Lyricycle

Post-Idiot Stress Syndrome

2011-11-10T16:31:00.004-05:00

“We may not be able to prevent every fatality on our roads but we owe it to those who have died — and to each other — to do what we can to make our roads safer”.
Toronto Star op-ed article, August 28, 2011

Call me prejudiced. To me, a person who would get in his car, drive a few blocks, line up with other cars, and then remain seated behind the wheel to order, pay for, pick up and consume his breakfast would not seem like a big supporter of cycling in the city. I’ve often joked to myself that it can be dangerous to get between a McDonald’s customer and his Sausage McMuffin. This morning I did, and almost became a Sausage McMuffin myself.

I was riding to work, westbound in the bike lane on Cosburn. A car turning left very rapidly in front of me into the McDonald’s drive-through came within inches of knocking me down, hard. Did the driver later think later about the fact that he could have killed me? Or did he think: “stupid bikes; shouldn’t be on the goddamn road”?

I don’t think I am a stupid bike. I try to be a safe rider. I wear a helmet, signal my turns and use lots of bright lights at night. I actually come to a stop at stop signs. This last action causes some bemusement among drivers, who take it as an invitation to roll on through in front of me without stopping themselves. So what more can I do?

This section of Cosburn is a bit of a graveyard. There is always a crowd of vehicles trying to squeeze into the hopelessly un-supersized McDonald’s parking lot. The last thing any of the burger-for-breakfast club are looking out for is a bicycle, despite the fact that a painted bike lane runs right down the side of the road. Should I expect less from the drive-through demographic then?

The frightening thing is that this morning’s scare was only one of many such near misses, and every cyclist has a compendium of similar there-I-wuz stories. (As I write this, a driver has been charged with driving up onto the sidewalk and knocking a woman off her bike with his car following an altercation, then fleeing the scene.)

What defense do we have against this? Almost daily I have to take some kind of evasive action to escape a sloppy or selfish driver while I’m riding to work. The other day I was cut off by a car making a last-minute unannounced exit off the Bloor Viaduct towards the Don Valley Parkway. His car sported a bumper sticker reading “Jesus is the Answer”. No, I thought, signalling your turns is the answer.

I can testify that nearly being run over, even if it happens often, is not something you get used to.

A female cyclist was killed the other day by a right-turning truck. Although there is no way to know if this particular accident could have been avoided, what I do know is that the circumstances of her tragic death lessen the value of living in this city. To borrow from John Donne, the death of anyone on our streets diminishes us all.

Bike lanes are not the answer; side guards on trucks are not the answer; pitched war between cyclists and motorists is definitely not the answer. Awareness and enlightenment might be the beginning to an answer, and sadly I suspect that neither of these things will happen here any time soon. Our mayor has implied that we cyclists – along with streetcars and other forms of above ground transit - are part of some perversely imagined ‘war on the car’, which he pledged to end when he took office. He was elected by a landslide.

Mayor McCheese and his Sausage McMuffin Brigade have won this battle for now; I am weary of the stress. After this week, my commuting bike is going away for the winter. Even though the roads are still clear and there is plenty of autumn riding left to do, it is getting too dark and cold and mean out there.

A Season for New Promises

2011-10-31T18:04:00.005-04:00

Toronto Waterfront Marathon and Beyond

All men should strive to learn before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why.
James Thurber

Although most of the leaves are still clinging stubbornly to the trees and serious snow is still more than a month off, it is finally time to admit that my racing season is over. It’s a funny feeling; since last January I have given myself something specific to train for every day, and now I’m running in place for a while. I managed an 80-minute spinning workout and a 10K run this weekend, but these are maintenance activities only. It’s really time for a rest.

As always, I had some unexpected challenges thrown at me this year: blistering headwinds in Death Valley and mechanical problems and dehydration at Ironman. I really do try to allow these curves and speedbumps to add to the richness of the experience. After all, what’s the point in entering one of these things if I know beforehand exactly how it's going to turn out? It would be like starting to read a mystery when I already knew who done it. I subscribe to the truism that a success is deeper in proportion to how well you maintain your focus after sudden changes in fortune.

I finished my year by setting an unplanned goal; because I was slowed down so much in the marathon at Ironman in August, I was determined to run a more satisfying one, so I entered the Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon on October 16. Having spent all summer training at Ironman pace (i.e. slow) I was under no illusion that I would set any personal records for speed. Nor would I try; I just wanted one more chance to run the distance.

The Waterfront Marathon is a beautifully organized event and offers one of the best race routes I can think of. Not only is it flat and fast, it nicely limits the runners’ exposure to the snarly entitled automotive element that even on a Sunday morning clogs and cheapens our city. This year the route looped through the Beach area; this is a great addition as the Beachers are refreshingly welcoming and supportive of special events that take over their streets.

After battling the wind in Death Valley and the cold at Blue Mountain this year, I was provided with a brisk mixture of both at the Waterfront marathon, with a few raindrops thrown in. Bundled up in running tights, gloves and a jacket I was nicely buffered from the unfriendly weather, although some people showed up in just a singlet and shorts. I hope they survived; I am not nearly that tough.

I seeded myself toward the back of the field of 4,000 marathoners, crossing the starting line about twelve minutes after the gun went off. To me there is a mystique and a romance to a marathon and I always start out suffused with uncertainty and anticipation. No matter how many I have finished, and no matter how well-prepared I am there is a sense each time that I am running into unknown territory and that the outcome will remain a mystery until the last few steps. After having run this distance for a quarter of a century, I still regard every step as an adventure and a gift.

I trotted comfortably westward along Lakeshore Boulevard and back along Queen’s Quay and at the half-marathon point I joined a Pace Bunny and his group. I’ve never done this before and it felt good to have someone else keep track of the time and speed for a while. In the Comrades Marathon in South Africa this is known as ‘hopping on the bus’ and the simple act of falling in with a group has helped many runners to complete that 89-kilometre distance. By the time I joined these Bunny folks there was not a lot of casual chatter occurring; at this point most runners are in conversation with their bodies, feeling the accumulated kilometres and negotiating with their pounded feet the distance to the next aid station.

At about 39 km I was becoming tired and sore myself, but decided I wanted to push myself a bit harder, so I left the Bunny bunch and dashed toward the finish. (Actually the official splits for the last few kilometres show that my speed wasn’t really much faster than it had been all along, but I felt like I was dashing). I flew through the final blocks and hopped across the finish line. I had run at a strong, even pace and I finished feeling wearily refreshed. By my count this was my twentieth marathon; each one is uniquely remembered and treasured by me.

So after two marathons, two cycling centuries and an Ironman, I am calling this season complete. I gratefully managed to avoid serious injury, either from overuse or accidental trauma. I set goals and achieved them and I kept the promises I made to myself. Now the cold months ahead will be a time for resting, for reflecting and for dreaming of new promises.

Cycling Big Blue

2011-09-20T23:48:00.008-04:00

Blue Mountains Century – September 18, 2011

"It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them".
Ernest Hemingway

Shortly after leaving the starting line of the Centurion Cycling Canada Century, I noticed a road sign that read: “The Blue Mountains Welcomes You”. Grammatical ambiguity aside, it didn’t take long for it to become clear that the Blue Mountains did indeed have a welcome for me. In the form of five magnificent climbs, each one challenging in itself, which collectively made up one killer bike ride.

About 950 cyclists began the century ride, which was billed as 168 kilometres but actually came out a bit farther on my computer. No matter, it would have been a darned good workout at half the length. In fact it was: there was also a 50-mile event for those who were of a more reasonable mindset. Between the two events there were about 2100 bicycles on the road, a terrific turnout. The coordination was admirable and the Centurion Cycling folks did a very slick job of organizing everything.

The morning was clear, calm and quite cold for mid-September. I had brought long sleeves, arm warmers, tights, full-fingered gloves and a vest and I was still shivering when we started (giving new meaning to the term ‘Blue’ Mountain). The conundrum of the day was that the air stayed cool and the chill wind picked up, but the sun grew warm, which made hill climbing a hothouse experience. The early part of the day became an exercise in personal temperature control. Dripping sweat going up the hills; chattering teeth coming down.

The aid stations were well-placed, well-manned and the volunteers did a great job of feeding us, as well as rising to the Augean task of cleaning up after us. Bicyclists must be the sloppiest athletes on the road. At least in a triathlon we triathletes make an effort to throw our used bottles and Power Bar wrappers somewhere close to the aid stations where they can be picked up by the crews (in fact, we risk disqualification if we don’t). The riders in this event managed to strew trash along the whole course with little thought of who would have to clean up after them. A popular dumping ground seemed to be people’s driveways; I could just imagine some poor farmer coming home from the hardware store to find a gaggle of empty Gatorade bottles blowing across his property. There must be a way to change the culture.

The countryside was stunning in the bright sunshine. The sounds from hundreds of derailleurs clicked and whirred in the air like crickets as we rode up and down the wild topography of the Niagara Escarpment. There are Mennonite communities in the area, and as I passed one church I noticed dozens of black horse-and-buggy combinations lined neatly up in rows in the parking lot, waiting for their owners. I wondered how the horses liked the hills.

The course is a big loop, thereby offering both headwinds and tailwinds and favouring people who like riding in pelotons. Being more of a tri-geek than a pure cyclist, I ended up working alone most of the time. At one point I came upon a lady who was grimly battling the wind; I began to suggest that we work together, but she was immersed deep in her task and didn’t respond, so I continued past her.

I had entered the Blue Mountain Century as a sort of treat for myself, a kind of low-stress day of cycling after the rigours and trials of Ironman Canada just three weeks ago, and a chance to ride my wonderful Cervélo R3 again. A noble and nurturing idea, if only I hadn’t committed to pedalling up 6,500 feet of vertical ascent in the bargain. Not exactly a day in a hammock with a book.

The course featured five tough major ascents (and a bunch of tough minor ones). None of them were real stand-on-the-pedal thigh burners, but all of them were long and fairly relentless. I tried to be gentle with my legs, telling myself that I was still recovering from Penticton and that - for me at least - this was not technically a race. It took me seventeen minutes to make the climb out of Beaver Valley at mile 80, and even with my 34/50 compact cranks, each pedal stroke was a test of the entire complex system that is my body.

The last climb, up to the Scenic Caves, was the longest and hardest, reminiscent of the trek up from Wilmington at Ironman Lake Placid. Reminding myself that there was no marathon to run afterward, I pushed my legs to their limit up and over the last hill. I took a moment to savour the brilliant sparkling blue of Georgian Bay spread far below me and then flew 900 feet straight down to the finish line at Blue Mountain Village. I finished with very little left in the tank, just as I had hoped.

In the end, this spectacular century was more work than I had planned on, but as always for me, that is what gave more allure to the goal, more meaning to the task, and more shine to the accomplishment.

Moving Forward

2011-09-02T15:33:00.007-04:00

Ironman Canada August 28, 2011

“I’m alive, and I’m moving forward”
Ironman mantra

I have always said that I enjoy the process of training for an Ironman almost more than the race itself. However, I should never forget the fact that the Ironman race is also a process, a day-long odyssey of challenges. I once heard legendary triathlete Lisa Bentley say that your success on race day is proportional to how you deal with all the unexpected challenges that are thrown your way. This year, Ironman Canada threw a number of those challenges my way to threaten my chances for success.

Race morning as I stood in my wetsuit on the beach under the cloudless pre-dawn Okanagan sky, I felt the familiar combination of excitement and jangled nerves plus the heavy anticipation of a long day ahead. The feeling has been there for each of my Ironman races, and I hope it always will be. Hot sunny weather was predicted; hot and sunny it became.

Swim - 3.86 kilometres

When the starting horn sounded at 7:00am, over 2800 athletes splashed into Okanagan Lake. This is a few hundred more than have ever started before and the population increase was noticeable. The beach area at the start is wide but swimmers quickly began to converge on the seemingly endless line of orange buoys that stretched out into the lake. Even though I stayed near the back of the pack, I felt more crowded than I ever have before, as if I was trying to get out of a subway car that had somehow filled up with water at morning rush hour.

But having lots of close company is part of the Ironman swim, so we all did our best to make progress amidst the flailing arms and kicking legs around us. I never did find any completely clean water to swim in, but after a while, everyone seemed to settle into a rhythm and we all moved forward. My old clavicle injury was not really a factor and I was happy and relieved to exit the water at about 1:37, one of my faster times. My daughter Laura was already ten minutes ahead of me and I would not see her again until we met on the run, some eleven hours later.

Bike – 180 kilometres
My legs felt strong right from the beginning of the bike as I headed down Skaha Lake Road and up the first hill at McLean Creek.

I flew down Highway 97 and rounded the 60k turn at Osoyoos on schedule and feeling terrific. My habit is not to take any bottles of liquid up the long climb to Richter Pass with me, not wanting to haul them up 10k of mountainous incline. This strategy works fine as long as you don’t have to stop along the way and can get to the next aid station quickly. As it turned out, I couldn’t.

I had just started up the climb when my rear tire went flat. I have never had a flat tire in a race, and I suppose that it was bound to happen sooner or later. I quickly changed the tube and pumped up the new one, which also went flat. I had obviously pinched the new tube in my haste to get back on the road. I was just replacing it again when the race support van from the Bike Barn stopped by. They were kind enough to pump up my tire and I continued upward to Richter Pass. I had been quite a while without anything to drink, and I had nothing with me. It was hot and windless, but I was determined to make up the time I had lost so I hammered my way up to the top. In hindsight this was probably a dumb thing to do.

The thrilling descents and the rollers were just as much fun as they always are, and the slipstream breeze was rejuvenating. Just as I pulled into the aid station at kilometre 100, my rear tire went flat again. Once again the fantastic Bike Barn people were right there and this time we replaced my rim tape as well. They got me on my way quickly, but I reckoned I had lost about thirty minutes by now. Once again I pushed hard to make up for the time. Once again it was a dumb idea.

Some of the aid stations had run out of water by the time I got to them (and the sports drinks were bathwater temperature), which did not help anyone battle the oppressive heat.

By the time I got back into town and rolled into T2 my bike had taken over seven hours and I was glad to put it behind me.

Run – 42.2 kilometres

My run began under the relentless afternoon sun. I started conservatively as I always do, running slowly and walking through each aid station. I was trying to take in lots of fluids to make up for what I had lost on the bike, but by this point I was rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

At about 15k I started to feel sick and light headed, as if I were either going to pass out or throw up - or both. I found that if I just walked it was slightly better, but as soon as I started running I would feel horrible again. I had obviously committed the cardinal error of becoming dehydrated out on the bike and now my body was making me slow down. My marathon and I were going downhill quickly. At 19k I met Laura, who was looking strong on her way back to the finish. I told her I would be finishing very late, if I finished at all.

Approaching the turnaround at 21k I began to consider the possibility that I might actually have to drop out if I started feeling any worse. The thought of a DNF depressed me beyond description, but I didn’t want to collapse right onto the road and be carted away by an ambulance; I’d seen this happen to other athletes throughout the day.

As I sat forlornly on the curb at the turnaround pondering my future, another runner eased himself down beside me. He asked me how I was doing, and I whined briefly about my nausea and light-headedness whenever I tried to run. Then just walk it, he said, but walk with purpose and determination and you’ll get there; you’ve got lots of time. It was then that I noticed that he was covered from head to toe with ugly red scrapes and bruises and that one finger was bandaged and splinted. Obviously he had survived a bike crash earlier in the day. He had to be in a universe of pain and I saw from the grease pencil numbers on his ankle that he was several years older than me.

I raised myself off the curb and started walking toward the finish. With purpose.

As the song says, if you’re going through hell, keep going; so keep going I did, one step at a time. After the sun went down I felt slightly better. Ironically my legs felt strong and there was no pain in my feet, but each time I tried to speed up the nausea returned. Although it was terminally frustrating not to be able to go faster, at least I was making forward progress. The mile markers appeared out of the darkness at slow but regular intervals: 19, 20, 21…

And so I strode purposefully and gratefully back into Penticton, down Main Street and across the finish line with my slowest marathon ever, giving me an overall time for the day of just over 16 hours. Of my seven Ironman races, this was the hardest of them all; but in the words of one coach, at least I “got ‘er done”.

Doing an Ironman is not heroic, despite the road-chalked encouragement slogans and heartfelt hand-lettered signs; but I believe that there is a degree of heroism in finishing what you start, in doing what you said you would do, in keeping your promises to yourself and others, and in honouring those who do the same.

I have no idea if that injured fellow I spoke to finished or not. I hope he did and I wish there was a way I could let him know how much he inspired me to heed my own often-professed advice: just get up off the curb and keep moving forward.

Running Wild

2011-08-27T19:46:00.004-04:00

If you want to win something, run 100 metres. If you want to experience something, run a marathon.
Emil Zatopek, legendary Czech distance runner

Picture a small group of prehistoric hunters on the trail of a wooly mammoth; they crouch in the bushes and run through the tall grass for days on end, avoiding their own predators while chasing their prey. The survival of the tribe depends on the success of the hunt; they cannot fail.

We were not stronger than the mammoth or faster than the tiger. How on earth did we survive?

This is how I prefer to think of it: we have all of us been innately gifted with wit, wisdom and will. We required the wit to outsmart the wooly mammoth, the wisdom to draw upon past experiences – our own and others’ - and the will to stay with the task until the goal was accomplished. This is how we survived.

Nowadays, due to a dearth of available wooly mammoths we humans tend to build matrices for ourselves to exercise some or all of the three attributes we worked so hard to acquire all those thousands of years ago. And it is still about survival.

In the best of us, it is in our nature to test ourselves. Crossword puzzles, cricket matches and triathlons have all come into being because of our desire to push our limits, physical, intellectual or spiritual.

The primal, elemental aspect of running has attracted millions in the past three decades. Forget that so many have hijacked the sport in vain pursuit of longer lives, smoother skin or firmer thighs. Forget that high-tech shoes and Lululemon wardrobes have tried to make running a materialistic circus. It is still the simplicity of muscles driving legs to push feet against the ground in order to propel the body through space; this is the attraction. I can do this, not because of what I am wearing or how much my shoes cost, but because my ancestors possessed the necessary attributes, and so do I.

The marathon, more than shorter distances, asks more from us than just solid strength or quicksilver speed. Because of its sheer length, marathon runners must be prepared to pass through a series of tests from start to finish. In the beginning the distance to run seems incomprehensibly long, so we don’t try to comprehend it; we just concentrate on the stride, the pace. Midway through we are still overwhelmed by the distance and need to push mentally to keep focus. Toward the end most of our physical resources are depleted, but the goal becomes realistic, so we continue, sometimes by sheer will alone.

When I run the marathon at the end of Ironman this Sunday each of my feet will strike the hot dusty pavement about 20,000 times, bearing all the dead, useless weight of my tired body. Although I think I have trained enough for the run, my various foot ailments could add a measure of discomfort to the effort. The high temperature is forecast to be in the thirties, adding further risks and challenges. But I will continue to move forward as long as I can. Discomfort is not the issue here; moving forward toward the goal is.

Running the marathon demands patience as well as fortitude. Because I am in competition with no one but myself, all my strategies and all my negotiations will take place internally. Whether my marathon takes me five, six or seven hours, I will impress no one but myself with the result and whatever outcome I achieve is for me alone. My success or failure depends on my ability to reach within and find some kind of acceptance of the status quo, some kind of quietude. If I slow down, it will take longer to finish. So it takes longer. As Coach Bill Bowerman said, running is not just about winning a race, it is about testing the limits of the human heart.

I hope Sunday to have a chance while running to pay silent tribute to the wit, wisdom and will of my prehistoric ancestors. Because they ran to survive, so therefore can I.

Two Centuries of Cycling

2011-08-18T16:10:00.001-04:00

After a long day on my bicycle, I feel refreshed, cleansed, purified. I feel that I have established contact with my environment and that I am at peace. …Even if I did not enjoy riding, I would still do it for my peace of mind.
Paul de Vivie
early 20th century cyclist and writer

A Century Last Weekend
I did my last long training ride – a century - on the weekend. Everything felt great, although I am still fiddling with the positioning of my saddle to achieve something resembling comfort – of which there is not a lot after 162 kilometres on a bike. Somehow in the last year either the saddle has changed shape or I have. Otherwise it was a beautiful ride up and down the hills in Algonquin. A sort of Lite version of riding up and down the mountains of the Okanagan.

I have managed to complete my Ironman training this year without tumbling from my bike, a gift for which I am grateful. If the gentle motorists of this city will allow me to pass safely among them on my way to work for one or two more days, I might actually make it to the starting line in Penticton this year.

I had a few Whitman-like moments through the day, celebrating the strength and power in my legs as my muscles responded to my wishes and drove the bike forward. Not for the first time, I was reminded how much I enjoy training for a challenging athletic event; the rewarding process of growing stronger while gaining optimism and confidence. It is really during the training phase, not the race itself, that I feel the most in synch with my abilities and goals. To borrow from Robert Pirsig, it is the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.

The bike portion of a triathlon is the only segment that requires a mechanical device. The swim is immersion in an alien element. The run calls for a serious meeting of foot and pavement. It is during the bike that we get to explore our relationship with technology.

As I pedal, I notice the motion of my feet and legs. Clipped into the pedals, my feet are made to describe perfect circles approximately 340 millimetres in diameter. I can change the position of my leg muscles by standing up for a while, but the feet keep turning those same circles on their pedals, limited by the length of the crankset. In this way our legs become pistons and we become a part of the machine, governed by its specifications.

However it is an incomplete machine; a bicycle requires not only a power source but also a commanding will, or else it is just a piece of finely-crafted but useless hardware. The bicycle will carry us great distances at speeds and efficiencies we could never achieve on our own, but it requires active collaboration from us.

We are the engine and the will; the bike is the means. Neither operates without the other and each makes the other greater. Thus the act of cycling becomes a synergy of technology and pure human ability.

A Century Ago
The term century, which we use to describe a 100-mile bike ride, made me think of the beginning of the last century and the early days of bicycling.

Much like today’s urban cyclists, the riders of a hundred years ago seemed to regard cycling as the cure for many ills. “…already it’s in our midst,’ read an ad for Massey Harris bikes in 1902. “No fad now - just a sensible mode of exercise easy to take”.

Cycling in the early 20th century had its share of purists. There was resistance to the addition of variable gears because some thought they made it too easy to pedal up hills and thus detracted from the wholesomeness of the sport. One fellow of the time expressed the opinion that such mechanical fripperies such as “the artifice of the derailleur” should only be used by “people over 45”. As I am pedalling up to Richter Pass next weekend I will be thankful that his attitude didn’t prevail. Also that I am over 45.

I think that one of the attractions of cycling when it began was simply the notion of being able to travel swiftly under one’s own power. Think of it: there were horses, trains, trams and trolleys - plus the nascent automobile - but until the bicycle appeared the only method of self-locomotion was by foot. How liberating it must have been to hop on a bike and pedal through the streets of the city or out into the countryside solely by means of individual strength and skill; to travel in a machine that was not powered by an engine.

To me, the fulfillment from basic self-propulsion is the appeal of the bike portion in any triathlon. We can move great distances at great speeds along the road and our success rests on our collaboration with the machine, by the strength of our desire and by the mechanics of our legs powering the pedals through those 340 millimetre circles.

Head Above Water

2011-08-04T00:13:00.002-04:00

WU: 4x50(5) 25drill/25swim 25BK/25swim 25drill/25swim 25kick/25swim MS: 100 (10”) steady 150 (20”) 200 (30”) 300 (40) 200 (30”) 150 (20”) 100 WD: 4x50 alternate drill and easy (10”) Total: 1550

Typical Swim Workout

“Pooh, did you see me swimming? That’s called swimming what I was doing!”

Roo, in Winnie The Pooh
A.A. Milne

I was slow to start my swim training for Ironman this year. Whether this was due to insecurity over my imperfectly recovered collar bone injury (possible) or just plain sloth (more likely) I can’t say. The fact is that I didn’t get into the open lake till the beginning of July and now I am trying to make up lost ground. Or lost water.

This season my shoulder joints feel like oars on an old wooden rowboat, creaking and clunking as they rattle around in the oarlocks. My body position is somewhere between pretzel and fetal.

My swimming technique, like my golf game, never seems to get any better or any worse no matter how I work on it. I am slow and passably steady and I will end my days that way. A revered triathlon coach once advised me to think of Ironman as one whole event rather than as three separate ones; meaning, I took it, that I should accept my swim as the talentless mess that it is and concentrate on not exhausting myself needlessly in the water.

And so my strategy for the 3860 metres of the Ironman swim is to keep everything as simple as possible: to aim to move forward in a fairly straight line and to conserve my energy. Of course, this strategy does not get me to the swim finish very quickly. Even at my best I am slow. In fact in my last – and fastest – Ironman swim I was 1975th out of the water, of 2210 athletes. Yet my time was so fast compared to my usual performance that my family on shore, still peering seaward, missed seeing me exit the water and were convinced that I had drowned.

There is so much that I like about a triathlon swim. There are no tires to go flat or heel spurs to become inflamed. Dehydration is rarely an issue. My wetsuit acts as a full body personal floatation device, supporting every inch of me like a neoprene mattress on a water bed. There is no weather to speak of. This morning it was windy, cool and rainy; I swam an easy and enjoyable 2000 metres in the lake, insulated from all elements by the warm, cozy water.

I relish the relative calm during the swim portion of the race, silent save for the sound of my own breath bubbling out of me and the muffled eggbeater swishing from the limbs of the other athletes. The embryonic quality of the water produces a sense of isolation that strokes my solitary nature; no one can talk to me, and vice versa. An old opera singing colleague once told me that she hated swimming; for one thing she couldn’t stand putting her face in the water: “Makes me gag,” she said. I recall that I used to have the same reflex when required to socialize at opening night receptions.

Aside from a little pinch at the apex of my stroke I am not aware of my year-old clavicle injury, which is a relief. All winter I had visions of the whole affair snapping in two again leaving me in the middle of the lake with my left arm flapping uselessly in the waves like a piece of driftwood. So far though, whatever grew back together in the past year has held.

There is a saying that you can’t win an Ironman in the swim but you can lose it. To me, who will in my life never win or lose an Ironman, the swim is a chance to warm up my body and to calm my thoughts for the rest of the day ahead. Twelve hours later, as I try to coax my tired legs to carry me over the last ten kilometres of the run, the brief swim that began the race will be long forgotten; and yet without it, the day would seem incomplete. Whether you are first out of the water or 2210th, triathlon is what it is because of the swim.

So up and down the lake I practice my stroke, my old oars called back to duty for one more year: creak, clunk, splash, creak, clunk, splash.

Who Are Those Guys?

2011-07-10T18:28:00.002-04:00

“I couldn't do that. Could you do that? Why can they do it? Who ARE those guys?”
Paul Newman as Butch Cassidy

The astonishing Race Across America bicycle event has ended for another year, with an impressively large field of finishers: 28 solo men and 2 solo women (plus over 200 cyclists in relay teams). I find myself once again wondering: who are these people? What drives these extraordinary athletes who can go basically without sleep for 10 days and nights while remaining upright on a bicycle, all the time pedaling and moving forward. One fellow cycled for half the race while suffering from Schermer’s Neck, a condition that makes it impossible to hold your head upright. He had his bike helmet duct-taped to an aluminum frame mounted on his back to support his head so he could see where he was going.

This coming week 95 seasoned ultra athletes (the average age is 45 years old) will run the Badwater Ultra Marathon, a 135-mile footrace across Death Valley and up the side of Mount Whitney. The temperature at the start is forecast to be 117 degrees Fahrenheit. If you are a sun-worshipper, Badwater just might cure you forever.

Who are they, these humans that can accomplish such miracles? Are they even human? Do they put their running shorts on one leg at a time just like I do?

To an extent it is all relative; in the eyes of couch potato sprawled in front of his 47-inch flat screen with a bowl of chips balanced on his 48-inch stomach, the idea of running anywhere even for ten minutes is inconceivable. To many 10k runners, a marathon sounds superhuman. And to most marathoners, an Ironman would seem like the very limit of endurance. Yet over the past 30 years we have arrived at the point in our culture where thousands of ordinary people accomplish these distances every weekend.

This is not so for an ultra endurance event. Aside from national institutions like South Africa’s 89 kilometre Comrades Marathon, which attracts over twelve thousand runners every year, very few people attempt to run or bike more than conventional race distances.

What does it take to be an ultra athlete? To ride your bike for days on end, to run across deserts and up and down mountain trails, to travel under your own power through withering heat, rainstorms and vicious headwinds; to endure? I have read many thousands of words on the subject and I have yet to discover the answer.

One opinion I have heard likens ultra running to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder; the seemingly endless repetitive plodding over hundreds of kilometres at a pedestrian pace can only be accomplished by someone who has lost his grip on reality somewhere along the road.

Marshall Ulrich, the legendary ultra runner has just published a book about his 53-day run across the United States. It seems like he was in pain from about mile 10 onward, and yet he ran every day until he finished. Maybe endurance is about enduring pain for longer than the average person.

On the other side of the coin, Gordy Ainsleigh, the very first finisher of the Western States 100 Endurance Race has spoken admiringly of a fellow ultra runner thus: “…his own rhythm is strong enough and his own joy is great enough the he’s able to win [the Western States] more than anyone else”. Is it an indefinable, unfillable capacity for joy that drives an ultra athlete?

In To the Edge, his memoir of completing the brutal Badwater Ultra, Kirk Johnson paints an excellent picture of what running nonstop for two days through Death Valley in July was like, but he doesn’t tell me how he did it; what pushed him to finish when many others did not. He had warm and supportive family members in his crew and I have no doubt this helped him a lot.

Years ago in an essay on marathons, I wrote that we athletes were running out of mere being into our essence; that we ran in order to demand something supernal of our souls and bodies. Fine. But these poetic sentiments are not a lot of help when your hip flexors have seized up, your feet are on fire, your gastro-intestinal system is in revolt, your morale is in the cellar and you still have an inconceivable distance to travel before the finish.

What do I need to get to the finish? I’ve come to realize that my fascination with this type of athletic lies not only in finishing an extreme event, but also in discovering what it takes to do so. Obviously the answer here is not something that can be taught, but something that must be learned.

To be continued…

I Was a Teenage Bodybuilder

2011-06-04T17:27:00.001-04:00

Your body is the baggage you must carry through life. The more excess the baggage, the shorter the trip.
Arnold H. Glasow

It's simple, if it jiggles, it's fat.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

My son came home with a cool device a few weeks ago, a “Body Composition Monitor”, which means a scale with a bunch of bells and whistles. But what fun the bells and whistles are! I got on the thing for the first time today and learned what I am composed of.

The Body Composition Monitor (BCM) tells me such useful information as the percentage of water that is inside me, how much my muscles weigh and what my metabolic age is (apparently it should be lower than my real age; this should be an easy one for me since the scale only goes to 50).

The charts and tables in the BCM User Manual tell me that all my numbers are inside the acceptable range. I’m not sure what the BCM does if they aren’t; perhaps flash an LCD readout that says “Clean Up Your Act!”, beep three times and print an audition application for The Biggest Loser?

I am apparently 57.3% water. This explains the sloshing feeling I have occasionally, and why I have to pee so often.

As an athlete I am used to being aware of calories; for me calories are the fuel I require to burn in exercise rather than the Blue Meanies they represent to dieters. If I am reading the BCM number correctly, I need 1733 calories per day in order to survive. Although the readout does not specifically indicate this, I believe that a large number of these calories are allowed to come from ice cream. At any rate, whether or not they are allowed to, in my case they do. However, I interpret my relatively low body fat percentage number as positive reinforcement for my dietary choices.

The good news is that my muscles, fat and bone seem to add up to roughly my total weight, meaning that I am composed of not much more than these components (which of these three categories is the brain in, and how much does mine weigh? The BCM does not tell me this). I wonder what would happen if politician got on a BCM; they are often full of other substances.

And what are goosebumps made of? The BCM manual says you are not to wear anything while weighing yourself and it was chilly in the bathroom.

The most surprising readout was what the BCM calls my metabolic age, which came out as 14. I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand I suppose it is good to have body of a teenager rather than of someone four or five decades older, but I’m not sure I want to go back to teenhood, physically or otherwise. It took me a lot of work, suffering and angst to get to where I am today and the thought of metabolically starting all over again makes me want to start scarfing down the cookie dough and at least get myself up to voting age.

At any rate, what I am to do with all this information remains to be seen. When one has the body of a 14-year-old, where else is there to go? If I continue to get fitter will I also continue to regress and end up like Benjamin Button?

At my time of life I suppose the best thing to hope for is that my metabolic information (or the rest of me for that matter) doesn’t slide too much in the coming years. And now I have the Body Composition Monitor to help me with that; or at least to track the inexorable decline as I sink inexorably into my declining years.

The Naming of Goals

2011-05-30T19:56:00.006-04:00

Ottawa Marathon – May 29, 2011

When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.
The Naming of Cats
T. S. Eliot

Mr. Eliot tells us that every cat possesses three names: first, there is the name he answers to at home; the second is the unique name by which he is known to other cats; and lastly, there is the name he himself knows, the one he shares with no one else. I think that my athletic goals for the Ottawa Marathon were like this.

My public marathon goal could have been to finish the race in a certain time. The goal I shared with other runners would have had to do with treating injuries or maintaining a certain racing or nutrition strategy.

I had two private goals for the Ottawa Marathon on Sunday, and these were really the only ones that mattered. First, I wanted to run the race at a consistent pace, in control as much as possible, and finish, but without worrying about a finishing time. Second, I wanted to confirm that my body - from the feet upward - was still capable of a sustained running effort after the injuries that have hobbled me in past years. These two things – race consistently and keep it together - were my rhythm and my focus for the entire 42.2 kilometres of the race.

The Ottawa Race Weekend is a huge affair, featuring a marathon, a half marathon, a 10k run and several family fun runs. Altogether more than 15,000 people take part over two days. Many of my extended family members have run in these races over the past twenty years or so, and this year a dozen of us got together each to participate in at least one of the events (I say “at least one”, because one energetic young fellow ran the 10k on Saturday evening and then the half marathon the next morning). My son Duncan and my youngest brother Dave were running their first full marathon. My daughter Laura was running the half.

Race morning was mild and overcast with a prediction of light showers. As the starting horn sounded at 7:00am and 4,200 marathoners began moving forward, I had successfully managed to put aside personal speculation about how fast I was going to run, replaced by concern about whether the pinched nerve in my right foot would behave itself or take me out of the race as it had in South Africa two years ago.

After decades of being tweaked and redesigned the Ottawa marathon route is a brilliant one, flat and easy on the senses with lots of green space. The Ottawanian crowds were wonderful the whole way; they were so insistently cheerful that I couldn’t help feeling lifted and helped along by their noisy enthusiasm. It was difficult not to contrast this festive atmosphere with the sullen thrombosis of idling cars and seething motorists one sees at race events in Toronto, so many of whom seem to regard a marathon as nothing but an interruption in their busy important lives.

After running the first 10k in 57 minutes I decided that I was moving a bit too quickly so I slowed down just a fraction, passing the halfway mark at just over two hours. After that I stopped looking at my watch; it was all about moving forward at a steady pace. As we ran through the congenial and boisterous neighbourhood of New Edinburgh at 28k, a light rain began to fall; this provided some cooling relief from the pervasive humidity. Beyond that, I didn’t notice the rain at all.

I was tiring at 32k as we headed up the Rideau Canal, and my legs were starting to stiffen up. I knew there was going to be discomfort. No one who has participated in a serious athletic event - who has hiked all day in the rain, who has climbed a rock wall, who has finished an Ironman - no one is surprised at discomfort. It is part of the challenge, and we accept it. We are not masochists or freaks; we don’t like the pain, we just acknowledge it as part of what we have to pass through in order to reach our goal.

I was determined to stick to my plan of not walking except to take on fluids or gels at the aid stations. This is the first time in 20 marathons I have ever successfully done this; I have always talked myself into walking “just to the next lamppost” in the past. This time I didn’t; I remained in “profound meditation” of my ineffable private goals, and I ran.

In past marathons I have managed to stretch out my final two kilometres so that they have seemed to last for hours. This is easy to do if you are hurting and if you give into the temptation to walk. This year I actually felt like I was picking up speed as I got closer to the end. I felt as if I were being drawn to the finish line.

Running back down the canal toward the race’s ending, our stream of tired marathoners was joined by the (much perkier) half marathon people, who had started two hours after us, and the stream became a river. The noise from the crowds and the dense throng of athletes provided exactly the right mood of sound and colour. I flew under the finish line with hundreds of other runners and felt better post-race than I ever have.

Unknown to me, Duncan was just about two minutes ahead of me and Dave was just about two minutes behind me. And somewhere close by was Laura who was simultaneously finishing the half, as were most of my other relatives. Judging from our times, we must all have been within a few hundred metres of one another. There would have been no way to coordinate a chorus line finish, but it’s cool to think of us all so near. I congratulate them all and I am proud to be among their number.

My personal goals were met. It was not my fastest marathon nor was it my slowest, but it was my most consistent and ultimately the most fulfilling since my very first one in 1987. The best news of the day was that my body – right down to the feet – managed to respond happily (or at least uncomplainingly) to what my mind asked of it. For the first time in a long time I felt as if the two were one again. I have laid down a good foundation for my training this summer and I feel optimistic for the future. On to Ironman.

Then a Miracle Happens

2011-05-23T17:04:00.006-04:00

“Today you are You, that is truer than true,
There is no one alive who is Youer than You”.
Dr Seuss

This month I ordered an item called a Road ID, which doesn’t ID roads, but rather me, if I am lying on one after possibly falling down and being unable to get up.

The Road ID website prompted me to include the following info on my bracelet: NKA NO MED HX. Which I gather stands for No Known Allergies, No Medical History.

I wonder if those abbreviations really mean that, or whether the EMTs will just look dumbly at them and think it is my Klingon name.

The bracelet will get its first real workout at the Ottawa Marathon on May 29, where presumably I will also be identified by other means – race number, timing chip, the finish line announcer. Not that I intend to fall down with no means of getting up next weekend but you never know. In the past twenty-four months I have pulled up lame in an ultra marathon in South Africa, collapsed in a helpless heap at the side of the highway in the Arizonan desert and launched myself over my handlebars in Muskoka. Worse could happen.

I have to run HOW FAR???

I’m looking forward to the marathon, because I hope it will show me that I am not in nearly as bad shape as I currently imagine myself to be.

As an avowed goal-setter, I have conducted a symphony of marathon goals over the past six months. The original one was to carve a phantasmagorical 20 minutes off my best-ever time. Once I started training in earnest I began to see that the fast express train had left the station some time ago. No matter how limitless your dreams, you can’t build a house on a foundation of whipped cream.

(It’s possible I could set a personal best for the highest number of bad metaphors in one paragraph, however).

So, over the winter the progressive deterioration of my marathon goals has looked something like this:
1. Finish the marathon in under 3:45!!!
2. Finish the marathon in under 4:00.
3. Finish the marathon in a personal best time (under 4:04, run in 2001)…
4. Finish the marathon?

After a springtime of good, solid training, including intervals, tempos and my mandatory three 30+ km LSD (long, slow, distance) runs, I had decided that number one was out of the question; number two was probably a stretch; number three would be a gift.

All these years of experience might have made me a smarter runner, but not necessarily a faster one.

(Come to think of it, maybe I am putting too much pressure on myself with goal number four. Maybe it should read: Finish the marathon if you’re feeling good and your feet don’t hurt and the weather is nice and they have measured the course short by a few miles).

At the moment my race strategy reminds me of that old systems flowchart, where a number of boxes, lines and arrows all culminate in one final process, labeled “Then a Miracle Happens”.

Of course the prospect of the unknown outcome is part of what attracts me to this type of sport in the first place and I’m not complaining here. All variables aside, I have done the work, have trained myself well and this is not my first marathon but something like my 20th. Not counting Ironman, the last one I ran was in 2006. I did it with no preparation whatsoever, and it took me what seemed like all day; I must have stopped at a Starbuck’s along the way or something.

I guess what is nagging at me is this: what if after all my conscientious training this spring, I still do no better than I did five years ago? What will this say about my running?
1. I don’t know how to train;
2. I don’t know how to run;
3. My body is falling apart faster than I expected;
4. All of the above.

The answer to all this is that if I do no worse than I did the last time, I will be in no worse shape than I was last time, and this can only be a good thing. It will mean I still have my health and my motivation.

Running the same pace as last time will confirm that I have not turned into Paula Radcliffe in the past five years, but this is OK; my Road ID tells me I am still me, and I have come to terms with the fact that most of the world will always run faster than I will.

The true “miracle” in my racing flowchart is the one that happens every time I put on my running shoes or hop onto my bike and head out onto the road: it is the ability to perform the simple act of moving across the planet under my own power. There is a mantra in Ironman: “I am alive, and I am moving forward”. This mantra does not necessarily win races, but it helps me appreciate the journey to the finish line.

If I can’t see the miracle in this, then maybe I should have added “LOOZR” to my Road ID bracelet.

A Vicious Cycle

2011-05-14T18:46:00.001-04:00

Warning: rant alert.

Cyclists fare best when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles.

John Forester, Effective Cycling

Be careful or be roadkill.
Calvin and Hobbes

Item: As I was going to work the other day I heard a prolonged angry blast on a car horn, and I could see that it was aimed at a sweet thing on her bicycle who had just serenely sailed through a 4-way stop sign, oblivious to the cars that were waiting. I watched as she rode past me and proceeded to breeze through the next two stop signs as well, infuriating all those in cars. And infuriating me that she should be so blithely unaware of her environment.

An article by Andrew Clark in the Globe and Mail last week asked the eternal question: who ARE these people? Who are they that they dream they can participate in vehicular traffic without any concomitant responsibility, let alone the risk of injury or death? Do they just not get it? Do they think that those motorists honking at them are nothing but bad tempered old fuddy-duddies who should just chill or whatever? Do they know that section 136 of the Highway Traffic Act provides for a $110 fine if they are convicted of disobeying a stop sign?

Do they actually think they are contributing positively to the health of our city?

As a veteran cyclist and bike commuter who tries hard to ride safely, I am frustrated that I get tarred with the same brush. Here’s one reason: Each morning on my way to work I have to pass through a 4-way stop sign. I stop. I wait my turn and then I go. Several times I have been nearly killed by drivers who don’t stop. I can hear the apologia now: “Well, he just came shooting right out into the intersection. What could I do? You know how bikes are; they never stop for anything”. Everyone sagely nods in agreement. They know how bikes are.

Item: Cars were lined up at the bottom of Pottery Road yesterday during afternoon rush hour. One car stopped to let a bicycle cross the road. The driver behind him gave a blast on the horn. A simple act of courtesy is met with a haemorrhage of road rage. This is not a sign of universal acceptance towards cyclists. It is a sign of intolerance.

The relationship between motorists and cyclists - rarely cordial - seems to have taken a nose dive since the election of our current mayor, who according to Mr Clark's article has publicly stated that a cyclist

who is killed by a car basically shouldn’t have been on the road in the first place. “Roads were built for buses, trucks and cars,” he proclaimed back in 2007. (He might as well have said that they were built for horses and wagons, as no doubt someone did back on the 1890s when bicycles first began taking over the streets of the city. Buses, trucks and cars came later, I believe).

I used to think that the most damage a sloppy, selfish cyclist could do was to be a nuisance to those around him. But it could be far more dire than that. Bad cycling habits produce rage towards cyclists. All cyclists, not just the bad ones. And in a physical conflict between a pickup truck and a bicycle, my money is on the truck

The spring appearance of thousands of bike commuters who either don’t know the laws or prefer to ignore them could aggravate an already-volatile traffic mood, the situation is literally an accident waiting to happen. Except it won't be an accident; it will be a preventable tragedy.

Those cyclists who treat their bikes as toys rather than as vehicles are pouring gasoline on a fire that is already smouldering. The result will be no good for anyone.

One More than Ten

2011-04-24T16:32:00.007-04:00

“We’re all here… to see what is possible.”
Angelika Castaneda, ultra-legend, winner 1999 Badwater Ultramarathon

The word 'athletics' comes from a Greek word meaning a competition or contest. The idea of the contest was to run a distance faster, jump higher over something or throw something farther than the other competitors did, in which case you were the winner. Thus the modern Olympic motto: swifter, higher, stronger.

There are a lot of very competitive and talented athletes who are out there trying to beat someone – anyone - even if it isn’t the front runner. There are prizes for placing in all age groups and genders, as well as spots in prestigious world championships for those who are among the fastest in their races. The need to compete defines a good part of the culture of any racing event.

What about me then; someone who has no discernible athletic talent and no competitive gene at all? How am I an athlete?

I will never come close to winning an athletic competition. Much as an opera singer needs at least the physical reality of a voice and some musical talent in order to perform, a competitive athlete needs certain physical attributes and a front-running spirit in order to compete. I have few of these attributes and could no more be athletically competitive than Usain Bolt could sing Handel’s Messiah.

Obviously the 27,000 runners in the Boston Marathon last Monday did not all think they were going to win. In fact about 26,950 of them probably had no chance of coming close to winning. So why did they do it? Who were they trying to beat?

But as running coach Bill Bowerman’s character pointed out in the movie Without Limits, the Olympic motto doesn’t say you have to be swifter, higher or stronger than anyone else. It just says Swifter. Higher. Stronger. The object of the comparative is left up to us.

The goal therefore of many an athlete could be not to beat the guy next to him, but rather to run faster than he himself did the last time. After most races you will hear more talk of personal bests achieved than of who beat whom and by how much. Although the distance to be run is necessarily standard, can the success factors be defined by those who set their own goals?

This then for me is the essence of being an athlete:

It is a desire to go somewhere I haven’t been before in order to see what is possible. It is the idea of moving forward rather than standing still, of striving to be better rather than accepting the status quo. Of reaching the top of the scale and then reaching a bit more.

My training strategy this spring has been to push myself just a little harder than I think I can manage; just out of my comfort zone. If I get comfortable, I push harder; not a lot, just a little. My goal this week is to be farther along the road than I was last week. If the number ten on my amplifier was the best I could achieve last week, this week I want to try to reach eleven. It is my own personal eleven and it will most likely not win the race, but it helps me believe that I too am living up to the three-word motto.

My goal is to be swifter than I was the last time, by being stronger and reaching higher than the last time.

Citius, Altius, Footius

2011-04-03T19:02:00.002-04:00

“The feet! What did you did to the feet?”
Ruth Cole in A Widow for One Year
John Irving

As I shift my training focus from cycling to running for my planned marathon in May, I am ever mindful that my success in the endeavour rests on the health of my two feet. Solely on them, you might say. Two years ago I had to drop out of a goal race because the Morton’s Neuroma (pinched nerve) in my right foot got so painful that I could barely walk, let alone run. About a month later - obviously charging back into training too quickly - I gave myself an epic case of plantar fasciitis in the other foot which hobbled me for nearly a year.

(Apparently it is not called plantar fasciitis any more, it is plantar fasciosis now. The former referred to an inflammation of the fascia whereas we are told that the new term describes a degeneration. Delightful. I take ibuprofen for inflammation. What do I do for degeneration, join a Fundamentalist church?)

Morton’s Neuroma – often aggravated by tight shoes - is possibly hereditary. My father had it - so badly in fact that eventually he could hardly walk home from work. So he simply had the offending nerve removed. Since he was a physician, presumably he just got one of his colleagues to yank it out during their morning coffee break. I do not really have this option, so I am trying to make do with watchful waiting plus a toe box on my shoe that is the size of a small garage.

It is a lot we ask of our feet. Whether we are lightly sprinting a 400-metre dash or lumbering down the Pacific Highway in The Biggest Loser Marathon, we are pounding the few square centimeters of flesh, sinew and bone that support us into the pavement over and over again. Maybe as many as 20,000 times per foot over a marathon distance. Is it any wonder the poor underappreciated feet sometimes break down?

And feet don’t operate in a vacuum. As the song says, the foot bone’s connected to the leg bone, and successful running biomechanics will be a synergistic function of all of our 2000 body parts. I believe this is the key: treat the whole engine with respect and the components are more likely to look after themselves.

In The Lore of Running, Dr. Tim Noakes reminds us that previous injury is a main indicator for subsequent problems. Age is another one, as is a sudden increase in training volume. Since I can’t do anything about my age or my running history, I am paying special attention to the intensity and volume of my runs this spring. I am trying – as much as is possible in marathon training – to ramp up my distance sanely and to keep my plans reasonable and attainable. If this means modifying my original time goals, then that is what I will do. My mantra will be:
He who runs a little way,
Survives to run another day.

Anyway, today I had my first outdoor run of any length, a 20k long-slow-distance. It was a great workout. I was happy that I managed to keep an even pace the whole way, and this was enough for me. My quads reacted as expected to the shock of running on concrete as opposed to the nice bouncy treadmill they've been enjoying lately. My lower half is currently squeezed into compression socks and tights in an effort to mollify these effects. I feel like a half-used tube of toothpaste.

But so far my feet show few signs of the threatened degeneration. As I move into my longer weekly runs over the next month, the challenge will be to keep all of my 2000 parts cooperative and functional and my feet happy.

Daring Lachesis

2011-03-20T14:56:00.008-04:00

Thanks to Pam S. for the photo

“I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time”.

Bond’s epitaph in You Only Live Twice

Ian Fleming

This month I entered my sixtieth year (which is to say that I turned 59; unlike the Christian calendar, I had a year zero).

Milestones aplenty lie just beyond the horizon. Significantly, if I were to wait one more year I could practically walk my way into a qualifying time for the Boston Marathon, instead of trying to knock 20 minutes or so off my PR, which is what I am aiming for this spring.

A recent book by Susan Jacoby, Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age suggests that if we think that by exercise and healthy living we will stave off the effects of aging and delay senility, we are dead wrong. This might be true; there is evidence on both sides. In any case it is an issue I care nothing about, since burning and raging at the close of day has never been included in my life plans.

And yet my generation is apparently bug-eyed with panic in its frantic attempts to keep from getting old. Billions are spent every year trying to outrun time and genetics. We will do almost anything, from grinding grimly away at lunch hour kickboxing sessions to injecting botulinum toxin into our bodies just to convince ourselves that the train is not about to leave the station.

One of the things I have finally learned in my 59 years is that not everybody is me, so I should not scoff. But I will, because this is my blog.

Several years ago a running shoe company ran an ad that suggested we runners were actually fleeing old age itself and that we would succeed if we bought their product and just did it. Did this sell any shoes? I would like to think not, but it probably did.

Rather than trying to outrun time, isn’t it better to run well with the time you have?

My participation in endurance sports has always been based on three keys: setting a goal that is somewhere beyond my reach, planning and working towards it and then pushing myself to achieve it. Side effects include a focused mind, a healthy cardio-vascular system and a strong sense of direction and adventure. There is satisfaction and validation if I am successful, and humility followed by renewed determination if I am not. Occasionally I have raised some money for a worthy cause.

Never once have I considered the idea that I might look younger, that my mind might stay clearer or that I might die later. To me, the very notion that anyone could have such an objective is laughable. It is King Canute seated on his throne at the sea’s edge with the waves splashing over his feet, trying to order back the tide. It is hubris, a double-dare to Fate.

(To his credit, good old Canute admitted defeat and acknowledged that there were things even a king couldn’t control. My generation should take note).

I began running in the nineteen-eighties, passionately inspired by the example of Terry Fox and his Marathon of Hope. To this day he remains my hero, and his self-determination is my touchstone. Of course he was not able to delay his death from cancer, but he made valuable the time he was given. He was successful at keeping hope alive, if not himself.

None of what I do guarantees me a long and healthy life, or even that I will survive the next 24 hours. But I don’t want that guarantee; I just want the next 24 hours I am given to be as valuable as I can make them.

“You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.”

Woody Allen

Into the Valley

2011-03-03T13:11:00.000-05:00

The Death Valley Spring Century

“Oh, a mighty wind’s a blowin’
And it’s kickin’ up the sand”
Mitch & Mickey

Driving through the town of Shoshone on my way into Death Valley National Park, I passed a billboard advertising the ‘Death Valley Health Center’. I wondered if anyone else had ever seen a paradox in this.

But Death Valley is all about paradoxes; it doesn’t quietly satisfy your expectations, but rather surprises you into redefining them and then waits to see how you adapt. This was only my second trip to the area but already I have immense respect for this most starkly beautiful and placidly terrifying of places.

The day before the Century I couldn’t resist driving the route of the Badwater Ultramarathon from beginning to end: Badwater to Lone Pine and as far up Mount Whitney as I could get until the snow stopped me. I might never run the race itself, but at least now I have seen what awaits those who do.

As I drove back to Furnace Creek in the afternoon a wicked wind whipped up from the south. A few miles from the Ranch I came upon two cyclists – Dave and Pam from Cleveland - who were walking their bikes; the wind was so fierce it was hard for them to make forward progress. I drove Dave back to the ranch and he went back later for Pam.

All afternoon the wind whistled and howled outside my hotel room, making me feel as if I were in a Quonset hut at the South Pole instead of a resort in the desert. I could only hope that it would die down a bit before sunrise.

Race morning dawned clear and bright, and still windy. The moment we rode out of the Furnace Creek Ranch driveway and turned south toward Badwater the vicious headwind hit us, slowing progress down to a crawl. Roaring up from the south, it was as strong a wind as I have ever experienced. An immovable object which we cyclists were trying to move. It can’t keep up like this all day, I thought. Or can it? And can I?

It was a perfect storm of wind. Here we were in Death Valley, with mountains climbing heavenward on both sides - no hills, trees or even boulders to slow anything down - forming a funnel for the force of the gale to be aimed straight at ME. There was nowhere to hide. Whether you picture it as a giant hand relentlessly and repeatedly slamming into my body, or a giant rubber band pulling me backwards toward the start, the fact is that it was the wind and not I who was in control of this ride. Every pedal stroke amounted to an effort just to keep upright on the bike. This went on for hour after hour after hour.

As the wind pushed at me I saw that this was not going to be a day of high speeds. My expectations of finishing 150 miles before dinner needed some rethinking. In my mind I heard the crabby lady in my car’s GPS: “Recalculating”.

It took five hours to travel the 45 miles to the Ashford Mills aid station, where I reconnected with Pam, the cyclist from the day before. At Jubilee Pass, the turnaround for the 100-mile distance, I spoke with Race Director Chris Kostman who advised me to downgrade my 150-mile goal and work on finishing just the Century. I didn’t take much convincing. Not only was I tired, but we were already so late that it was not likely the aid stations on the route could stay open much longer. And without aid stations there is no way; there are no Seven-Eleven stores along the road to Badwater.

So along with several others, I became a Century rider and headed back down into the Valley. Hitting the desert floor and heading north, we now enjoyed laughing at the headwind which had plagued us all morning and had now become a tailwind. For the first time all day I got into my big chain ring and sailed along at speeds up to 28 miles per hour. I actually found myself wondering how I was going to fill the rest of the afternoon after I got back to the Ranch.

But Death Valley was not finished with us yet.

Seven miles south of Badwater another vicious headwind slammed into us without warning or mercy. A Bermuda Triangle-like mist spread across the valley floor, possibly indicating where the north and south gales were charging head-on into one another, like opposing armies. My speed dropped to eight miles per hour again. This wind seemed stronger than it had in the morning, and I was about ten times as tired. And there were still 25 miles to go. There was no point in bemoaning the unfairness of it all; it is not about fairness. It is about handling what is thrown at you.

My arms were aching with the effort of supporting myself down on the drops; I had not expected to be cowering from the wind for so long. I would have killed for the clip-on aerobars that I had left at home, thinking they would be too clunky and dorky-looking for this ride. Fool.

At the Badwater aid station, with 18 miles still to pedal on my silly putty legs, I spoke with Pam and her friend Jill who were wisely about to call it a day. They were going to wait for Dave to come and get them in the car. Would I like a ride? I wasn’t quite ready to drop out but I asked if they would check on me later.

I started pedalling toward home, one stroke at a time. The mileposts passed so slowly that I kept thinking I had missed one. Twelve miles… eleven miles… ten miles. At nine miles Dave pulled up in his car offering a lift; this was my chance. For better or worse I decided to try to tough it out till the end, and watched my last opportunity for a ride disappear up the road. The wind had been roaring in my ears and tearing at my body for ten hours.

All I could do was to look at the four feet of pavement passing under my front wheel, and grind the pedals around: down, up and over, down, up and over. There were riders strung out ahead of me and behind me at hundred foot intervals doing the same thing: heads down, minds locked in negotiation with bodies, asking for just a little more of the impossible, the supernal. It wasn’t a lot of fun, but then I hadn’t come here to have fun; I had come to place a challenge before myself and to see how I responded. To see what was possible. For in the end, it isn’t the elements we battle, is it?

As we passed Golden Canyon about three miles out, I began to realize that I was going to finish this sucker. I made one last imprecation to my weary legs and summoned up the strength for a final push.

The last mile into Furnace Creek is downhill. With impeccable timing, the wind decided to die down right about this moment. I had indeed managed to get near my goal of 11 hours elapsed time, but for 100 miles, not 150. However I was not complaining; this was a JTF day – Just to Finish, and finish I did. Just. I coasted joyously past the finish line feeling - as I always do - like I could do it all over again.

Just not today.

To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target.
Ashleigh Brilliant

Back in the Saddle

2011-02-13T15:48:00.000-05:00

“The backside of heroism is often rather sad.”
Ursula K. McGuin, ‘Sur’

I’m back on the bike once more after an annoying chest ailment that made it difficult to exercise. I should be philosophical about illnesses. I get very few of them and there is not a lot of personal choice when something does come along; you just have to go with it. We get our bodies for free - at the start anyway, not counting any cosmetic or prosthetic enhancements along the way – so we can’t really complain too much when they don’t always behave exactly as we expect. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein and the Law of Identity, a cold is a cold is a cold.

All the same I’m frustrated that I haven’t done nearly the preparation I wanted to for my upcoming century-and-a-half in Death Valley next week. However I am not above lowering my expectations, to use a somewhat bipolar metaphor. My true aim is to enjoy the day, even if it takes all day.

I am trying a new type of saddle, the ISM Adamo Racing. Actually it is my wife’s saddle – she shares my Cervélo R3 with me – and because I was too lazy to swap saddles every time I wanted to work out on the trainer, I have gotten used to the ISM over the past three months. Bonded with it you might say. So although it isn’t new to me as a person, I have never used it in an actual long distance cycling event before. If I end up pedaling the last 50 miles standing up I will, as Edison put it, know one more thing that doesn’t work.

No matter how hardy or experienced a cyclist you are, you have to admit that there are many more comfortable positions for the human body than sitting astride a bicycle for hours. On end (as it were). If it were a pleasurable way to sit, then Barca Loungers would be shaped like bicycles. Some people profess not to notice any saddle discomfort after six hours in one, but these people are lying. Among online bicycling forums you will find as many discussion threads about finding a comfortable saddle as you will about any piece of equipment. Let’s face it: we are all of us – male and female – pretty vulnerable around that area of the anatomy.

What to do? Well there are a few motherhood issues such as proper bike fit and decent shorts. In addition to height, it helps to pay special attention to the way the saddle is tipped fore and aft. A little adjustment can make a big difference. I have found that my discomfort in the saddle is inversely related to the amount of time I spend out of that saddle. In other words if I am riding a very hilly course, I hardly notice my saddle at all. Therefore one of my remedies is to make sure I stand up every once in a while even if I am on a dead flat course. A little relief goes a long way because I recover quite quickly once the pressure is off; I used this technique in Ironman Florida several years ago and felt great the whole way.

So my Ideal Saddle Modification partner and I will try out the not-always-smooth road surfaces in Death Valley. Hopefully we will still be speaking to one another at the end of the ride.

A Winter Stale

2011-01-31T18:03:00.000-05:00

Hiver, vous n’êtes q’un vilain.

(Old French Folk Song)

Talk of your cold: through the parka’s fold

It stabbed like a driven nail.

The Cremation of Sam McGee

Robert W. Service

Goodbye and good riddance to a very cold, dark, dreary month. Hello to another one. The temperature today was minus 18 Celsius and a snowstorm is planned for tomorrow. The climate in my part of the world is unpredictable during the wintertime: we can have mountains of snow or no snow; deep freeze temperatures or clammy thaws. It is never comfortable. This year we are enjoying what some would call a ‘real winter’, with below normal temperatures and lots of snow. I wonder sometimes at the motivation of those who came here first, and stayed.

I have in the past ridden my bike to work during the winter months, but no more. The combination of utter darkness plus car windshields gummed up with salt and sludge makes me feel invisible on the roads. And it is slippery out there. What few bike lanes we have here are not plowed; in fact the snow from the street itself is plowed onto the bike lanes. I used to tempt both gravity and ice, but their collusion with the visually-impaired car drivers creates an axis of evil that defeats me. In short, I am frightened to ride my bicycle in the city in the winter. I’ll remount in March when Daylight Savings resumes and the roads clear, at which time I might have a chance of making it alive through the streets of this sadly bicycle-averse city.

The winter conditions present a challenge to anyone who is trying to train for a cycling event such as the Death Valley Spring Century. Where would I be without Coach Troy Jacobson and his Spinervals DVDs? Think what you like about Coach Troy’s approach, I am a fan. He gets me spinning on my trainer, gets my heart rate up, works my legs and pushes me to do more than I would just pedalling away in front of Jeopardy every night. Spinervals workouts are not a complete solution, but they contribute strongly to my survival as an athlete at this time of year.

For good measure I managed to contract a personal cold as well, which hit me mid-month. It lingers - as they do - with the nagging vestiges of a cough. I felt the best course was to lie low while I was sick and not to irritate my battered lungs with gulps of furnace-dried air. As a result, training has come to a standstill over the past ten days; with the Death Valley event less than a month away, I need to get back on the bike. I want to get back on the bike; I miss it like anything.

But it’ll be the trainer and rollers I’m afraid, until I get away to Furnace Creek.

Return to Death Valley

2010-12-30T15:49:00.000-05:00

“If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans”

Woody Allen

A plan is the stairway between your vision and your goal. Each step brings you closer.

For me the past year has been one of plans, mostly interrupted or unfulfilled. Even a planned trip to see a movie the other night was cut short when everything – right down to Yogi Bear – was sold out.

Our family’s most recent plan, to visit New York City this Christmas, was foiled by that most capricious of spellbinders, the weather. The entire Eastern Seaboard was shut down by a spectacular snowstorm. The only way to have gotten into Manhattan would have been to ski in.

But plans continue to well up in my restless and ever-optimistic mind. My indoor training for my planned 2011 events is going beautifully. I have added a little speedwork to my running and I am amazed at how easily my body is adapting. It makes me think of how lazy I must have been for the past twenty-five years.

So that I do not blow my feet out before March by overtraining for my planned spring marathon, I have found another project to keep me focused: I’ve entered the Death Valley Century, the California bike event that I did back in the fall of 2008. There is also a spring version on February 26th, so I signed up. They offer distances of 100, 150 and 200 miles and I opted for the middle one, since 100 miles will not challenge me and 200 miles will seem too much like work at this point in my season. Also the double century requires night time riding, and after my experiences in RAW last June, cycling through the desert night just wouldn’t seem the same without the Scissor Sisters blasting through my walkie-talkie.

The Death Valley Spring Century will give me a non-running event to train for over the winter months plus a chance to take my terrific Cervélo R3 out on the road before getting into the triathlon season. Although the event is not specifically a race and most of the course is new to me, I would like to finish the 150 miles in under 11 hours. Unlike my marathon goals, this one is currently attainable. Yes, riding my bike through the desert does seem to be my idea of an ideal holiday, but I agree that it might not be everyone's.

To me, planning means looking forward, and I am looking forward to getting back to Death Valley. It is an extraordinary part of the world.

Outrunning the Grizzly Bear

2010-11-14T14:16:00.000-05:00

Of course I’m ambitious. What’s wrong with that? Otherwise you sleep all day.
Ringo Starr

I’m just in from a killer run. (In 25 years I don’t think I have referred to any run workout by that adjective). Sixty-one minutes at top speed.

I am a laid back - you might almost say lazy - runner. My running has always been like the dancing bear; to me the wonder is not how well I do it but that I do it at all. In a straight marathon I like to push myself, but I have never achieved what I feel is my best. In Ironman I am content to jog and walk the marathon, knowing that there is very little chance I won’t finish sometime before midnight; my Ironman marathon times range from snail-like to glacial.

This fall, perhaps in reaction to the idleness my clavicle injury forced on me, I decided that I would try to leave my comfort zone and try to improve my marathon time. I don’t think I have too many years left to do this so there will never be a better time than now.

They say you should put your goals in writing, for it is only by creating an analog version of your dreams that they will ever materialize. I am not sure if this is always the best way, but I do know that that some of us build far greater castles in our minds than we do in reality.

I am shy about setting specific goals for running these days because so many things have gone wrong in the past few years. Plantar fasciitis, Morton’s neuroma; my feet are a compendium of podiatric pitfalls. But without a goal, I will end up going nowhere. In this case I need to see my goal written down with accompanying metrics.

So my running goal for the coming year is to complete a marathon next May in less than 3 hours and 45 minutes, a time that involves knocking about 20 minutes off my previous personal best. This would be quite reasonable, except for the fact that the previous personal best was set when I was younger…about ten years younger in fact. So in addition to running faster than I ever have before, I need to deal with an aging infra- and superstructure. It could be a mess.

One of the reasons I want to do this is that at the moment I can’t. I couldn’t run a 3:45 marathon if a grizzly bear were chasing me. The killer ‘top speed’ 61 minutes I just ran weren’t even close. So part of the fun will be to see if I can even get myself into the same time zone as my goal. The other part of the fun will be the sheer enjoyment of the training. It’s been so long since I have been able to run injury-free and to train with a purpose I that intend to treasure every minute.

Each of my three triathlon sports has its attractions. But there is a joy and simplicity to running that never leaves me. Like the golfer finding that sweet spot, a good run is indescribably satisfying. When all the components come together successfully, it is a marvelous way to fly across the earth.

Build Your Wings on the Way Down

2010-11-06T18:08:00.000-04:00

Over twenty years ago I chose to abandon my life as a freelance musician to take a comparatively secure job in the business world. We were just starting a new family and I wanted to be able to help provide. I worried that indulging myself in something as apparently capricious as a music career would be selfish, and I truly believed that I owed my children the best I could give them in terms of stability and protection. To me this meant being Ward Cleaver.

In my mind I still believe it was the right decision, but not a day goes by when I don’t wonder what would have happened if I had possessed the courage and confidence to trust my natural talent and remain a singer. To an extent, my participation in endurance sports is a reaction to the stability I chose for the rest of my life. Although my day job comes with its own challenges and rewards, my goals at work are clearly attainable and my progress toward them is mostly predictable.

To me, the essence of a true challenge lies in the mystery of an unknown outcome. When we get on the subway every morning to go to work, very few of us consider the possibility that we might not arrive at the other end. But when I entered my first 10k race in 1985, I had no idea whether I could run 10k or not; when I signed up for my first Ironman in 2001, I truly didn't know whether I was capable of finishing it. Taking those steps into the unknown, large or small, is part of what attracts me to endurance racing. If I ever begin an event completely secure in the knowledge that I can trip lightly across the finish line a few hours later, I will begin to question why I am there.

As I have learned from tough personal experience, there is no guarantee that anyone will finish a long distance race. In the best light, it is the uncertainty that drives me forward; it is a need to know if I can do it. And the fact is that sometimes, I can’t.

I am in good company. Two examples that parallel my recent experience: during the 2007 Ironman World Championships, defending champion Normann Stadler had to drop out during the bike due to an inability to keep fluids down. The same day, six-time women’s winner Natasha Badmann crashed her bike into a traffic pylon, breaking her collarbone and ending her race. Both of them know as I do now, that the outcome of an event like this is anything but certain. I would bet that neither of them would have it any other way.

My own fulfillment comes from challenging these uncertainties to achieve the pure joy of pushing my body and spirit, and in doing so to discover places I might not have known before. To have both the opportunity and the ability to do this is a gift I will not ever take for granted. I would not trade places with anyone’s stability or predictability.

And as I know from my past adventures, there will be an instant in time in the midst of it all when I look up from my handlebars at the world I am traversing, feel the tautness in my muscles as my legs piston me towards my goal, inhale the clean air sharp as a laser in my chest, and know that there is no place else I would rather be. For some of us, the awareness of this will offset every other reality in a single moment; for others it never would in a lifetime.

Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.
Ray Bradbury

Me, Undefined

2010-09-18T13:02:00.000-04:00

We are a people starved for self-definition.
Ken Burns, documentary filmmaker

People talk a lot about defining themselves, how they are defined, what defines them. They tell us when they are in the process of redefining their lives (or reinventing themselves, a curious notion if ever there was one, as if we were light bulbs or mousetraps). A friend once lamented to me that a lot of her friends seemed to be redefining their lives and she wanted to as well but was having trouble thinking of a new definition. She wondered if I could help with some suggestions.

Without going to my dictionary, I am guessing that the word ‘define’ derives from the Latin meaning the ‘end’ or ‘limit’, as in ‘finite’. So by defining themselves, people are actually listing what their limits are.

It seems an odd thing to do, to draw an invisible boundary around yourself, like a Marcel Marceau cell, so that you or others will know what your limits are. A woman I know told me once: “I can’t ever imagine doing what you do”. I wanted to reply archly: “That is why you never will do what I do. It begins with imagination”. An answer like that would of course have been trite, self-serving, smug and unfriendly so I said nothing. But I thought it. (I reserve the right to be internally trite and self-serving).

I have another friend who, whenever she hears of an activity or undertaking that is new to her has a habit of saying “Oh yes, I could do that.” In fact she could never do a fraction of those things, but I have always admired the way she doesn’t set a limit on herself automatically.

Why can’t we discover our boundaries by testing them rather than defining them?

In the past year I have had some colossal athletic failures. I travelled all the way to South Africa to run in the Comrades Marathon and had to drop out after 55 kilometres. This year I failed to bicycle the entire distance of the Race Across the West, running out of energy and spirit after at the 540 kilometre mark. Then last month I launched myself over my handlebars during a routine training ride and managed to snap my clavicle in two, unequivocally ending my 2010 Ironman hopes and my whole season.

If my athletic self-definition were constructed of what I have been able to accomplish recently, my boundaries would be moving inward on me at an alarming rate, like Marceau’s walls. And if I placed limits on my own potential, I would never have attempted those races in the first place; would never have gotten on my bike; might, in fact never have left the house. Yet even sitting here with my clavicle fractured and useless in a sling and with two egregious DNFs behind me, I am still imagining Everests yet to be climbed, oceans yet to be swum, roads yet to be cycled and trails yet to be run. Challenges as yet undefined.

I think that if I were forced to, I would choose to define myself by the things I can’t yet accomplish. Western States 100? Badwater Ultramarathon? Race Across America? Oh yes, I could do that.

The Head Bone’s (Still) Connected to the Collar Bone

2010-08-08T21:02:00.000-04:00

They’re funny things, Accidents. You never have them till you’re having them.
Eeyore

I was thinking earlier this week how much I was looking forward to Ironman Canada. My favourite event ever: great swim, spectacular bike ride, relatively easy run and lots of enthusiastic spectators. And I was ready for it. With my biking in the best shape it has ever been and my running and swimming finally coming back after a long sabbatical I was all set to enjoy the race from beginning to end. Besides, after DNFs in my last two major races I could use a success; I could use a break, I remember thinking.

Be careful what you wish for, goes the saying.

This past weekend with the race three weeks out, I decided I might benefit from one last century ride, and I decided to do it on the Muskoka 70.3 course near Huntsville. It is terrain I know very well having driven on the highways all my life ( we have a cottage close by) and having done the Muskoka Chase many times. I parked my car at Robinson’s General Store In Dorset, about half way around the 78 km loop part of the course, intending to do the loop twice.

I was having my best ride in months. Sparkling cool, calm morning air, smooth road and a responsive bicycle. There are times when there is nowhere else I would rather be. Coming down a hill at a decent speed on South Portage Road, something – a pothole, rock, gremlin - grabbed the aerobars out of my hands. In a split second my bike shot into the soft sand at the side of the road, bucked wildly like an unbroken stallion and threw me over the handlebars onto the pavement. I hit with my chest, head and finally my knees, which acted as brakes, dragging along the road behind me until I skidded to a stop. I didn’t lose consciousness but was pretty frazzled.

My left shoulder had taken the brunt of my unscheduled aterrissage; the same shoulder that I injured in another fall two years ago. Now it throbbed and burned, sending streamers of pain through the rest of my body. Like most cyclists, naturally my first thought was for my bike: to get it off the road, where it lay impotently waiting to be run over by the next pickup truck that happened over the brow of the hill. If you had been watching from the sidelines you would have seen me staggering around like a drunken sailor kicking water bottles into the ditch and frantically dragging the frame of my P2 out of harm’s way, all the time voicing imprecations of outrage and pain.

As luck would have it, I was cartographically about as far away from my parked car as could be, and I had to pedal nearly 35 km to get back to it. The ride back was not the most fun I’ve ever had but was ultimately bearable. At Robinson’s I bought some ibuprofen. Walking across the parking lot to my car with road-burned legs and a deformed shoulder, clutching my box of Advil I must have looked pretty awful. Several people asked me if I was all right, and one very kind lady reached into her car and gave me a bottle of naturopathic pills to take with me. I was able to drive to Huntsville Memorial Hospital using all of my one good arm and the thumb from my bad one.

While I was waiting in Emergency the pain was present and insistent, but somehow not as bad as it had been two years ago with my separated shoulder. I fully expected that the doctor would smilingly tell me to take anti-inflammatories, ice the injury and it would all be OK in a few weeks. I began to feel badly for taking the time of the emergency room staff with my minor trauma. It came as a shock therefore when they informed me that my left clavicle was broken, (although after looking at the X-ray I agree with the diagnosis; the two halves of my collarbone look like they are in different time zones). If I had been entertaining any hopeful thoughts of still being able race in Ironman, this was the end.

They gave me the CD with my X-ray on it, and I had to tell them what I was going to do with it, who I was going to show it to. What did they think I was going to do? Post it on my Blog?

So, for me the season is over: an enforced rest from swimming, biking, running and anything else athletic. Ironman is off the calendar for this year. I expect we will travel to Penticton anyway as the plane tickets and accommodations are all arranged. I can make it a vacation, cheer for the triathletes and take some time to consider the future.

As a postscript there is one point I want to make. I have always worn a helmet when I ride a bike – I wouldn’t feel dressed without it - and the tumble this weekend pointed up the value. There is a dent in the left side of my helmet where my head hit the pavement; this dent would have been in my skull if not for the helmet’s protection. As it is, my head doesn’t even have a mark on it – at least not one that wasn’t there before.

Anyone who rides a bicycle without a helmet does not deserve to own a head.

Ease on Down the Road

2010-07-17T15:23:00.000-04:00

Exercise: a series of strenuous activities which help convert fats, sugars, and starches into aches, pains, and cramps.
Anonymous

Just in from a terrific run: an hour and a half, bathed in the liquid summer heat. This is the longest I have run in over a year and I am stiff. But it was a relief for once not to have something snap crackle or pop in some part of my musculo-skeletal structure. Stiffness: yes, pain: no. After the beating-up my body and mind took last month in Arizona we are starting to wake up to the fact that we are not dead yet. The road stretches before us.

I am easing my way into Ironman this summer, trying to combine some sort of focused training plan with a reasonable demand on my body. Ridiculous, of course. Ironman requires a lot of time in the water and on the road, and there is no way to train properly for it without doing that time. You can’t “ease into it”. Do, or do not, as the annoying little Muppet said

Yet after 25 years of marathons, triathlons and dreams possible and impossible, I have learned there is a benefit to some sensibility when it comes to what we ask of our bodies. In the best of worlds, our older physical selves should be the beneficiaries of the accumulated experience and lore our minds acquired while we were getting older. Therefore my training this summer will not involve me trying to emulate some twenty-year-old steroidal Olympian in a Gatorade commercial. I will strive for modest gain with minimal pain. Lots of miles, yes. Lots of easy miles.

We athletes are a contradiction sometimes. Of all people we should be the most in touch with our bodies and the constant stream of physical feedback they provide, yet we seem to be capable of selectively tuning out what they are trying to tell us if it doesn’t elide with our plans.

Many years ago while out running I noticed a tight soreness just in front of my right heel. Since the pain it seemed to go away after I was warmed up, I ignored it and continued running for several months. (By now, any experienced runner will recognize the unmistakable signs of plantar fasciitis). One day I came back from a 20k run and my foot gave up on me. For several months I could barely walk, let alone run. It was what we call a season-ending injury and I was finally forced into treating it properly. With that proper treatment, it went away and never came back.

The point here is that we can push our bodies to accomplish amazing things, but they are not to be considered slaves to the demands of our dreams. Our hearts and minds need to treat the body as an equal partner, not as a mindless Morlock, toiling away unseen in the dark for our higher pleasure and fulfillment.

So I am going gently into my training this summer, and if I hurt, I am going to slow down.

Just Deserts

2010-06-13T00:19:00.000-04:00

Race Across the West – 2010

“I’m pretty tired…I think I’ll go home now.”
F. Gump; Monument Valley, Utah

As I began pedalling my bike away from the start line of the 2010 Race Across the West, I was aware that I had joined a group of offbeat but determined athletes who were attempting something extraordinary. From every path of life and every level of ability, the RAW field had one thing in common: a desire to ride a bicycle from California to Colorado, across deserts and up mountains, through some of the most unwelcoming conditions on the continent.

The taxing 4000 foot climb from the Pacific Ocean up to Palomar Mountain was followed by a thrilling descent to the floor of the California desert. It took me hours to get to the top, and about 15 minutes to get to the bottom.

I was delighted to discover a strong tailwind blowing eastward across the desert; I grabbed hold of it and sped effortlessly along the highway at an average speed of about 25 miles an hour all evening. In the support van behind me, Laura and Duncan periodically blasted hip hop tunes through my walkie-talkie to keep my pedaling cadence upbeat. After riding for a total of 13 hours, we stopped and slept in the middle of the desert dunes under a black sky that was washed with stars. Although it was a restorative and pleasant break, it proved to be a rookie mistake; it would have been more prudent to have kept riding through the night. We left well before dawn, but the desert sun was waiting for me.

I cycled all day in hot windy conditions, the road curving gently but insidiously upward all the way. I had thought that I was taking enough salt, water, Gatorade and food but it became more and more difficult to process fluids and nutrition. I rode slower and slower as every pedal stroke became an effort. At the top of a long, long climb into Salome Arizona, I slid from my bike and collapsed onto the ground, every muscle in my body in spasm. On my knees at the side of the road, I threw up all the unprocessed water that had accumulated in my stomach over the past hours. I felt beaten up and utterly defeated.

In the Hollywood version of the story I would have climbed heroically back onto my bike and finished the race. My version was not written in Hollywood unfortunately. We took a motel room, paramedics were called and after an unpleasant and unsuccessful attempt to take in some more water (it came right back up), I was given IV fluids to rehydrate me. In many races this treatment is enough to disqualify you, but in RAW it does not, so there was still the option of continuing. Some hours of sleep later however, I still felt awful and the crew and I discussed my situation. After bicycling over 330 miles in 30 hours, with considerable mileage left to go, I made the very tough decision to withdraw from the race. It is a decision I know will be second-guessing for months, but at the time it was the only one I could see myself making.

Needless to say I am disappointed not to have made it to the end, but I choose to think of a project like the Race Across the West as a journey rather than a destination. My training these past seven months has taken me to new levels of fitness and endurance, and the race itself has given me an appreciation for the challenges and adventures that are available beyond the scope of everyday vision. The learning experience has been unparalleled for all of us; we are now a seasoned racer and crew, and are ready for the next challenge, whatever that might be. In short, I got far more out of it than I put into it.

I congratulate and thank my stellar crew, without whom I would not have made it 38 miles let alone 338. Karen: rainmaker, provisioner, helpmate and unfailing supporter. Laura: intrepid follow-vehicle driver, documenter and photographer extraordinaire. Duncan: Crew Chief, indispensable bike mechanic, who can change a tire in 30 seconds flat. Terry: flawless factotum, provider of exactly the right encouraging words, always there when needed. These four made the race for me, and I can’t imagine a finer team.

One of the biggest successes of my participation in the Race Across the West was the support I received for my chosen charity. Through the thoughtfulness of family, friends, co-workers and many Canadians I have never met, we achieved our financial goal of raising $5000 for Myeloma Canada. It’s impossible for me to express enough gratitude for this support.

The Team Lyricycle story is still a work in progress, and I look forward to musing on the topic of endurance athletics here in days and months to come. I now begin adding some swimming and running to my biking in preparation for Ironman Canada later this summer. After that we’ll just have to see where the journey takes us.

End of the Beginning - Race Across the West 2010

2010-06-03T23:29:00.000-04:00

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Winston Churchill, 1942

By popular demand, here is an update; the first since New Year’s Day. We are at the end of the training phase of the Team Lyricycle / Race Across the West project. Laura is currently driving somewhere between Toronto and the Grand Canyon with all our bikes and equipment (don’t forget about that left turn at Albuquerque…) en route to the starting line at Oceanside California. The rest of us are flying this weekend. I will write more before the race begins next week, but here are some thoughts about what’s happened so far.

Just over five months ago I wrote here of my plan to train for, and to participate in the Race Across the West, 1400 kilometres across the deserts and up the mountains of the southwestern US. I am all about learning experiences and this one is turning out to be a postgraduate degree. More biking, more sweating than I have ever done in my life. And that’s just the training.

My log indicates that over the course of 280 hours of training, I have pedaled my bike more than 6000 kilometres. Truthfully, I didn’t travel quite that far since many of the kilometres were logged on my trainer in the basement during the winter, (when in fact I travelled nowhere). But each kilometre – real or virtual - on my computer represents a number of pedal strokes, and another training milestone reached. Over the past months I have pedaled hour after hour through long nights, headed out on cold windy mornings when the last thing I wanted to do was ride a bicycle and I have watched the sun set over my handlebars after riding since sunrise. Is it enough? I believe I haven’t even scratched the surface yet. How can anyone know?

I am lucky to have survived the training phase without developing any new injuries, although I have caused some of my old ones to look up sharply and take note, like wolves aroused from sleep. One of the challenges of the race will be to keep these crafty old wolves at bay.

One thing I hadn’t planned for was the wonderful response of family, friends and the myeloma community to my fundraising efforts. We are up around $4000 now and I hope the figure keeps climbing. The stories and notes I receive from Canadians who are battling this disease make it all very real to me. As I have said before, their best advantage is our awareness and support.

The world at large will be happy to see me safely away on my bike and happier still not to have to listen to my endless chatter about the Race Across the West. I am shameless in my self-promotion. At an upscale reception the other night I couldn’t resist telling person after person that I was about to try riding 1400 kilometres on a bike. Their reactions resembled what I imagine they would be if I had told them I was going to try to eat fifty hard boiled eggs. I have gotten used to that kind of reaction.

The training is over; now it is time to ride.

Race Across the West 2010 – Team Lyricycle

2010-01-01T18:10:00.000-05:00

Welcome to our website!

In June 2010 I will be participating in the Race Across the West, a 1400 kilometre (860 mile) non-stop bicycle race from Oceanside, California to Durango, Colorado. The race route crosses the brutally inhospitable deserts of California and Arizona before climbing to the finish line high in the Rocky Mountains. This is an event to test the resources of the even most highly-trained and motivated of athletes.

My participation in Race Across the West will be dedicated to raising money and awareness for the Canadian myeloma community. Multiple Myeloma is a rare, life-threatening cancer of the plasma cells that currently affects about 6,000 Canadians. Over the past few years I have lost two close friends to this terrible disease. All proceeds from my 1400 kilometre ride will go to Myeloma Canada, a dynamic charitable organization uniquely devoted to supporting and strengthening the Canadian myeloma community.

To the right of this page is a link to a secure donation site, where you can help support the people who are fighting this disease. Please take a moment to visit my Gift Page by clicking on ‘DONATE NOW’.
If you would rather make your donation through regular mail, you can send a cheque payable to:

Myeloma Canada
P.O. Box 326
Kirkland, QC
H9H 0A4

Please indicate that you are supporting Team Lyricycle in the Race Across the West.

Myeloma is without a cure so far. But this doesn’t mean that it can’t be fought, and I believe that that the people who are fighting it deserve to be given every advantage possible. Their best advantage begins with our awareness and support.

Something More

2009-11-27T11:11:00.001-05:00

In June 2010 I will be participating in the Race Across the West, a 1400 kilometre non-stop bicycle race from Oceanside California to Durango Colorado. This adventure represents a giant step upward in terms of my expectations of myself. I am not an elite athlete; in fact there is nothing particularly special about me at all, except that I have made the decision to complete this race. And I like to take giant steps upward.

A short time ago I wrote that while racing in scores of long distance athletic events over the years, I had always wondered if I was ultimately working towards achieving something more than a finisher’s medal or a T-shirt at the end of the race. I have also written of winning the “lottery” of life, since I have been blessed since birth with appallingly good health.

My participation in Race Across the West will be dedicated to raising money and awareness for the Canadian myeloma community.

Multiple Myeloma is a life-threatening cancer of the plasma cells. Although it is relatively rare - affecting about 6,000 Canadians – it is the second most prevalent blood cancer, after non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Myeloma is without a cure so far. But this doesn’t mean that it can’t be treated, and I believe that that the people who are fighting it deserve to be given every advantage possible. Their best advantage begins with our awareness.

We have Myeloma Canada to thank for spreading the knowledge. This dynamic grass roots organization is much of the reason that so much attention has been paid recently, and why so much progress will certainly be made down the road. Others are joining in. This past summer cyclist Shane Saunderson rode from Calgary to Toronto to raise cash and awareness for the myeloma community, and he succeeded spectacularly in raising both.

Myeloma knows no class, social boundaries or lifestyles. The two cherished friends whom I have lost to this disease were strong, healthy, vital people. The remarkable Canadian actress and model Lisa Ray was diagnosed last summer and she is lending her voice. Visit her blog for an eloquent insight:
http://lisaraniray.wordpress.com/

Please join me in spreading the word about the quest to tame multiple myeloma and ultimately to defeat it. By the time I finish the Race Across the West next June I want many more people to know about this disease and to support the fight against it.

I will be building a website shortly that will contain more information, and I will continue to post entries to this blog, so stay tuned!

“With time and patience, the mulberry leaf becomes satin”.

Daring Greatly

2009-11-14T21:17:00.000-05:00

Over the past decades I have undertaken a variety of athletic exploits, many of which have raised eyebrows among family and friends who remember me as anything but an athlete. Despite my limitations or reputation I have managed to finish what I started in nearly every event (the painful exception being the Comrades Marathon last spring). Now, after completing half a dozen Ironmans and countless marathons, triathlons, cycling tours and other endurance events, I believe I am ready to try something more.

Cycling in the RAW
I am about to embark on a new adventure, which may end up being the eyebrow-raisingest of them all. I have signed up for a bicycling event known as the Race Across the West (hereinafter referred to as RAW), which takes place next June, 2010.

RAW is a subset of the famous Race Across America (RAAM) and is a non-stop bicycle race from Oceanside California to Durango Colorado, a distance of about 1400 kilometres. To put the effort into perspective, in September I raced in a 220 kilometre event in the Adirondacks and was pretty darned tired by the time I crossed the finish line. RAW is more than six times as long. Add being sandblasted and sunbroiled across the California desert and then climbing up the western slope of the Rocky Mountains and the whole thing seems more than just a pleasure tour. In fact, the Race Across the West is so grueling that since it began there have been only a couple of solo finishers. Mercifully, the race organizers have shortened the distance a little this year and allowed a more generous time limit.

Bringing Extra Sunscreen
I’m not sure when the exact moment was: when it was that I decided for sure I was going to ride my bicycle nonstop across all those vast kilometres of the American Southwest, but it might have been when I came across the following entry in the comprehensive rulebook issued by the race:

Rule 850(8)
Crew or Racers may not strip and dance naked for any reason outside of the support vehicle without appropriate coverings or curtains.

This was a rule that was obviously just crying out to be broken.

Team Lyricycle
In addition to the obvious physical commitment, the project promises to be vast in terms of scope and organization. In fact for me, merely getting myself and my crew to the starting line is the most daunting aspect of the whole thing. The coordination of vehicles, supplies people and so forth would be overwhelming if I had to deal with it all by myself. Luckily Team Lyricycle begins with my willing and able Crew Chief: my son Duncan, who also happens to be a bike mechanic. This is a great start.

Like so many of my other adventures, there is no guarantee of success and a strong possibility of, well...less than success. But that of course is one of the reasons I do it. As Edmund Hillary remarked, if you start out on a challenge with absolute knowledge that you are going to succeed, why bother starting?

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man… who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly.”
Theodore Roosevelt.

The Summer of my Discontent Made Glorious Autumn by a Sock?

2009-10-03T14:31:00.000-04:00

Best Laid Plantars of Mice and Men
What I had planned as a season of interesting and unusual running events turned into a frustrating summer of soreness and annoyance. After my painful and disappointing DNF in the Comrades Marathon in May, I was just getting back to full strength running at the end of June when I was stopped dead by a serious case of plantar fasciitis. As very little within our lives is not connected to something else, I theorize that the one incident led to the other, directly or otherwise.

I last suffered through this nasty injury about twelve years ago. Back then I had tried to run through it, and ended up lame for months. There are palliative treatments to this insidious inflammation, but no matter what anyone tells you there is no universal cure for it except patience, time, and abstinence from running. Years ago one perceptive but honest doctor told me: “No one knows how to fix this. Whoever treats you just before it gets better will take credit for curing it.” As someone once said, the task of the physician is to keep the patient amused while nature heals the ailment.

Aside from one small 25k trail race at the beginning of July, I have not run in any events at all this summer. I have tried to fill in the gap with more cycling than usual, but as any runner would know, this is like trying to fill in the Grand Canyon with a teaspoon.

At the moment though, I am starting to feel some hope. This morning I didn’t notice the usual twinge in my left heel – or rather I noticed its absence – for the first time since Canada Day. And it might well be The Sock that is to be credited.

The Sock?
I ran for the last time for about 45 minutes, at the beginning of July. That day I was chatting with a running mate at the gym and I confided that I was off for a trial run to test out whether my plantar fasciitis was really as serious as it seemed (of course it was, and as a result of my trial run, I was in pain for the rest of the week). Six weeks later I ran into the same friend and admitted that the injury had kept me from running a step since our last meeting.
“You need The Sock!” he said.
“The Sock?”
“The Strassburg Sock.”
He explained that this strange device was the only thing that had cured his inflamed fascia many years before.

The Strassburg Sock looks like a cross between a surgical sling and a scale model of a ski jump. As its name implies, it is a long sock that comes up to your knees, with a small metal D-ring at the knee end and a long Velcro strip attached to the toe. You pull the Velcro strip gently up and through the D-ring and fasten it, and the whole affair keeps your toe from pointing downwards. This in turn should serve to keep your arch and accompanying fascia in a slightly stretched attitude. “Slightly” is the operative word; you don’t want to try to get your big toe to touch your kneecap, you just want a gentle pull. One is supposed to wear this to bed overnight - our feet like to point down when we sleep, apparently - but I had visions of having to run outdoors in case of fire and then explain its presence to my neighbours (my neighbours are not runners; if they were, they would understand wearing a sock with a Velcro strap to bed). So I use it mostly when sitting in front of the TV. I use it as an excuse to sit in front of the TV.

Aside from the obvious benefits of prolonged stretching, I have little idea why this invention is supposed to work. I know there are no magic bullets in physiotherapy, and I would not tout this one as a panacea, nor am I in a position to recommend it to anyone else. However at the moment, based on my own results I am loathe to look a Gift Sock in the mouth. Or in the toe.

The fact is that I don’t really know whether the sock had anything to do with my recovery or whether the recovery was just an event whose time had come, and the sock just happened to be along for the finish, like the last doctor who treated me 12 years ago and took credit. At least though, it did no harm, thus fulfilling the first requirement of the Hippocratic Oath. And it gave me the feeling that I was actively participating in my recovery, even if the tissue in my heel had its own agenda.

I have tried three short, pathetically slow runs of no more than 20 minutes each in the past week, with encouraging results. Having been laid very low by this vicious injury before, I will get back to running slowly, but at least there is a small glimmer of daybreak on the horizon.

Ultra Cycling in the High Peaks

2009-09-27T10:51:00.000-04:00

The Adirondack 540

Since 2003 when I did my second-ever Ironman, I have always loved racing in Lake Placid. At its best, the weather is clear and crisp and the high peaks stand out so sharply against the sky that you’d swear you can pick out every branch of every tree from miles away. Cycling up and down the Adirondack Mountains is as thrilling as it is challenging, with thigh burning climbs and screaming, white-knuckle descents.

Looking for an endurance event that would test me without requiring my injured feet to run, I found the Adirondack 540 , an ultra bicycle race held over the third weekend in September. The race, as its name suggests, is just over 540 miles – or 880 kilometres - long, consisting of four laps of 220 kilometres each. Luckily for those of us without the legs to pedal for two straight days and nights to cover 880k, there are options to do one, two or three of the laps as well. I modestly and realistically opted to do the one-lap race, nicknamed the Bronze Blast.

The course describes a sort of figure eight, part of which follows the Ironman bike route. It begins in Wilmington, passes through Lake Placid and continues through Keene. At this point cyclists head south to the halfway point at Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain, then back through Westport, Elizabethtown and Keene to Wilmington. Before the start, Race Director John Ceceri warned us that even though the fiercest climbs were early in the race, we were not to underestimate the challenges of the second half. His words would burn through my head many hours later.

Race morning was clear and frosty with a significant wind from the north. I joined a small number of dedicated riders, bundled in layers, as we straddled our bikes in the parking lot for the 7:00 am start. As the only obvious tri-geek in the group, I received the expected jibe about my carbon fibre Cervélo P2C, and vowed not to show up at one of these roadie events again without a proper road machine.

We separated from one another almost immediately after the start; not much danger of drafting with only a couple of dozen of us in the race and 220k of state highway along which to spread out. The first 30k or so were very well known to me, having ridden the Ironman course many times. After the familiar breathtaking descent into Keene, I turned right down Route 9 into unknown territory. Most of the highway was bereft of traffic and the tall pine trees towered overtop like a cathedral ceiling. There were some rough spots in the road, but for the most part it was a smooth and enjoyable ride. At about kilometre 115 I stopped at the Super 8 motel in Ticonderoga, the halfway checkpoint. A highlight of this checkpoint, aside from the extremely friendly and helpful volunteers, was the presence of Fred Boethling, Director of the Race Across America. I got the chance to chat with Fred during my short break, picking up some intelligence on the chance that I would ever decide to do RAAM. I do try never to say never.

Coming from Elizabethtown to Keene, at around 180 kilometres, in what I thought was nearly the home stretch I encountered a section of road that the cue sheet had called innocently, “4 mile climb”. It was not so much a climb as it was a 45-minute torture session. The grade is not steep, but it is long and relentless enough to make you feel like you’re going backwards. By this point I was also bonking due to sloppy nutrition practices earlier. So my mood was anything but cheery. The words of the Race Director boomed through my ears with every pedal stroke: don’t underestimate this part of the course. I had, and I was paying. However, this too passed and eventually I zoomed down into Keene, through Upper Jay, along the Ausable River and up route 86 to the finish. This part would have been more enjoyable if I had not left everything I had on the gentle “4 mile climb”.

As I wheeled into the parking lot of the motel at the finish, I had the familiar feeling from my early Ironman days of being the last living soul left in the race (actually it turned out I was fifth out of eleven finishers in my category). My time was around nine hours and fifty minutes for the 220 kilometres. This is a glacial pace for me nowadays, but I had entered the race at the last minute with next to no training under my belt, and I was ecstatic just to finish. The good news was that my legs felt strong and I could have gone for a run if I had wanted. Let’s see the roadies try that.

That evening, comfortably rested, showered and fed back at my motel in Lake Placid, I strolled a ways down Route 73 and noticed a well-lit-up cyclist ride past me in the gathering darkness, perhaps a 540-miler starting his last lap with another eight or nine hours of riding ahead of him. They are made of different stuff, these ultra distance people and I was intrigued to be in their company on a couple of occasions this season. There is a step – a leap – I need to make before I can truly consider myself one of them. Defining that step will be my next challenge.

A View from the Sidelines

2009-09-07T15:44:00.001-04:00

Ironman Canada - August 30, 2009

Volunteers are not paid -- not because they are worthless, but because they are priceless.

A year ago when I decided not to enter an Ironman for 2009, I had in mind that I would like to try a bunch of different, more esoteric endurance events. As it happened this plan was not as successful as I would have liked, for reasons I will discuss in another post. I did however have the exquisite enjoyment of travelling to Penticton this past month to watch my daughter Laura race in Ironman Canada, and to volunteer along with my wife Karen at the finish line. Both of these activities are highly recommended.

Although I was not participating this year, I took my wetsuit and bicycle along, and during pre-race week I managed a few swims and rides, including a thigh-burning tour of the bike course against a healthy headwind. Riding up and down the taxing terrain was a humbling experience, and a reminder of what the triathletes were bound for on race day. It was also good fun to be able to stop every once in a while and admire the stunning views along the way, and to chat with other folks as one can’t when actually racing.

On race morning, the weather – as it usually is in the Okanagan in August – was sunny and warm, tinged with some smoke from distant forest fires. For some reason this year, Maranatha the old faithful cannon that has started the race in the past was replaced by an air horn. I hope they bring her back if possible. At any rate, at precisely 7 o’clock the race began and over 2600 hopeful athletes splashed into Lake Okanagan, with many, many hours of serious swimming, biking and running in front of them.

Aside from the experience of actually being part of an Ironman swim start, there is nothing that quite equals watching it from shore. The sight of over 5200 arms all paddlewheeling through the water resembles nothing less than a mass piranha feeding frenzy. It's worth remembering that each tiny splash represents someone’s months of training, their strong commitment to their goals and their hopes and dreams for the day.

As an athlete who spends most of my time near the back of the pack, I rarely get to see any of the pros, who hopefully are closer to the front. This year we were able to spend the day watching them all as they charged out of the water, headed out of town on their bikes, biked back into town many hours later and then took off on their run. These are people who spend every day of their lives perfecting every aspect of their craft, and it is inspiring to see them in action.

Karen and I saw Laura as she came back into town from the bike and headed out again on the run, looking (and no doubt feeling) as if she had been pushing the envelope of endurance for the previous eight hours. As in fact she had. I had no doubt that she would finish; her personal perseverance begins where other people’s leaves off.

Our volunteer job at the finish was to hand bags containing Finisher T shirts and hats to the athletes after they crossed the line. We were supposed to determine what size they were before giving out the shirts. Obviously this What-Not–to-Wear issue is not uppermost in the mind of a worn down athlete who has just endured a dozen hours of brain-fogging physical exertion.

“Small, Medium or Large?”
“Huzza?”
“SMALL, MEDIUM or LARGE”.
“Huh… Smee”.

I hope they all got something that fit them.

We started our T shirt shift at 4:00pm, just as the pro women were coming in. My daughter, who hates it when I fawn over superstar triathletes, would have been mortified when I congratulated Belinda Granger on her second place finish (and got a friendly arm squeeze in return). I also got to speak briefly to Ironman legend Joe Bonness as he once again won his age group.

Of the hundreds of finishers we watched during our four hour shift, the most exhausted appeared to be those who came in between 5:00 and 7:00 pm, whose elapsed times were from ten to twelve hours. They had so obviously left it all out on the course, and had nothing even to carry them through the finishing area. Many of them would have been trying for Hawaii spots, so this was a serious business to them; more than a few were limply dragged off by the Catchers and plopped into wheelchairs for a possible trip to the Medical tent. As the timer moved onward past twelve hours and darkness began to fall, the mood of the finishers was more celebratory; here were people who had faced the rigours of the day and were justifiably thrilled with the result. I envied every one of them.

We were not expecting Laura till later in the evening, so when our volunteer shift ended we wandered a bit up the race route where, sentry-like, I took up a position atop a concrete tree planter and watched the runners through my binoculars. Sure enough sometime after nine I caught sight of her familiar stride approaching down Main Street. Our volunteer wrist bands allowed us to enter the finish area and greet her as she crossed the line. This, her third Ironman finish, was now in the books.

One of the most valuable perqs of volunteering at Ironman Canada is that I was able to go to the front of the line to sign up for the race in 2010. Next year, inshallah, I will be back in the pack, experiencing the bubbling witches’ cauldron of the swim, the wind-burning speed of the bike, the pain of the run and the thrill of the finish. I will take a moment to thank the finish line volunteers and will try to communicate an intelligible T shirt size.

Move Swiftly on those Mountains

2009-05-29T00:01:00.000-04:00

Comrades Marathon May 24 2009,

The Pietermaritzburg-to-Durban direction of the Comrades Marathon is referred to as the “Down Run” because the net decline in altitude is about 655 metres. But this net change is comprised of about 3,100 metres of quadriceps-jarring descents offset by 2,450 metres of climbs that reduce many runners to a walk. In fact the dramatic topography of the race’s path makes you wonder why anyone would ever consider having a footrace there in the first place. Although the Comrades is run on roads, it has the feel sometimes of a trail race. The length and grade of the climbs and descents can cause even veteran runners to quake in their Reeboks.

For this year’s Comrades I had much going for me. I felt I was in my best running shape ever, and had trained diligently all winter and spring with no injuries to speak of. I was well-rested and well-nourished. I had been looking forward to the race with an eagerness similar to that of my first Ironman. A guided bus tour of the route, sobering though it was, did little to dampen my enthusiasm.

The Down Run of the 89 kilometre Comrades Marathon begins in the cool darkness, at 5:30am in front of the Pietermaritzburg Town Hall; it is one of the most exciting and moving race starts I’ve ever experienced. The music is wonderful, culminating in a singing of the traditional South African folk song, Shosholoza:

Shosholoza
Ku lezontaba
Stimela siphum' eSouth Africa
The words mean “move swiftly on those mountains”, an inspiration and a portent.

After the starting gun went off, the crowd of 12,000 runners was so dense that it took me more than six minutes to get across the starting line; this lag is significant and worth remembering, because many runners will need that six minutes at the end of the race to make the mandatory 12 hour cutoff. If you don’t finish in less than 12 hours, you haven’t finished at all as far as the Comrades Marathon is concerned. No medal. No results. No nothing.

The first part of the race was magnificent. It was a terrific feeling to be running effortlessly through 5, 10, 20 kilometres as a rosy pink dawn took shape to our left. Unlike most other races, the Comrades posts signs showing your progress in reference to how far you have yet to go rather than how far you have come (89k, 88k, 87k...). Each sign has an accompanying thermometer, which decreases in fullness like a fund raising graphic in reverse. The first big downhill – the saucily-named Polly Shortts – previewed the challenges to come, but at this early point it was just plain fun.

I was running exactly on my planned pace to finish somewhere between 11 and 12 hours. There is not a lot in the way of nutrition offered at the early aid stations, but I had brought a supply of gels with me and kept my carb intake at a good level. I found that I could walk briskly up the steepest hills at a strong pace. All was well.

At around 40k into the race I noticed that I was feeling some pain in my right forefoot; this is an old injury caused by a pinched nerve (neuroma) between the metatarsals, and one I had thought was dormant. I have only had problems with it once before, at the Ironman Florida 70.3 a year ago, and in that race the pain was so bad I had to stop at every aid station to massage my foot back into life. Likewise here, I had to stop frequently and my pace slowed down so dramatically that I only made the Halfway Point 6 hour cutoff by 5 minutes.

The pain grew more and more severe as I hobbled up and down hill after hill, and I saw my carefully planned time goals slip further and further away. I tried everything I could think of to alleviate the pain, which was by now spreading to my toes and across my instep: ice, extra padding, loosening my laces, tightening them…nothing worked for long. Eventually I could put no weight on my right foot at all. Finally after 7 hours and 45 minutes of running, with 55 kilometres behind me and 34 left to go, I made the sad decision to drop out of the race. I climbed aboard the ‘Runners Rescue Bus’, an un-air conditioned mini-van filled with sweating, suicidal dropouts like me; a cheery ride, you bet. We lurched and crawled along the race route to the finish and were deposited into the ‘Bailers Tent’, a depressing little fenced compound behind the stadium, well away from the official finish area.

Despite the disappointing and inconclusive result, my Comrades Marathon was a rich, vivid experience. It surpasses all other road races I have done in terms of excitement, challenge, tradition, colour and emotion. The Comrades must be run to be believed; no inspirational literature, advertisements or YouTube clips can do justice to the sheer magnitude and stark beauty of this race.

Naturally, having recorded my very first DNF in nearly 25 years of running I am tempted to climb right back onto the horse and return to South Africa for next year’s race, to complete what I started. But realistically, I will have to put any new thoughts of ultra running on hold until I can figure out a solution for my pinched nerve problem. If the true purpose of running is, as Bill Bowerman says, to test the limits of the human heart, I must - for the present at least - concentrate on testing the limits of the human foot.

To Test the Limits

2009-02-16T14:31:00.000-05:00

When is a marathon not a marathon? Most runners (and very few non-runners) know that the marathon distance is 42.195 kilometres, or 26 miles, 385 yards. No farther, no shorter (unless you count Frank Shorter, who won the marathon gold medal at the 1972 Olympics). The distance was standardized by the IAAF in 1921 (not at the 1908 London Olympics, as held by popular belief). But the standard remains: if it isn’t 42k, it isn’t a marathon. Don’t listen to your neighbour who boasted to you that he did a 5k “marathon” last Sunday. He was short by about 37k. Tell him to go out and finish it.

Which brings us to the Comrades Marathon, a challenging jog through the hilly South African countryside between Pietermaritzburg and Durban. At a distance of 89 kilometres, give or take, it is technically an ultramarathon. The race was founded in 1921 to commemorate South African soldiers killed in the Great War, and as such is probably the oldest ultramarathon in the world. Over 12,000 runners participate every year, making it a very popular event, as well as a very historical one, so if they want to call it a marathon that’s fine by me. Especially since it’s been going on since before anyone really knew how far a marathon was.

Each year the race reverses direction. From Durban to Pietermaritzburg the topography is generally uphill, so it is called the ‘Up” run. The other direction is (by deduction) the “Down” run. Both directions have their challenges, as one can imagine. This year is a Down year, finishing at the Kingsmead Soccer Stadium in Durban.

So I’ve entered the Comrades Marathon for this Down year, May 24, 2009. Even with my past record of endurance sports, a few eyebrows (including my own) have been raised at my plans. I guess that an explanation as to why I would try to run such a distance might prompt me to offer Louis Armstrong’s reply to the jazz question (“if you have to ask, you’ll never know”). And I’m not sure I have a better answer at the moment. For me, discovering the reason I have set this goal is part of the goal itself.

Aside from the airy metaphysical aspects of my running that I have described in various essays below, the fact is that I like to try to challenge myself to go beyond where I should logically be able to go. To me, travelling to Africa and participating in the Comrades Marathon - whether I finish the 89 kilometres smiling or barfing, sprint to the finish or wilt in the first 10k - constitutes an inquiry into how much farther I can go.

A finisher of the notoriously punishing Badwater Ultramarathon once reflected on the inevitable question this way: “We are here,” she said, “to see what is possible”.

Heaven help me if I ever cease to explore what is possible.

Ultra distance-wise, I have a couple of things going:

· Slow running suits me. I am not fast and never will be. I have a feeling if I tried to get fast I would injure myself and come to grief.

· Long distances suit me. I am not prone to blisters, black toenails, shin splints, seized muscles or spasmodic tendons that stretch tight as piano wire and then pop, scattering animals and small children in all directions. In my case, after a certain number of hours, I hurt; later on, I hurt more. That’s about the extent of it.

· I am old (57 on race day). Older runners tend to do better at long distances for reasons that no one really understands. It might be that we are not in such a hurry to get to the finish line. Which is just as well since it is going to take a while to get there.

· I actually enjoy myself while 'racing' slowly. As a side benefit - not an end in itself - I find I do better in a longer event in which I am enjoying myself. An example is last year’s Ironman Canada, at which I was relaxed from beginning to end, had fun the whole day and finished in a personal best time.

Having said this, the sobering fact is that I have never run one step beyond the marathon distance in my life. I might turn out to hate those extra miles, my quads might turn to quivering mush and my feet might be pounded into instruments of torture, but I won’t know till I go there and try it. I think I can do it, but I don’t know, and therein lies the adventure. If I fail, then I will - to borrow from Edison - know one more thing that doesn’t work.

“…he finally got it through my head that the real purpose of running isn't to win a race. It's to test the limits of the human heart.”
Bill Bowerman, in his eulogy to Steve Prefontaine

Yea, Though I Ride Through the Valley

2008-10-28T22:35:00.000-04:00

The Death Valley Century is a cycling event organized twice a year by Adventure Corps. It is actually both a century ride and, for those who crave a little more challenge, a double century. And in fact the century itself is more than a century as the round trip is 108 miles - or 175 kilometres - just shy of the Ironman distance. And in fact, the century distance is a staple of ironman training. We do a lot of them.

As much as I had been looking forward to this event, I was uncertain how it would go, given my serious cycling injury of three weeks earlier. My shoulder was still hurting a lot and hauling my bike box around various airports wasn't going to do it any more good. At least swimming wasn’t going to be part of this event.

My Cervélo and I got to Las Vegas, found our rented car and after a few wrong turns headed west toward Death Valley National Park in California. My destination was the Furnace Creek Ranch, the only resort in the park, at 200 feet below sea level, and the starting point for the Death Valley Century . Furnace Creek is a spring-fed oasis in the desert, dotted with date palms and featuring a golf course (“the world’s lowest…”). The spring water fills the swimming pool, which is always pleasantly warm, a nice place to relax in the cool desert evenings.

Death Valley is described as the lowest, hottest, driest place in North America, and after having been there, I am not going to argue. Really, the only word I can think of to describe the environment of Death Valley is thermonuclear. Everything you look at gives the impression of having been blasted, baked and scattered. The air is crackling dry, the sky so clear it is almost invisible. The sharp mountain peaks pierce the horizon like black sawblades. It is easy to see how the sun - which makes a hurried dawning over the Black Mountains and an equally hasty exit over the Panamint Range – can become an enemy while it lingers overhead. There is no shelter anywhere. The vista is so stark and so immediate that you can’t take your eyes off it. I loved it on sight.

The day before the event I drove 18 miles south to Badwater, the lowest point in the western hemisphere, and the starting line of the Badwater Ultramarathon – also organized by Adventure Corps. It is one of my dreams to stand one day on this starting line (and of course to cross the finish line, 135 miles later).

The century route would take us from the ranch and up the highway (it is hard to get lost as it is the ONLY highway) to a bizarre architectural horror known as Scotty’s Castle, at mile 54, over 3000 feet above sea level. “Scotty” was an early 20th century bagman and flim-flam artist who talked a wealthy mining investor into building him a mansion high up in a canyon at the north end of the park. As H.L. Mencken pointed out, no one ever lost a fortune underestimating the intelligence of the American public. After a food break, the route returns back down to the ranch where it began.

Race morning was cool, clear and mostly windless, a cyclists’s dream; the rising sun would be at our backs all morning. The forecast high temperature for race day had been around 90 Fahrenheit (which is the quaint, archaic way the Americans say 32.2 Celsius). As it turned out, the air stayed a little cooler than predicted, completing an ideal weather day.

The redoubtable double century folks started at 7:00 and we less adventurous single centurions went off in waves at 7:30. I offered imprecations to whatever desert gods there might be that my battered and torn AC ligaments would not trouble me too much, hopped on my Cervélo and we started northward up highway 190. The mountains and desert rolled by on either side. We passed signs indicating that we had reached sea level, 1000 feet above sea level and so on. There were photogenic landscapes everywhere and I snapped a few pictures from the saddle before remembering that it was this sort of inattention and capriciousness that had caused me to crash a few weeks ago. I put the camera away, drank a lot and faithfully kept my nutrition and electrolytes up; there is a terrific aid station at mile 18 featuring all sorts of food and very friendly, helpful people.

The outbound route offers about 30 miles of relatively easy pedalling before the road starts to slope upwards. It is an insidious grade, one you feel in your legs and notice in your speed before you see it. By the time we entered the canyon leading to the turnaround at Scotty’s Castle, the hills had become thigh-burners and the grade steepened around every corner. For a strong climber this would present no challenge at all, but I am neither strong nor a climber. As I strained up and around what seemed the hundredth hill I bellowed at the canyon walls: “Where the Dickens is this Gosh Darned castle? Golly!” At least that is what it would have sounded like if they had aired it on The Disney Channel. Finally, after one last push up and over, we were on the grounds of Scotty’s place. Food, water, shade and green grass to sink your toes into. I dallied longer than I should have before heading back down the canyon for the 54 miles of the homeward leg.

Returning to Furnace Creek was a much easier ride, so I treated myself to some good speed and high cadence work. Rather than slowing me down, the slight headwind served to cool me a bit in the afternoon heat. If the trip upward had taken around four hours, the return trip took about three. I coasted back into Furnace Creek sometime after 3:00pm and dove into the provided pizza, followed by the pool. My shoulder injury had indeed nagged me all day, like an unpaid bill, and I was never unaware of it. But neither was I sidelined by it, and the sheer enjoyment of biking through this spectacular, extreme part of the world was more than enough to compensate.

I left Furnace Creek for home before dawn the following morning. As I drove out of Death Valley, a fingernail moon was shining over the mountains, completing a perfect picture which I will keep with me. There is no question that I will be back.

Because I Can

2008-10-17T23:29:00.000-04:00

On one of the Ironman highlights videos I own there’s a quick shot of a guy on his bike talking to the camera, energetically answering the age old question:

“Why do I do Ironman? Because I CAN!”

I responded to similar questions in a similar fashion for several years, consciously self-satisfied and content with the sentiment. I train hard all year, in all conditions, and I put everything on the line after the cannon goes off. I push myself physically, mentally and emotionally as hard as necessary get myself to the finish line. I have earned the right to feel self-satisfied. I “do Ironman” because I can. (And you can’t, is of course the unspoken postscript).

Recently it has occurred to me that my smug little comeback really means much more than I thought. It’s true that I race because I can, but the ability to say this is a product of more factors than simply my training regimen or my commitment to the sport.

I can because I am fortunate enough to be physically able.
I can because I was born into an established, stable society and grew up wanting little.
I can because I live in a part of the world that is not touched by war, pestilence or natural catastrophe.
I can because more than any other generation before me, and more than most of the world today, I am empowered to make choices about my life.

I won’t go off the deep end and say that I am humbled by the previous statements. In spite of being a large winner in the lottery of globalized life, I am also very un-humble that I set and achieved the goal of finishing an Ironman when I was 50. And prouder still of shaving over 2 hours off my original finishing time 6 years later.

Rather, I would like to think that everything we are, dream and do are responses to the gifts we have received. If we have the gift of free choice, how will we choose to live? If we are given affluence, what will we choose to do with it? If we are successful at maintaining healthy minds and strong bodies, how will we use them?

Instead of a smug aphorism, the phrase “Because I can” should be a holistic acknowledgement of the myriad factors and forces that have allowed one to be capable at all.

The Well-Tempered Clavicle

2008-10-12T19:36:00.000-04:00

Riding home from work along the bicycle path in the dark last week, the flow of my life was interrupted as my bike and I lost an argument with a large boulder, which had placed itself in our way. I was obviously riding too fast for my lighting system; I missed a turn and rode off the path, hitting the offending rock. Lessons learned: go slower when you can't actually see WHERE you're going. I must have gone over top of the handlebars since there aren’t that many other options when you meet an immovable object at speed. Luckily I was not far from home and managed to ride the rest of the way with one hand (the right) to steer, the other one (the left) dangling uselessly by my side. The pain was transcendental. When I finally arrived home my offspring, both trained in first aid, diagnosed shock and whisked me off to the hospital, where I spent a pleasant few hours in the hallowed halls of socialized medicine.

The nice young doctor in the emergency department (who could have been Vincent Lam but wasn’t) told me I had a Type 1 injury to my acromioclavicular joint. Common parlance is a separated shoulder. I can believe this: there may still be pieces of my shoulder out on the bike path, separated from me. Looking up the injury later I learned that the main symptom is pain, a symptom for which I can vouch. Like the Inuit and their myriad words for snow, I could without difficulty find dozens of synonyms for the feeling generated by my battered brisket. If Type 1 feels this bad, I am sorry for those whose have attained a higher Type. The blessing is that I didn’t break my clavicle outright, and sometime down the road, I will count this blessing. Not now.

So began a week of convalescence. It would have been a lot easier were it not that this is the busiest week of all at my job, so my acromioclavicular and I found ourselves working 12 hour days and presenting financial results to inquiring minds. It is fair to say that I was not at my best, gritting my teeth through bond and stock analyses and cursing the flaccid markets.

At home, I have hated the sense of feeling useless and unhelpful, like Dylan Thomas’s ‘few, small aunts, not wanted in the kitchen or anywhere else for that matter”. I am very bad at being waited on or fussed over, which is just as well, since no one offered any such service. Small blessings. So I try to look after myself, only with 50% of the brachial resources. Common everyday tasks like getting dressed become projects, in need of advance planning and logistics and about twice the time. Failure to acknowledge this need will find you standing with your pants around your ankles clutching your shoulder in agony.

As we stand now, nine days After The Fall, the shoulder feels slightly better. There is still pain, although it now resembles being stabbed with a screwdriver instead of a carving knife. I still can’t really lift my left arm above chest level, but I’m working on achieving some more mobility. I believe that I need to move it and use it now.

I am supposed to fly to California in about 2 weeks to ride in the Death Valley Fall Century; I booked this long ago as a special treat for myself (I am aware that only certain folks would understand the allure of cycling 100 miles through Death Valley). I’m sure I will have recovered sufficiently to ride adequately by then but I’m not looking forward to hauling my bike box through the airports.

If, as Ecclesiastes says, there is a time for every purpose, it may be that the purpose for the next week or so is to convalesce and not push the return to cycling too aggressively. Generally I would rather push a wheelbarrow of wet cement to work than take public transit, but as we occasionally need to be reminded, you can’t always get what you want.

Ironman Canada, August 24 2008

2008-08-27T21:52:00.000-04:00

Wednesday August 27, 2008
“I do not know how to instil a taste for adventure in those who have not acquired it, and yet there are those who suddenly tear themselves away from their comfortable existence and, using the energy of their bodies as an example to their brains, apply themselves to the discovery of unexpected pleasures and places”
Pierre Elliot Trudeau
Exhaustion and Fulfillment: The Ascetic in a Canoe; 1944

On Sunday August 24th I finished my 6th Ironman race, at Ironman Canada in Penticton BC. In many ways it was my best ever, and the most satisfying since my very first one in Wisconsin back in 2002.

I had an unremarkable summer of training, interposed by an ankle sprain, annoying occurrences of burning forefoot pain while running (alarmingly named Morton’s Neuroma) and finally, a spectacular spill off my bike while riding home from work just 10 days before the race. The crash left me scraped down the left side of my face, arm and leg and bruised in the upper ribs – typical cycling injuries – and left me wondering if I would even make it through the swim. Or have the strength to get into my wetsuit.

At any rate I got myself to Penticton and joined my family, who had been in Kelowna the week before where Duncan had aced an Olympic distance triathlon. I got registered and survived a few pre-race day warm-up bike rides and swims so I decided I could start the race and just see where the day took me.

I Love the Smell of Neoprene in the Morning

I splashed into the waters of Okanagan Lake with 2,209 other hopeful triathletes when Ironman Legend Peter Reid fired off the cannon called Maranatha at 7:00 am. The water was a little colder than most people wanted it (about 66F I heard) but this was not an issue to anyone who has learned to swim in a Haliburton lake. I managed to get swimming with a pack of people who all seemed to be going in a straight line. This is a Good Thing as I tend to wander a bit on my own. The 3.86k swim went by easily and quickly and I exited the water in 1:35, still glacially slow on a global level but a personal best for me and about 14 minutes faster than last year. I was so unusually quick in fact that my family on shore missed me coming up the beach and were sure that I had been pulled out by the lifesaving staff. It wasn’t till they checked the times on the Internet that they realized I was already out on my bike.

Over Hill Over Dale, and Over Hill and Over Dale….

Heading southbound on the first 60k of the bike, my new Cervélo P2C sliced through the slight headwinds to Osoyoos and I started the 11k climb up to Richter Pass feeling very fresh. Of course this lovely feeling faded as we climbed and climbed and climbed and I, like everyone else, was glad to get to the top. The weather was beautiful; sun and cloud and not too much wind. The rollers between 80 and 100k were quite fun; I was energized grinding up each hill and roaring down the other side. The whole 180k of the bike passed enjoyably and I went flying back down from Yellow Lake into town (I got the Cervélo up to 74 kilometres per hour) to finish in 6 hours and 35 minutes, another personal best, even beating my time at the pancake-flat Ironman Florida in 2004.

Far: A Long, Long Way to Run

Coming out of T2 into the run my legs felt strong and supple; this is a feeling I’ve had before at this stage (and one that frankly always surprises me), but it usually fades in the first miles. This time however I managed to keep up a steady jog through the whole run, stopping to walk only at the aid stations and up one steep hill. The marathon course at Ironman Canada is very straightforward: 21.1k south to OK Falls and then 21.1k back. As I approached the southern point of the run some rain started to fall, so at the turnaround I took the plastic Special Needs bag that had been left there for me, punched three large holes in it and made a sort of rain tanktop to wear on the run back; it looked unfashionable but kept me somewhat warm and dry while the rain lasted. Coming back into Penticton with 7k left to go I met Laura who had run out to see where I was. She travelled along with me for a while and then trotted back downtown to let Karen and Duncan know I was on the way. I continued my slow but steady pace all the way to the finish, crossing the line with a 5:19 marathon at 8:47pm, for a total time of 13:47:03. This is my best result ever by about 25 minutes and is an hour and a half faster than I did this event last year. Since I do these things only to challenge myself, not to race others, I am quite thrilled with the outcome. I truly feel that after 6 Ironmans I am finally figuring out how to approach my potential.

Basically I think my Masters Swimming classes helped my swimming this year, the light carbon fibre frame of my new Cervélo helped my bike time, and improved nutrition habits on the run kept my legs moving to the end. The metaphysical aspect (and there is one) I will leave for another journal entry.

I am skipping Ironman next season to try some different events, although I haven’t figured out which ones yet. Flagpole sitting or marathon ballroom dancing have not yet been ruled out. I’ll let you know.

Footfalls

2008-08-12T21:57:00.000-04:00

I have no idea what to put in a blog, so I am going to copy in an essay I wrote several years ago about running. Maybe this will get me primed.

Footfalls
The Exquisite Loneliness of the Marathon Runner

I have a vision of a visitor arriving in Toronto this autumn from a distant war-torn country. As his host drives him into town, their trip is temporarily interrupted by a marathon race; they must stop to let the runners pass. The perplexed visitor turns to his host and asks, “What are they running away from?”

I am one of those marathon runners and I have been asked similar questions. Why do I do it? What am I fleeing? The curiosity and cynicism is logical; we runners have been described as compulsive personality types, weight-obsessed and prone to alcoholism. The average marathon field might be thought to contain a fair number of unbalanced, anorexic drunks trying to outdistance their own neuroses.

I am not an elite athlete; I neither win nor lose the race. I run in the back half of the pack, with aging executives and heavy-hipped women in long white T-shirts. The folks running near me are there to go the distance certainly, but they are challenging themselves only; the winners have long since finished. There is conversation and laughter. As we reach the halfway point, people are making plans for brunch afterwards. Later we fall silent as our muscles stiffen and our feet begin to hurt.

A marathon is 42.2 kilometres long. Some of these kilometres can be uncomfortable. To actually want to run such a distance can be puzzling to those whose hobbies are less exacting. There is no immediate gratification in pounding each one of your feet into the street pavement 21,000 times over a period of four hours. Neither is a lot of sensual pleasure generated by clomping along the road mile after mile as your legs turn to painful stumps and your body becomes caked with a layer of sweaty salt.

Some of my friends wonder why I spend so much time and energy on a pursuit that causes such apparent anguish among its practitioners - more so than, say, shopping for antiques on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Why do I run?

Is it because I want to feel superior to my sedentary friends in the same way that the aviator feels superior to earthbound mortals? Maybe I achieve a self-satisfaction in listening patiently to someone tell me of the new vibrating Barca Lounger they’ve just had delivered while I am cooling down my tingling quadriceps muscles after a 20K training run. Is it smugness I seek?

Am I fleeing our pervasive modern technology by attempting to rediscover something primal, more basic, something that people have been doing naturally since our species first walked upright? There could be something in this, although the theory is discredited somewhat by the computerized timing chip strapped to my ankle as I run through the urban jungle.

Am I looking for the kind of challenge that is disappearing from my everyday existence? Not many of us in the cities go off into the grasslands to hunt down our dinners these days. We do not have to cope with Bubonic Plague, sabre-tooth tigers or marauding bands of Vikings. Let’s face it, we are part of a society that is transfixed by televised reality stories of dysfunctional wannabees all trying to claw and backstab their way to a million dollar prize. Are some of us looking to endurance sports as a way to become real survivors in our own lives?

Some years ago a running shoe company ran an ad that suggested we runners were actually fleeing old age itself - as if that were possible - and that we would succeed if we bought their product and just did it. Did this sell any shoes? I hope not.

Popular lore holds that we run for cardiac fitness, weight control, or to find inner peace in an age of anxiety. The fact is that all of these things are a by-product of running, not a goal. No weight loss agenda will carry you through a three-hour run in the blistering heat. People speak of a “runner’s high”. These people are mostly non-runners. I have seldom been high in the final miles of a marathon; sore yes, high no.

But if you were a runner you would know this:
At one point in a long distance race, you will come to a place where all conversation ceases, and there is only the sound of rubber soles hitting the pavement and of runners evenly breathing. The people around you are deep in their own thoughts, alone with their discomfort or despair, with their dreams or determination. This is a time of transcendental solitude, when no external source - no self-help book, no friendly coaching, no high-tech shoes – can get you to the finish line. You are locked away in negotiation with your abilities and your limitations. It is an elemental moment that is redefined each time your protesting feet hit the ground.

About three-quarters of the way through a marathon, the fuel in your muscles is exhausted and you are literally running on empty. No one is quite sure what powers you through the last 10K, but this much is known: you are given an opportunity to reach deep into yourself to achieve personal greatness. By accepting this opportunity, you become extraordinary. In the end, it’s not your legs that carry you across the finish line. It is your heart and your soul.

In answer to our foreign visitor’s question: we marathoners are running away, but not from old age or chubby thighs or the stresses of the world. We are running from the shadow of the ordinary man, from the purgatory of spiritual indifference, and ultimately we are running out of mere being and into our essence. We run in order to demand something supernal of our bodies and our souls, and to feel them respond.