggles and minor pain are part of the process. In the beginning of September, I started having some unusual muscular issues in the high part of my left calf. It took one visit to my Chiropractor and he was able to immediately work the issue out with Graston. The following week, I had season best numbers in the pool, on the bike, and on the run. A week later, towards the end of the week, I started having some discomfort on my right side as a result of running. I did my scheduled runs on Saturday, my long run on Sunday, and a run on Tuesday without issues. On Wednesday–10 days out from Kona–I did my last threshold run workout.
During the back half of that workout I had noticeable pain that was affecting my normal running gait. At the conclusion of the run, there was definitely some pain that was leading to a minor limp when I was just walking around. At the time, I figured it was either an IT band, quad, or some other muscular issue. Being so close to race day, I decided it was best to scrap all of the rest of my planned runs, do as much rehab—icing, chiro, stretching, rolling, etc.—and do one last run a day or two before race day to test things out hoping the time off from running would heal whatever was bothering me.
The following day on Thursday, I went for a bike ride. Post bike ride, the leg actually felt a lot better and I was even able to walk around normally without the limp.I woke up first thing Friday morning and headed to the pool for my 6:00 a.m. swim session at the Valparaiso High School Aquatic Center. The facility at the high school is a beautiful 50-meter long course pool that was recently built in 2020 and has thirty 25-yard short course lanes. Like most Friday mornings, there was quite a mix of people there: the high school boys and girls teams, the local masters group, and about a dozen or so solo swimmers like me.
After my normal pre-swim stretching routine, I jumped into the pool–I should mention that the pool is such that it’s too deep for me to touch the bottom–and as I can back level to the surface like I always do when I start all of my swims, I did one breaststroke kick before starting into my regular freestyle stroke. Well, upon doing the breaststroke kick, I both felt and heard a snap in my leg. I came back to the surface and was able to paddle to the edge of the pool. As I was doing this, the Valpo High School Boy’s Head Coach, Adam, yelled over and asked “Jordan, are you alright?” Me being a dumb and thinking it was still a muscular issue related to my run from Wednesday waved him off and said “Yeah, I’m fine. Give me a minute.”
I was able to lift my butt up to the pool deck and was sitting there with my right leg bent completely so that my heel was touching my butt. I then repositioned myself to sit about six inches off the ground on the step on the side of the starting block. As I was self examining my leg, I started to become worried as something did not seem normal. I tried to extend my leg straight out and at that point experienced the most severe and excruciating pain I have ever felt in my life. The pain was so bad that I passed out for 5-10 seconds. The next thing I knew when I came too, Coach Adam had sprinted from the side of the pool deck and was on the ground holding me up. Not only that, but there were four other swimmers that were there doing their own individual workouts that had hopped out of the water to help care for me. They wrapped me up in towels because I was shaking so badly from the shock and adrenaline, and they called an ambulance to take me to the Emergency Room. I did have the presence of mind to call my wife to tell her that I was headed to the hospital. Mind you it was 6:00 a.m. and she was still soundly sleeping, so, boy, did that news wake her up right away!
I was clutching my leg as hard as I could to keep it in the bent position to avoid the pain I had felt when I had tried extending it at the pool the entire ambulance trip and when I arrived to the the Emergency Room. Fortunately, since it was 6:00 a.m. on a Friday morning, the ER was not very busy and I was admitted to an exam room straight away. The ER Doc ordered an X-ray. The pain was still so agonizing that the hospital staff was only able to originally capture one image of my leg as it was fully bent, but that was enough to reveal a complete break in my femur bone just above my knee! Over the next few hours and several doses of pain meds later, I slowly but surely was able to inch my knee down so that it was laying flat. This allowed the ER staff to capture a full workup of X-rays of my entire right leg as well as my left leg for comparison.
Since this was outside of the realm of the ER Doc’s expertise, he immediately referred me over to Dr. Denz, the Orthopedic Surgeon Specialist on call. Dr. Denz was in his clinicals most of the day, but I give him a lot of credit because between patient visits, he was making calls to his former stops at the University of Chicago Hospital and the Michigan State University Health System to consult and gather input from former colleagues because as he would later say, this case is not exactly something that you would find in any typical medical school textbook.
Later Friday afternoon, he came and sat to talk with my wife and me and the first thing he said was “The femur is the longest and strongest bone in the human body. Short of being involved in an automobile accident or being the starting quarterback for the Indiana University Football Team and being smashed by a 400 pound defensive tackle, it is nearly impossible to break that bone.” Moreover, he said “Stress fractures are common in runners but they are very rare in the femur and present much more regularly in the smaller and weaker bones lower down the leg.” Dr. Denz concluded by saying “Jordan, you are a super fit and healthy 34 year old male and there is really no reason at all that your femur should have just broken the way that it did.”
With all that in mind Dr. Denz wanted to be absolutely thorough and rule out as many other possible underlying issues that could have caused the break. Dr. Denz said “If it’s just a broken femur, the repair and surgery is straightforward, but we don’t want to fix it and have something crazy come up 6-12 months from now after it’s repaired that is going to compromise it again.” Before moving to surgery, he wanted to first order up blood work to rule out cancer and second perform a CT scan which would provide a better and clearer image than the X-ray. When I asked what the worst case scenario the CT scan could show, he was honest and described a few terrifying theoretical cases of the bone basically being eaten away and deteriorated by rare and strange diseases.
Luckily, the bloodwork came back clean with no signs of cancer. The results of the CT Scan took a bit longer to process. Dr. Denz finally came in and said “Jordan, your bone is one of the healthiest I have ever seen aside from the fact that it is broken about an inch above the knee.” With that, he felt comfortable scheduling and moving to surgery on Saturday morning to fix it. Dr. Denz’s final hypothesis given the results of the blood tests and CT scan was that it was likely a chronic build up of small stress fractures in the femur from running that likely led to a crack during my run workout on Wednesday and a full on break upon doing my breaststroke kick in the pool on Friday. In other words, a unicorn of an injury.
The surgery itself was fairly straightforward. After putting me under anesthesia, Dr. Denz made one insertion above the knee. He then drilled through the center of the femur to insert a titanium rod. He made a second incision parallel to the first where he inserted four titanium screws to anchor it in place at the bottom. Finally, he made a last incision at the top of the leg to put in two more screws to anchor it at the top of the femur. Remember when he said the bone was the healthiest he had ever seen? Well, he later said that it took a tremendous amount of torque to drill through the bone and insert the screws because the bone was so strong.
I was released from the hospital Sunday afternoon. Since the repair involved the titanium rod, I can lightly put weight on the leg and have been able to navigate around the house with the use of a walker. The bone is obviously still broken, but with the rod inserted, the idea is that over the next three months, the bone should repair itself and go back to normal. Hopefully things improve marginally a little bit day by day. Bib #2233 will not be competing in the 2022 Ironman World Championships on Saturday, but Dr. Denz said we can reevaluate in three months and depending on progress, I will eventually be able to get back to swimming, biking, running, and the sport that I love, triathlon.
Writing this was very therapeutic for me, so thank you for reading. I also want to give my heartfelt thanks to Coach Adam, the folks at the Valpo HS pool, the ambulance EMTs, all of the hospital staff, Dr. Denz, friends/family/colleagues that have been sending good vibes over the past several days, and my mom and wife who have been the world’s best caregivers!
–Jordan Bailey, Bib #2233
P.S. I tried to attach some pictures of the bone break and titanium rod and screws, but was having trouble with the attachment. Here is a link to the google doc file with the photos.
The short version: I had a chronic series of stress fractures in my femur—the longest and strongest bone in the human body. A run workout likely led to a crack in the bone. Two days later, one powerful breaststroke kick in the pool broke it clear in two!
The long version:
A little background on me. By way of introduction, my name is Jordan Bailey. I grew up on the Southern tip of Lake Michigan in Northwest Indiana in a small beach community called Ogden Dunes. As a kid I always knew how to swim being so close to Lake Michigan, but, unlike my wife, who was a much more accomplished swimmer competing from age three through college, I did not pick up the sport competitively until high school. In my early youth, I did all of the normal ball sport activities that most kids do, but it was somewhere around the 5th grade when I squared around for a bunt playing baseball and was beamed right square in the face that I knew ball sports were not really for me. So when I arrived in high school I figured I would join the swimming and diving team.
Mind you, by all high school time standards, I was a horrible high school swimmer, but as many triathletes on this forum know, swimming is all about feel for the water. Certainly swimming all of those yards for four years set me up quite well for my much longer term triathlon career, but my triathlon journey started after my freshman year of high school. That summer, I had been tooling around on a used 30 pound mountain bike as a form of cross training. I thought to myself, well I have two out of the three disciplines down and how hard can running be, so I signed up for a local sprint YMCA triathlon.
In that particular triathlon, I came out of the water towards the front of the race. I hopped onto my 30 pound mountain bike, started vigorously pedaling away at 10-12 mph, and of course was immediately humbled by all the folks zooming past me on much lighter road and triathlon bikes. But, as they say, after that race, I was bit by the triathlon bug and have been involved as an athlete training and competing ever since.
I did my undergraduate work in Bloomington, IN at Indiana University, home of the iconic Little 500 Bicycle Race immortalized in the 1979 Academy Award Winning film, Breaking Away. As a student, I raced all four years in the bike race for one of the upstart independent teams named the Black Key Bulls. Throughout college, I continued to race triathlons during the summers but mainly focused on the shorter distance events with a few 70.3s sprinkled in. It was not until after college that I finally put in the requisite run training volume that I felt comfortable making the jump to the Ironman.
I did my first Ironman at IM Mont Tremblant at the age of 25 finishing with a respectable time of just under 10 hours for my first go at the distance. A few years later, with additional knowledge and more serious and focused training, I tackled Ironman Wisconsin finishing 4th overall and was able to punch my ticket to the Ironman World Championships for 2016. I went into that edition of Kona the fittest I had ever been in my life, but like most male, amateur triathletes, the big island got the best of me as I completely overcooked myself unraveling and self-destructing in spectacular fashion!
Fast forward to the pandemic. It was December of 2020, we were still very much in the doldrums of covid and a former Little 500 teammate texted nine other Black Key Bulls alumni and me, convincing us all to sign up and race the 2021 Ironman Chattanooga. The thought process was that despite being spread out across the country, this would give us all something to look forward to and raise us all out of our mental covid funks. Of the 10 of us, three of us had raced an Ironman, another three had raced a triathlon, and the rest were going into the event blind (though to be fair they were all past endurance athletes with backgrounds in either cycling or running).
I like to say that it is pretty much impossible to have a perfect Ironman race because the event is so long and the best thing you can do is minimize as many mistakes and adversity that come your way over the course of a multiple hour race. As a relatively strong swimmer, I queued towards the front of the rolling start. I was maybe the 10th amateur to hop into the Chattahoochee River that morning to start my race. I had my Garmin set to auto split every 500 yards and distinctly remember glancing at my watch after the first 500 split and laughing in the water at how absurdly fast it was due to the current. It was way faster than any shaved and tapered time I could ever do in a pool.
Well, that really set the tone for the day and from that point forward I tried to maintain the most positive attitude I could about the experience and the race. It was also helpful that in addition to my own support crew that came to cheer, I also had the encouragement and applause from all the family and friends of the other nine buddies that were also racing out on the course. At the end of day, my time was the best of my five Ironman attempts, it was the first time I had ever broken nine hours, it was the first time I was ever the first overall amateur at an Ironman race, and I had punched my ticket to the 2022 Ironman World Championships in Kona. Those are all impressive goals and feats accomplished, but the thing that I was proudest of at the end of that long day was that out of the 10 of us that had toed the starting line, all 10 of us made it to the finish line!
During my 2016 campaign for Kona, it would be an understatement to say I was high strung. Being older and wiser from that experience, my goals for 2022 were 1. To finish 2. Have fun with the journey and the day 3. Make it really more of a vacation than being stressed out about the race. Overall, I had a good 2022 year of training. Fitness wise, I definitely was not in career best shape, but I certainly had better fitness in the water than in 2021 and I was close to my 2021 fitness levels on the bike and the run, so I felt good with how things were progressing and building and I approached the Kona race day.
As an endurance athlete, niggles and minor pain are part of the process. In the beginning of September, I started having some unusual muscular issues in the high part of my left calf. It took one visit to my Chiropractor and he was able to immediately work the issue out with Graston. The following week, I had season best numbers in the pool, on the bike, and on the run. A week later, towards the end of the week, I started having some discomfort on my right side as a result of running. I did my scheduled runs on Saturday, my long run on Sunday, and a run on Tuesday without issues. On Wednesday–10 days out from Kona–I did my last threshold run workout.
During the back half of that workout I had noticeable pain that was affecting my normal running gait. At the conclusion of the run, there was definitely some pain that was leading to a minor limp when I was just walking around. At the time, I figured it was either an IT band, quad, or some other muscular issue. Being so close to race day, I decided it was best to scrap all of the rest of my planned runs, do as much rehab—icing, chiro, stretching, rolling, etc.—and do one last run a day or two before race day to test things out hoping the time off from running would heal whatever was bothering me.
The following day on Thursday, I went for a bike ride. Post bike ride, the leg actually felt a lot better and I was even able to walk around normally without the limp.I woke up first thing Friday morning and headed to the pool for my 6:00 a.m. swim session at the Valparaiso High School Aquatic Center. The facility at the high school is a beautiful 50-meter long course pool that was recently built in 2020 and has thirty 25-yard short course lanes. Like most Friday mornings, there was quite a mix of people there: the high school boys and girls teams, the local masters group, and about a dozen or so solo swimmers like me.
After my normal pre-swim stretching routine, I jumped into the pool–I should mention that the pool is such that it’s too deep for me to touch the bottom–and as I can back level to the surface like I always do when I start all of my swims, I did one breaststroke kick before starting into my regular freestyle stroke. Well, upon doing the breaststroke kick, I both felt and heard a snap in my leg. I came back to the surface and was able to paddle to the edge of the pool. As I was doing this, the Valpo High School Boy’s Head Coach, Adam, yelled over and asked “Jordan, are you alright?” Me being a dumb and thinking it was still a muscular issue related to my run from Wednesday waved him off and said “Yeah, I’m fine. Give me a minute.”
I was able to lift my butt up to the pool deck and was sitting there with my right leg bent completely so that my heel was touching my butt. I then repositioned myself to sit about six inches off the ground on the step on the side of the starting block. As I was self examining my leg, I started to become worried as something did not seem normal. I tried to extend my leg straight out and at that point experienced the most severe and excruciating pain I have ever felt in my life. The pain was so bad that I passed out for 5-10 seconds. The next thing I knew when I came too, Coach Adam had sprinted from the side of the pool deck and was on the ground holding me up. Not only that, but there were four other swimmers that were there doing their own individual workouts that had hopped out of the water to help care for me. They wrapped me up in towels because I was shaking so badly from the shock and adrenaline, and they called an ambulance to take me to the Emergency Room. I did have the presence of mind to call my wife to tell her that I was headed to the hospital. Mind you it was 6:00 a.m. and she was still soundly sleeping, so, boy, did that news wake her up right away!
I was clutching my leg as hard as I could to keep it in the bent position to avoid the pain I had felt when I had tried extending it at the pool the entire ambulance trip and when I arrived to the the Emergency Room. Fortunately, since it was 6:00 a.m. on a Friday morning, the ER was not very busy and I was admitted to an exam room straight away. The ER Doc ordered an X-ray. The pain was still so agonizing that the hospital staff was only able to originally capture one image of my leg as it was fully bent, but that was enough to reveal a complete break in my femur bone just above my knee! Over the next few hours and several doses of pain meds later, I slowly but surely was able to inch my knee down so that it was laying flat. This allowed the ER staff to capture a full workup of X-rays of my entire right leg as well as my left leg for comparison.
Since this was outside of the realm of the ER Doc’s expertise, he immediately referred me over to Dr. Denz, the Orthopedic Surgeon Specialist on call. Dr. Denz was in his clinicals most of the day, but I give him a lot of credit because between patient visits, he was making calls to his former stops at the University of Chicago Hospital and the Michigan State University Health System to consult and gather input from former colleagues because as he would later say, this case is not exactly something that you would find in any typical medical school textbook.
Later Friday afternoon, he came and sat to talk with my wife and me and the first thing he said was “The femur is the longest and strongest bone in the human body. Short of being involved in an automobile accident or being the starting quarterback for the Indiana University Football Team and being smashed by a 400 pound defensive tackle, it is nearly impossible to break that bone.” Moreover, he said “Stress fractures are common in runners but they are very rare in the femur and present much more regularly in the smaller and weaker bones lower down the leg.” Dr. Denz concluded by saying “Jordan, you are a super fit and healthy 34 year old male and there is really no reason at all that your femur should have just broken the way that it did.”
With all that in mind Dr. Denz wanted to be absolutely thorough and rule out as many other possible underlying issues that could have caused the break. Dr. Denz said “If it’s just a broken femur, the repair and surgery is straightforward, but we don’t want to fix it and have something crazy come up 6-12 months from now after it’s repaired that is going to compromise it again.” Before moving to surgery, he wanted to first order up blood work to rule out cancer and second perform a CT scan which would provide a better and clearer image than the X-ray. When I asked what the worst case scenario the CT scan could show, he was honest and described a few terrifying theoretical cases of the bone basically being eaten away and deteriorated by rare and strange diseases.
Luckily, the bloodwork came back clean with no signs of cancer. The results of the CT Scan took a bit longer to process. Dr. Denz finally came in and said “Jordan, your bone is one of the healthiest I have ever seen aside from the fact that it is broken about an inch above the knee.” With that, he felt comfortable scheduling and moving to surgery on Saturday morning to fix it. Dr. Denz’s final hypothesis given the results of the blood tests and CT scan was that it was likely a chronic build up of small stress fractures in the femur from running that likely led to a crack during my run workout on Wednesday and a full on break upon doing my breaststroke kick in the pool on Friday. In other words, a unicorn of an injury.
The surgery itself was fairly straightforward. After putting me under anesthesia, Dr. Denz made one insertion above the knee. He then drilled through the center of the femur to insert a titanium rod. He made a second incision parallel to the first where he inserted four titanium screws to anchor it in place at the bottom. Finally, he made a last incision at the top of the leg to put in two more screws to anchor it at the top of the femur. Remember when he said the bone was the healthiest he had ever seen? Well, he later said that it took a tremendous amount of torque to drill through the bone and insert the screws because the bone was so strong.
I was released from the hospital Sunday afternoon. Since the repair involved the titanium rod, I can lightly put weight on the leg and have been able to navigate around the house with the use of a walker. The bone is obviously still broken, but with the rod inserted, the idea is that over the next three months, the bone should repair itself and go back to normal. Hopefully things improve marginally a little bit day by day. Bib #2233 will not be competing in the 2022 Ironman World Championships on Saturday, but Dr. Denz said we can reevaluate in three months and depending on progress, I will eventually be able to get back to swimming, biking, running, and the sport that I love, triathlon.
Writing this was very therapeutic for me, so thank you for reading. I also want to give my heartfelt thanks to Coach Adam, the folks at the Valpo HS pool, the ambulance EMTs, all of the hospital staff, Dr. Denz, friends/family/colleagues that have been sending good vibes over the past several days, and my mom and wife who have been the world’s best caregivers!
–Jordan Bailey, Bib #2233
P.S. I tried to attach some pictures of the bone break and titanium rod and screws, but was having trouble with the attachment. Here is a link to the google doc file with the photos.
Last edited by:
jbailey500: Oct 5, 22 11:58