Thought you might be interested in the musings of a former pro triathlete ... Apologies if previously posted ...
Scott Tinley (born October 25, 1956) is a former professional triathlete and two-time winner of the Hawaii Ironman endurance race. In the 1980s Tinley dominated the sport of triathlon together with Mark Allen, Dave Scott and Scott Molina. Tinley was inducted into the Ironman Hall of Fame in 1996.
Tinley taught English and “Sport and Society” at San Diego State University, and currently teaches “Sports, Games, and Culture” at San Diego State University. This 7th generation Southern Californian currently (2020) resides in Del Mar, California with his wife and has two grown children. Current net worth listed at $5M.
Scott Tinley
Metallica Homo
Part I. The Dark Queen
The course for the annual Ironman Triathlon World Championships is not so much a place or even a venue as it is a region or perhaps an area code. It covers 144 miles, plus or minus a few orange traffic cones. It is not pretty and for the most part looks nothing like the rest of the Hawaiian Islands. When you go to the Kohala Coast on the west side of the Big Island where most of the event is run, there are a few palm trees. But not many. Competitors seem to like it that way. But that is only one indication of how bizarre the whole place and this race can be.
When the event was first brought to the town of Kailua-Kona from an overly-crowded Oahu in 1981, the town was growing up and out, but slowly, like a bad haircut.
Pat Griskus, a late-twenties, single-leg amputee from Boston was well-liked, well-adjusted to his physical challenge and well… a damn good athlete. As he cycled back into town, four days before the event, a nice easy taper-ride on the long strip of asphalt known as the Ka‘ahumanu or “Queen K” Highway, a heavy metal trough from a passing cement truck inexplicably swung out to the side of the vehicle, into the road’s shoulder and the back of Griskus’ helmeted-skull. He was dead by the time following cyclists cradled the man in their arms. It was a strange accident, everyone agreed, a tragic incident. The race went on as scheduled.
The most recent was Randy Caddell, 37, a paraplegic, local Kona resident and seven-time Ironman veteran. Calling himself, “The Animal,” Caddell had suffered his first disabling injury in a motorcycle accident near Hollister, California, the very town made famous in the Marlon Brando cult film, The Wild One. Pedaling a hand-crank, three-wheel cycle specifically designed for upper body-abled paraplegics, Caddell apparently was struck by the turning vehicle of a fellow triathlete. No blame has been assigned in The Animal’s death. It was a tragedy, most agreed, and as long-time Ironman Medical Director, Dr. Bob Laird said, “a true accident.”
But there was something else.
Over on the other side of the Big Island, the periodic lava flows from an erupting Mt. Kilauea are adding to the size of the island as they reach the sea and extend the shore. But miles of paved road have been buried under the molten flows as well. The dichotomies are everywhere.
“The whole island is rife with chaos and creativity,” says Jim MacLaren, former Ironman finisher, Kona resident and partial quadriplegic. “Athletes of all abilities go there to find themselves, to be reborn. But some of them get eaten up by the powerful energy that exists on the Island.”
What MacLaren is talking about can be seen each October when fifteen hundred of the best triathletes in the world envelop the town to compete in the Ironman World Championship. In comparison to similar events, a higher percentage of athletes experience either the best or worst race of their career. Banality in anything is rare on the Big Island.
The West Coat of Hawaii, traced all the way back to the time King Kamehaha III’s rule, has been a place of refuge for those wanting to escape the oppression in their lives. Athletes come here, as MacLaren says, “to find a new map of their lives.” As the population grows, so does the polarity.
Personal legends and encounters included.
In the middle of the island sits Muana Kea, the tallest island mountain in the world (over 32,000 ft. from the ocean floor to the top). The island of Hawaii is geographically isolated and young. Significant things happen here all the time. Nobody lives small and everybody seems to be somehow defined by their wound or their victory-- mythological figures with an axe to grind as well.
And even if Kona only exists as some tropical Valhalla for athletic searchers and neuvo riche retirees, it’s a big island; you’d think there’d be enough room to spread out. Or maybe the sheer size is daunting to those who subconsciously seek community among the like-minded and flock to the small towns or pop-up resorts where the lava has been replaced with fairways and ocean-front homes valued in the millions. Only the individual can answer that.
Still, nobody in Kona stays indoors. It’s Hawaii, for Christ’s sake, regardless of your reason for being there; you feel the pull to be outdoors and on the move. And much of the time, the Queen K is your only route.
Jim Major, a local Kona singer-songwriter who has braved traffic snarls in such frenetic metro-zones as New York, South Boston and Washington, D.C., thinks the Queen K Highway is the most dangerous stretch he has ever been subjected to.
“The road was paved over miles of native bones and lost cities. The whole road is unpredictable, the asphalt moves. Just today there was a head-on collision with three fatalities. I’m scared to drive the ten miles to work.”
Like the ancient Hawaiians, like Jim MacLaren, who moved to Kona in a wheelchair to “rekindle the feeling of what I had accomplished when I was only a single-leg amputee,” maybe they were just seeking refuge for awhile, until the earth beneath them stopped moving.
“Almost every athlete who gravitates to Kona is already wounded,” says MacLaren. “Metaphorically, many of them are already in a kind of wheelchair.”
But Jim, I had to ask, why do we wait until the once-bitten are finally swallowed whole before we take notice? Is it that when a physically challenged athlete, after fighting the good fight and inspiring able-bodied hearts and minds with their strength of will and unvanquished tenacity, finally comes up against a foe too fast and with too much towing capacity, that we take greater notice of their demise?
“It puts it right in your face,” MacLaren continues, “when someone physically half-dead is finished off. There is something about the place that makes you feel immortal and close to death at the same time. That’s why I raced in Kona, why I moved there, why I allowed myself to get hooked on drugs there…and why I moved away and put my life back together.”
I wondered if this was the same thing that happens when a series of earth moving trucks headed out on to the Queen K Highway to build one more posh resort, the rush of their heavy loads of imported red earth and the thump-thump of the big diesel motors, passes uncomfortably close to a group of cyclists or runners or tourists in paper-thin sub-compact rental cars. Or maybe it was like the white lava rocks that are used as pieces of physical graffiti against the black background on this billboard-banned road. “Jesus Saves,” is written and then sub-titled, “now go home, haole.”
Nothing in Kona is as it seems though; not the lack of dense green foliage found throughout the other islands, not the long and sometimes lonely, sometimes grid-locked ribbons of asphalt road where ghost cars come out of the mist, not even the very earth that shifts with each rumbling, faulted-breath that is either a land trying to find itself or Pele, goddess of volcanic fire, playing another bad joke.
In many ways, Kona and its surrounding roads is indeed Babylonian--paradise with a price, a place where you have to watch your back for reasons other than sunburn.
But even here, the nightmares can look and feel like sweet, rewarding sleep.
Part II. Heavy dreams
Somebody told me the other day that the entry fee for the Ironman World Triathlon Championship is over five hundred bucks. That’s a big pile of sheckles, I tested him. That could buy yourself and a loved one a weekend away or decent little mountain bike with a front fork that works for a year or two. He told me he’d rather work a few extra days instead of sitting around the house looking at that Ironman race application on the kitchen table, never even considering the fee in his decision on whether he will put his name on the top of that sheet.
I told him with that attitude, he’s already racing.
The first few Ironman races I did in Hawaii cost me a hundred even, more than my college tuition for the entire semester, books not included. Still, it didn’t matter. It was just something that I had to do. I worked a few extra days, sold my eight track car stereo---I was going to be an Ironman.
Turns out I wasn’t alone. Seems to me quite a few people are compelled by this Ironman thing. Nowadays, you have to be very fast or very lucky to snag a spot.
You ever wonder what regular people think when they hear that close to 20,000 people are somehow trying to get an entry into Kona? They must go home to their husbands and wives, dogs and friends and say something? I just don’t picture them leaving it alone, thinking that all those people must have a screw loose. I’d bet a thousand sit-ups that more than a few dream about crossing that finish line, all tan and trim, the crowd screaming, their toothpaste commercial smiles caught and beamed out over the airwaves.
And I’d bet when they wake up and get ready to put their pants or their skirts on in the morning, more than a few will roll over, mash their faces back into the pillow, trying to hide some sickening straight truth from the reality of the day and the gnawing feeling in their gut, wishing they had that same screw loose.
Maybe they realize that too many of us die too young or too late. Maybe they know that we pull ourselves up by making money, making the grade; all the while making less and less time to face the fact that there are some things in life we need to do.
Just because.
I think the Ironman is one of those things.
I can’t pretend to know why, for all those people. Hell, I barely have an idea why I did close to fifty of them. But I know that people are changed by an Ironman event. All finishers do. Ironman finishers are the kind who leave a mark on the world. Not the kind who get left a mark on.
Try to define that. Go ahead. The words will never come. It is enough to hear the stories, to watch the returning smiles. Witness the metamorphosis.
Yeah, there is a price too. Always is for the good stuff. Relationships, jobs, sunburn, toenails, a few hours of sleep. Heck, you do enough of them maybe its a few years of life. At this point though, not too many people are doing a cost/benefit analysis. The call of the distant drum is too loud to ignore, too powerful to pawn off as some midlife crisis for the middle manager or desperate wanting plea from the minivan-bound soccer mom to grab her own life back for a day or two. They know they might be contextually bound by the reality of homework and staff meetings that await them beyond the finish line. Willing to pay the price, scared but thrilled, knowing, as Thoreau said, “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity,” all they want is their One Day.
One day, enough intangible feeling and power of emotion to last for years, enhancing, not injuring eternity.
But like war, marriage, tight jeans and stick shift cars, the Ironman isn’t for everybody. As much as it can give, it can take away. If it was easy, it wouldn’t mean the same. Even dreams are fair game in the forecast of one’s decisions.
I know there are other ways to validate one’s life. Has to be. The Pulitzer Prize winning author Katherine Anne Porter once said that salvation can only be found through religion and art. I believe that great feats of physical endurance include traits of both.
And in a world that tries its hardest to separate us from what should matter, the Ironman helps us to re-connect with the pulse of our lives. As long as it does that, we will stand in that line, happy to have made the decision to even accept the dream.
Part III. For what it was worth
Ironman is not an education or a degree or a statement of purpose. It is a private transaction that you have with yourself. It occurs mostly on the one day, but if you've ever done it before, you know that in the end, there is no end.
The constellation of feelings brought up by your Ironman experience will follow you around like a lost dog. You are smart to feed that puppy and look for all the possibilities that come with an open mind and an open heart.
Because in the ordinary hours of life, you will forget about all those emotions that swept through your mind while the winds blew through your spokes. It's natural. An Ironman race hurts. But the pain of sore legs and a sun burnt neck will go away and be replaced with the pains of growing old-sore backs, tired eyes, gravity doing its best job on your waistline. These are the tangibles of age, no different than the dust that covers a finisher's medal in a drawer in some back closet. One tells you where you are now, the other where you have been.
As you prepare for an Ironman, whether its falling asleep at night wondering how you could ever do what seems so amazing or whether you’re standing in the transition area, licking the inside of your goggles on the morning of your first, you may not know what the experience will mean to you. And how could you?
You may have heard all the pop-psychology and personal anecdotes in your months and years leading up to that morning: “You’ll get out of it what you put into it”; “You’ll never forget that last 100 yards”, “You’ll find your limits.” And for the most part they are true. But if you allow it, completing an Ironman can creep into the cracks of your future in places that will surprise and delight you.
You might be out walking with your grand daughter in the park one late summer afternoon and a group of runners comes up behind you. They seem so young. Nostalgia drips down your mind like motor oil. Then that precious little girl holding your hand says she knows about when you did that long race over where you had to swim all day and ride your bike through lava and it must have been so hard but she’s so proud to have the strongest grandma on earth. Her momma had told her all about it.
Suddenly you’re 25 or 45 again…it doesn’t matter. You’ll always be an Ironman.
Or maybe you don’t have to wait that long. You could be sitting in a meeting with 12 other sales managers or lawyers or retail clerks. You’re just one of the dozen, doing his job. But then the boss sees you in the corner and says before he forgets that he’d like to congratulate you on that race you had been training for all year. “Wow,” he says, “I get tired just thinking of it. You’re amazing.”
You know that, but it sure is nice to be reminded.
The bridge between then and now is found in what the race means to you and how you use that memory. Will you tell your granddaughter all about that swim start where there were so many people you felt like you were in an aquatic popcorn machine? Will you run alongside her when she is learning how to ride without training wheels and think back how the local volunteers did the same for you when they shoved you out on to the Queen K Highway?
Your Ironman will exist in some other dimension, a place where life exists after you've lived it and goes backward and forward at will. Your day in the October Kona sun will stand vigil as you make choices. Do I marry? Do I have kids? Where will I live? What job will I take? Do I have a drink with the boys to help my career or go for a jog around the lake? It may not have any great bearing on your major decisions of consequence. But it certainly could.
Everybody, it seems, is always looking forward to an Ironman. So much excitement and preparation and nerves-you almost can't stand it. Competitors sense that the event will become a pugmark of their athleticism, a notch on their life's totem. And though it may be defined and re-defined in the ensuing years, they know it will be an exceptional experience.
Indeed, someday you will look back and bear witness not through the windshield but through the rear view mirror-a smaller piece of glass but equally important in orienting yourself to the world.
It wasn’t always that way.
Part IV. A drop of solder
Beginning Ironman—it’s almost an oxymoron, rife with disparity and illusion. Many people think that those who compete at the distance are born to it, the thick skin of the earth covering heart and lungs that’d move an army, delivered right there on the birthing table, a certificate of race acceptance part of the hospital forms to sign. Ironman is a noun not a verb. It carries the substance of an established person, place or thing. One doesn’t try to be an Ironman; they are or they aren’t.
But I don’t believe that.
And yet even those who have gone well beyond the harrowing fear associated with that first one, those who no longer hear the heavy breathing of the ghosts carrying chains, each link stamped with words like CRAMP and DNF; they too have memories shortened by ego. Can you finish a few, accept the coveted mantle and then burn the landscape behind you? Not with any grace, you can’t. Closing the door on your past when you were young and strong or young and stupid will do no good. We all came from somewhere. And for most of us, we weren’t beautiful babies.
Maybe more blood was shed on the first Ironman than the last. All the mistakes were made: too little food, too much stress, not enough swim miles, too long in taper, the right gears but the wrong day; tire pressure, peer pressure, six hours of bike seat pressure on parts of your anatomy that were only designed for six seconds of pleasure…who knew? But you made it through and gradually erased the pain, highlighted the glory, forgot that you earned it and began to believe that you inherited it. You were always this good, this efficient; you don’t remember being a beginner. Personal faux pas were replaced with situational ethics. You were always an Ironman; but you are also full of shit.
It’s funny; I don’t remember all the Ironman events that I competed in, only snapshots of moments that logged themselves in my psyche for reasons that are sometimes contextual, sometimes meaningful, but always irrational. The ones that are in focus came early; early like the first time I competed. Young and strong, with no back pain or long term injuries; young and stupid with vice grips in my tool kit and a billowy tank top on my back—I miss the innocence, the naiveté, the two-day recovery, hell, I even miss the looks of bewilderment on the faces of people back home when I explained to them what an Ironman consists of.
I know I was green, made mistakes that no one who can read a training manual would ever make these days. But now that I’m on the other side of the mountain, wondering how I ever got across, I wouldn’t mind being back over there, looking up at it, thinking, “Damn, you think it’s possible?”
They say that in defeat the heart grows. And humility is the hardest of all human lessons to learn. I remember the exact moment in 1996, 10 miles into the run, suffering ignominiously, when I decided to quit. This just isn't healthy anymore. I'm over it. Get me out of this place. So I sat down on the side of the road and waited. And waited. And waited. And finally I stopped a draft marshal on a moped and begged for a ride into town. She dropped me off at the gas station and there stood Dave Scott doing some corny radio show, which he is very good at, and Scott Molina drinking beer, which is also quite adept at. Dave told me I had done the right thing. Molina told me to go find a camera and take a picture of myself because I would never be that skinny again in my life. Dave was wrong. Scott was right. Mark Allen ran by, leading the race with a mile and a half to go. We tried not to look, not to feel anything.
But even the most hardened of egos caves in occasionally. Dave said, “Two minutes on the German". Molina said, "Let's go get another beer". Both were correct and in every race thereafter my heart would ache but it would grow.
I cannot and will not talk of the pain felt during my 20 years of racing there, other than to say it was nearly always substantial. I have listened with equal parts confusion, interest and rage as former victors have taken the award's stage to profess of their "perfect race". I have never experienced the phenomena and liken the statement to saying that one had had a “perfect life.” If one can say that with all honesty, well, what about the rest of us who struggle to have a “pretty damn good race?”
Still, it’s gotten even more difficult to be average there. There is so much info on how to prepare for the event it’s a wonder some wonder-kid from Morocco with an IQ higher than his max VO2 doesn’t win on his first try. You have to work at screwing up, purposely refuse the eight thousand chemically-engineered food and beverages thrust at you on race day. I suppose this is a good thing. I think they call it the maturation process or something that has to do with learning from the mistakes of others, of something growing out of what was there before.
In the first days of Ironman, the best athletes were the ones who could see beyond the moment, forged new ground, turned themselves into lab rats in Lycra. But the route was also strewn with bodies; many of them sitting on the side of the road, heads buried in their hands, sun burnt tears, hearts broken, and dreams stolen. Those early ghosts had cast their netted-chains and more than a few links were stamped with the word BEGINNER.
But for those who refused to live vicariously, who carried bolt cutters of courage, I‘d bet that they remember that race, that moment, that experience more than any in the collective careers they may have amassed. I’d bet my bronzed running shoes that they know you can’t kill time, as Thoreau said, “without injuring eternity.”
In a world of growing tutorials it would be nice to throw the manual away, coach yourself, become intuitive. Wear black socks.
Soon enough we may be in that next dimension where our own shadow struggles to keep up. Soon enough we’ll think all the world’s good comes out of some sporting championship. Soon enough our selective memory will sip into place and our toenails will grow back and we’ll upgrade our wheels and all the great things about finishing an Ironman will still be great, but they might not feel as good, and never as fresh and close to our earlier world.
Nobody was born too cool. And growing slower is a colder proposition than growing up.
Cheers, Neal
+1 mph Faster
Scott Tinley (born October 25, 1956) is a former professional triathlete and two-time winner of the Hawaii Ironman endurance race. In the 1980s Tinley dominated the sport of triathlon together with Mark Allen, Dave Scott and Scott Molina. Tinley was inducted into the Ironman Hall of Fame in 1996.
Tinley taught English and “Sport and Society” at San Diego State University, and currently teaches “Sports, Games, and Culture” at San Diego State University. This 7th generation Southern Californian currently (2020) resides in Del Mar, California with his wife and has two grown children. Current net worth listed at $5M.
Scott Tinley
Metallica Homo
Part I. The Dark Queen
The course for the annual Ironman Triathlon World Championships is not so much a place or even a venue as it is a region or perhaps an area code. It covers 144 miles, plus or minus a few orange traffic cones. It is not pretty and for the most part looks nothing like the rest of the Hawaiian Islands. When you go to the Kohala Coast on the west side of the Big Island where most of the event is run, there are a few palm trees. But not many. Competitors seem to like it that way. But that is only one indication of how bizarre the whole place and this race can be.
When the event was first brought to the town of Kailua-Kona from an overly-crowded Oahu in 1981, the town was growing up and out, but slowly, like a bad haircut.
Pat Griskus, a late-twenties, single-leg amputee from Boston was well-liked, well-adjusted to his physical challenge and well… a damn good athlete. As he cycled back into town, four days before the event, a nice easy taper-ride on the long strip of asphalt known as the Ka‘ahumanu or “Queen K” Highway, a heavy metal trough from a passing cement truck inexplicably swung out to the side of the vehicle, into the road’s shoulder and the back of Griskus’ helmeted-skull. He was dead by the time following cyclists cradled the man in their arms. It was a strange accident, everyone agreed, a tragic incident. The race went on as scheduled.
The most recent was Randy Caddell, 37, a paraplegic, local Kona resident and seven-time Ironman veteran. Calling himself, “The Animal,” Caddell had suffered his first disabling injury in a motorcycle accident near Hollister, California, the very town made famous in the Marlon Brando cult film, The Wild One. Pedaling a hand-crank, three-wheel cycle specifically designed for upper body-abled paraplegics, Caddell apparently was struck by the turning vehicle of a fellow triathlete. No blame has been assigned in The Animal’s death. It was a tragedy, most agreed, and as long-time Ironman Medical Director, Dr. Bob Laird said, “a true accident.”
But there was something else.
Over on the other side of the Big Island, the periodic lava flows from an erupting Mt. Kilauea are adding to the size of the island as they reach the sea and extend the shore. But miles of paved road have been buried under the molten flows as well. The dichotomies are everywhere.
“The whole island is rife with chaos and creativity,” says Jim MacLaren, former Ironman finisher, Kona resident and partial quadriplegic. “Athletes of all abilities go there to find themselves, to be reborn. But some of them get eaten up by the powerful energy that exists on the Island.”
What MacLaren is talking about can be seen each October when fifteen hundred of the best triathletes in the world envelop the town to compete in the Ironman World Championship. In comparison to similar events, a higher percentage of athletes experience either the best or worst race of their career. Banality in anything is rare on the Big Island.
The West Coat of Hawaii, traced all the way back to the time King Kamehaha III’s rule, has been a place of refuge for those wanting to escape the oppression in their lives. Athletes come here, as MacLaren says, “to find a new map of their lives.” As the population grows, so does the polarity.
Personal legends and encounters included.
In the middle of the island sits Muana Kea, the tallest island mountain in the world (over 32,000 ft. from the ocean floor to the top). The island of Hawaii is geographically isolated and young. Significant things happen here all the time. Nobody lives small and everybody seems to be somehow defined by their wound or their victory-- mythological figures with an axe to grind as well.
And even if Kona only exists as some tropical Valhalla for athletic searchers and neuvo riche retirees, it’s a big island; you’d think there’d be enough room to spread out. Or maybe the sheer size is daunting to those who subconsciously seek community among the like-minded and flock to the small towns or pop-up resorts where the lava has been replaced with fairways and ocean-front homes valued in the millions. Only the individual can answer that.
Still, nobody in Kona stays indoors. It’s Hawaii, for Christ’s sake, regardless of your reason for being there; you feel the pull to be outdoors and on the move. And much of the time, the Queen K is your only route.
Jim Major, a local Kona singer-songwriter who has braved traffic snarls in such frenetic metro-zones as New York, South Boston and Washington, D.C., thinks the Queen K Highway is the most dangerous stretch he has ever been subjected to.
“The road was paved over miles of native bones and lost cities. The whole road is unpredictable, the asphalt moves. Just today there was a head-on collision with three fatalities. I’m scared to drive the ten miles to work.”
Like the ancient Hawaiians, like Jim MacLaren, who moved to Kona in a wheelchair to “rekindle the feeling of what I had accomplished when I was only a single-leg amputee,” maybe they were just seeking refuge for awhile, until the earth beneath them stopped moving.
“Almost every athlete who gravitates to Kona is already wounded,” says MacLaren. “Metaphorically, many of them are already in a kind of wheelchair.”
But Jim, I had to ask, why do we wait until the once-bitten are finally swallowed whole before we take notice? Is it that when a physically challenged athlete, after fighting the good fight and inspiring able-bodied hearts and minds with their strength of will and unvanquished tenacity, finally comes up against a foe too fast and with too much towing capacity, that we take greater notice of their demise?
“It puts it right in your face,” MacLaren continues, “when someone physically half-dead is finished off. There is something about the place that makes you feel immortal and close to death at the same time. That’s why I raced in Kona, why I moved there, why I allowed myself to get hooked on drugs there…and why I moved away and put my life back together.”
I wondered if this was the same thing that happens when a series of earth moving trucks headed out on to the Queen K Highway to build one more posh resort, the rush of their heavy loads of imported red earth and the thump-thump of the big diesel motors, passes uncomfortably close to a group of cyclists or runners or tourists in paper-thin sub-compact rental cars. Or maybe it was like the white lava rocks that are used as pieces of physical graffiti against the black background on this billboard-banned road. “Jesus Saves,” is written and then sub-titled, “now go home, haole.”
Nothing in Kona is as it seems though; not the lack of dense green foliage found throughout the other islands, not the long and sometimes lonely, sometimes grid-locked ribbons of asphalt road where ghost cars come out of the mist, not even the very earth that shifts with each rumbling, faulted-breath that is either a land trying to find itself or Pele, goddess of volcanic fire, playing another bad joke.
In many ways, Kona and its surrounding roads is indeed Babylonian--paradise with a price, a place where you have to watch your back for reasons other than sunburn.
But even here, the nightmares can look and feel like sweet, rewarding sleep.
Part II. Heavy dreams
Somebody told me the other day that the entry fee for the Ironman World Triathlon Championship is over five hundred bucks. That’s a big pile of sheckles, I tested him. That could buy yourself and a loved one a weekend away or decent little mountain bike with a front fork that works for a year or two. He told me he’d rather work a few extra days instead of sitting around the house looking at that Ironman race application on the kitchen table, never even considering the fee in his decision on whether he will put his name on the top of that sheet.
I told him with that attitude, he’s already racing.
The first few Ironman races I did in Hawaii cost me a hundred even, more than my college tuition for the entire semester, books not included. Still, it didn’t matter. It was just something that I had to do. I worked a few extra days, sold my eight track car stereo---I was going to be an Ironman.
Turns out I wasn’t alone. Seems to me quite a few people are compelled by this Ironman thing. Nowadays, you have to be very fast or very lucky to snag a spot.
You ever wonder what regular people think when they hear that close to 20,000 people are somehow trying to get an entry into Kona? They must go home to their husbands and wives, dogs and friends and say something? I just don’t picture them leaving it alone, thinking that all those people must have a screw loose. I’d bet a thousand sit-ups that more than a few dream about crossing that finish line, all tan and trim, the crowd screaming, their toothpaste commercial smiles caught and beamed out over the airwaves.
And I’d bet when they wake up and get ready to put their pants or their skirts on in the morning, more than a few will roll over, mash their faces back into the pillow, trying to hide some sickening straight truth from the reality of the day and the gnawing feeling in their gut, wishing they had that same screw loose.
Maybe they realize that too many of us die too young or too late. Maybe they know that we pull ourselves up by making money, making the grade; all the while making less and less time to face the fact that there are some things in life we need to do.
Just because.
I think the Ironman is one of those things.
I can’t pretend to know why, for all those people. Hell, I barely have an idea why I did close to fifty of them. But I know that people are changed by an Ironman event. All finishers do. Ironman finishers are the kind who leave a mark on the world. Not the kind who get left a mark on.
Try to define that. Go ahead. The words will never come. It is enough to hear the stories, to watch the returning smiles. Witness the metamorphosis.
Yeah, there is a price too. Always is for the good stuff. Relationships, jobs, sunburn, toenails, a few hours of sleep. Heck, you do enough of them maybe its a few years of life. At this point though, not too many people are doing a cost/benefit analysis. The call of the distant drum is too loud to ignore, too powerful to pawn off as some midlife crisis for the middle manager or desperate wanting plea from the minivan-bound soccer mom to grab her own life back for a day or two. They know they might be contextually bound by the reality of homework and staff meetings that await them beyond the finish line. Willing to pay the price, scared but thrilled, knowing, as Thoreau said, “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity,” all they want is their One Day.
One day, enough intangible feeling and power of emotion to last for years, enhancing, not injuring eternity.
But like war, marriage, tight jeans and stick shift cars, the Ironman isn’t for everybody. As much as it can give, it can take away. If it was easy, it wouldn’t mean the same. Even dreams are fair game in the forecast of one’s decisions.
I know there are other ways to validate one’s life. Has to be. The Pulitzer Prize winning author Katherine Anne Porter once said that salvation can only be found through religion and art. I believe that great feats of physical endurance include traits of both.
And in a world that tries its hardest to separate us from what should matter, the Ironman helps us to re-connect with the pulse of our lives. As long as it does that, we will stand in that line, happy to have made the decision to even accept the dream.
Part III. For what it was worth
Ironman is not an education or a degree or a statement of purpose. It is a private transaction that you have with yourself. It occurs mostly on the one day, but if you've ever done it before, you know that in the end, there is no end.
The constellation of feelings brought up by your Ironman experience will follow you around like a lost dog. You are smart to feed that puppy and look for all the possibilities that come with an open mind and an open heart.
Because in the ordinary hours of life, you will forget about all those emotions that swept through your mind while the winds blew through your spokes. It's natural. An Ironman race hurts. But the pain of sore legs and a sun burnt neck will go away and be replaced with the pains of growing old-sore backs, tired eyes, gravity doing its best job on your waistline. These are the tangibles of age, no different than the dust that covers a finisher's medal in a drawer in some back closet. One tells you where you are now, the other where you have been.
As you prepare for an Ironman, whether its falling asleep at night wondering how you could ever do what seems so amazing or whether you’re standing in the transition area, licking the inside of your goggles on the morning of your first, you may not know what the experience will mean to you. And how could you?
You may have heard all the pop-psychology and personal anecdotes in your months and years leading up to that morning: “You’ll get out of it what you put into it”; “You’ll never forget that last 100 yards”, “You’ll find your limits.” And for the most part they are true. But if you allow it, completing an Ironman can creep into the cracks of your future in places that will surprise and delight you.
You might be out walking with your grand daughter in the park one late summer afternoon and a group of runners comes up behind you. They seem so young. Nostalgia drips down your mind like motor oil. Then that precious little girl holding your hand says she knows about when you did that long race over where you had to swim all day and ride your bike through lava and it must have been so hard but she’s so proud to have the strongest grandma on earth. Her momma had told her all about it.
Suddenly you’re 25 or 45 again…it doesn’t matter. You’ll always be an Ironman.
Or maybe you don’t have to wait that long. You could be sitting in a meeting with 12 other sales managers or lawyers or retail clerks. You’re just one of the dozen, doing his job. But then the boss sees you in the corner and says before he forgets that he’d like to congratulate you on that race you had been training for all year. “Wow,” he says, “I get tired just thinking of it. You’re amazing.”
You know that, but it sure is nice to be reminded.
The bridge between then and now is found in what the race means to you and how you use that memory. Will you tell your granddaughter all about that swim start where there were so many people you felt like you were in an aquatic popcorn machine? Will you run alongside her when she is learning how to ride without training wheels and think back how the local volunteers did the same for you when they shoved you out on to the Queen K Highway?
Your Ironman will exist in some other dimension, a place where life exists after you've lived it and goes backward and forward at will. Your day in the October Kona sun will stand vigil as you make choices. Do I marry? Do I have kids? Where will I live? What job will I take? Do I have a drink with the boys to help my career or go for a jog around the lake? It may not have any great bearing on your major decisions of consequence. But it certainly could.
Everybody, it seems, is always looking forward to an Ironman. So much excitement and preparation and nerves-you almost can't stand it. Competitors sense that the event will become a pugmark of their athleticism, a notch on their life's totem. And though it may be defined and re-defined in the ensuing years, they know it will be an exceptional experience.
Indeed, someday you will look back and bear witness not through the windshield but through the rear view mirror-a smaller piece of glass but equally important in orienting yourself to the world.
It wasn’t always that way.
Part IV. A drop of solder
Beginning Ironman—it’s almost an oxymoron, rife with disparity and illusion. Many people think that those who compete at the distance are born to it, the thick skin of the earth covering heart and lungs that’d move an army, delivered right there on the birthing table, a certificate of race acceptance part of the hospital forms to sign. Ironman is a noun not a verb. It carries the substance of an established person, place or thing. One doesn’t try to be an Ironman; they are or they aren’t.
But I don’t believe that.
And yet even those who have gone well beyond the harrowing fear associated with that first one, those who no longer hear the heavy breathing of the ghosts carrying chains, each link stamped with words like CRAMP and DNF; they too have memories shortened by ego. Can you finish a few, accept the coveted mantle and then burn the landscape behind you? Not with any grace, you can’t. Closing the door on your past when you were young and strong or young and stupid will do no good. We all came from somewhere. And for most of us, we weren’t beautiful babies.
Maybe more blood was shed on the first Ironman than the last. All the mistakes were made: too little food, too much stress, not enough swim miles, too long in taper, the right gears but the wrong day; tire pressure, peer pressure, six hours of bike seat pressure on parts of your anatomy that were only designed for six seconds of pleasure…who knew? But you made it through and gradually erased the pain, highlighted the glory, forgot that you earned it and began to believe that you inherited it. You were always this good, this efficient; you don’t remember being a beginner. Personal faux pas were replaced with situational ethics. You were always an Ironman; but you are also full of shit.
It’s funny; I don’t remember all the Ironman events that I competed in, only snapshots of moments that logged themselves in my psyche for reasons that are sometimes contextual, sometimes meaningful, but always irrational. The ones that are in focus came early; early like the first time I competed. Young and strong, with no back pain or long term injuries; young and stupid with vice grips in my tool kit and a billowy tank top on my back—I miss the innocence, the naiveté, the two-day recovery, hell, I even miss the looks of bewilderment on the faces of people back home when I explained to them what an Ironman consists of.
I know I was green, made mistakes that no one who can read a training manual would ever make these days. But now that I’m on the other side of the mountain, wondering how I ever got across, I wouldn’t mind being back over there, looking up at it, thinking, “Damn, you think it’s possible?”
They say that in defeat the heart grows. And humility is the hardest of all human lessons to learn. I remember the exact moment in 1996, 10 miles into the run, suffering ignominiously, when I decided to quit. This just isn't healthy anymore. I'm over it. Get me out of this place. So I sat down on the side of the road and waited. And waited. And waited. And finally I stopped a draft marshal on a moped and begged for a ride into town. She dropped me off at the gas station and there stood Dave Scott doing some corny radio show, which he is very good at, and Scott Molina drinking beer, which is also quite adept at. Dave told me I had done the right thing. Molina told me to go find a camera and take a picture of myself because I would never be that skinny again in my life. Dave was wrong. Scott was right. Mark Allen ran by, leading the race with a mile and a half to go. We tried not to look, not to feel anything.
But even the most hardened of egos caves in occasionally. Dave said, “Two minutes on the German". Molina said, "Let's go get another beer". Both were correct and in every race thereafter my heart would ache but it would grow.
I cannot and will not talk of the pain felt during my 20 years of racing there, other than to say it was nearly always substantial. I have listened with equal parts confusion, interest and rage as former victors have taken the award's stage to profess of their "perfect race". I have never experienced the phenomena and liken the statement to saying that one had had a “perfect life.” If one can say that with all honesty, well, what about the rest of us who struggle to have a “pretty damn good race?”
Still, it’s gotten even more difficult to be average there. There is so much info on how to prepare for the event it’s a wonder some wonder-kid from Morocco with an IQ higher than his max VO2 doesn’t win on his first try. You have to work at screwing up, purposely refuse the eight thousand chemically-engineered food and beverages thrust at you on race day. I suppose this is a good thing. I think they call it the maturation process or something that has to do with learning from the mistakes of others, of something growing out of what was there before.
In the first days of Ironman, the best athletes were the ones who could see beyond the moment, forged new ground, turned themselves into lab rats in Lycra. But the route was also strewn with bodies; many of them sitting on the side of the road, heads buried in their hands, sun burnt tears, hearts broken, and dreams stolen. Those early ghosts had cast their netted-chains and more than a few links were stamped with the word BEGINNER.
But for those who refused to live vicariously, who carried bolt cutters of courage, I‘d bet that they remember that race, that moment, that experience more than any in the collective careers they may have amassed. I’d bet my bronzed running shoes that they know you can’t kill time, as Thoreau said, “without injuring eternity.”
In a world of growing tutorials it would be nice to throw the manual away, coach yourself, become intuitive. Wear black socks.
Soon enough we may be in that next dimension where our own shadow struggles to keep up. Soon enough we’ll think all the world’s good comes out of some sporting championship. Soon enough our selective memory will sip into place and our toenails will grow back and we’ll upgrade our wheels and all the great things about finishing an Ironman will still be great, but they might not feel as good, and never as fresh and close to our earlier world.
Nobody was born too cool. And growing slower is a colder proposition than growing up.
Cheers, Neal
+1 mph Faster