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Some times just getting to the starting line is the hardest part.  Before the start of Eagleman last Sunday I sat on the grass near the swim start with the events of the last few years rolling through my mind.  Starting with a bike crash in which I tore my rotator cuff and labrum, it seemed like Murphy’s Law was firmly in effect.  I struggled to regain fitness after a long recovery period following surgery to repair the injuries from the crash.  Then when things started to come together last fall and I was feeling ready to race again, I crashed at 34 mph during a time trial and broke my elbow.  Forunately that didn’t require surgery too, but I was out of training for quite a bit of the fall.  Then in January when I was beginning to ramp up my base training for Eagleman, I was on my way to meet some friends for a ride, and got hit by a woman who ran a stop sign.  My car was totaled, and I suffered some pretty painful injuries to my neck and back.  I couldn’t run again until March, and my first run back was an exercise in pain and frustration.  I looked back at the results of that workout on my Garmin right before Eagleman: 2 miles, averaging 8:39 per mile.  I was in so much pain after the run that I think I lay on the floor for 20 minutes before I could move again.  But after all those set backs, there was no way that I was letting anything stop me from racing at Eagleman.  So I pushed the training, always remembering the old saying “Do the best you can, with what you have, where you are.”  My results actually were surprising in that they were fairly decent.  Certainly not what I would have hoped for, but better than I expected.  As race day drew closer I was feeling optimistic about a good result.

As the sun came up on race morning, it wasn’t quite as hot as the previous days, but it was still hot.  The water temperature was 82 degrees, and air the temperature was quickly climbing into the 90’s.  Still, I had my plan for fluids and nutrition and felt confident.  Soon enough we were all the in water, lined up for the swim start.  When the gun went off it was the expected chaos, but despite a few years off I felt right at home.  The currents going out were tough, there was a bit of wind and some pretty good chop, making it difficult to sight the buoys.  I actually had to breaststroke a couple of times the get my bearings.  But about 800 meters in a found a good draft and settled in.  I decided to play it safe on the swim and keep my heart rate low to conserve for the run, and finally came out of the water in just over 33 minutes, quite a long ways off my best time, but I felt good and was ready to focus on the bike.

T1 went smoothly, and once I hit the roads I started trying to get some fluids down.  My stomach hadn’t felt great for the couple of days before the race, and the fluids weren’t going down too easily.  Looking back, I should have switched to water and just gotten some fluids down, but at the time I was caught up in the race and trying to keep my speed up.  The roads were as flat as a pool table, but after 10 miles the winds started to kick up.  Some pretty big packs formed and at about mile 30 I sat up to stretch my back and got passed by about 20 guys.  I hadn’t even realized they’d been on my wheel.  I yelled at one of the guys that it wasn’t a team time trial, and he just laughed and said, “It’s not?”  So much for non drafting rules.  My one complaint about the bike was that there didn’t seem to be any effort to break up the packs.  By the end of the bike I saw pelotons of 20-30 riders flying along at 25 mph, and not a single draft marshal in sight.  I just tried to stick to my plan, and came in at about 2:34.  Again, well off my best time, but pretty close to the target I had set of riding 2:30.

So it was on to the run.  Off the bike my legs felt great.  I was picking up guys in my age group pretty quickly.  I drank a cup of water at the first aid station, and about 10 steps later it all came back up.  Then I definitely knew it was going to be a tough road to the finish.  I would guess that the actual temperature on the road was close to 100, and running 13 miles with no fluids was looking like a tough proposition.  So I slowed down and just tried to get lots of water down, without much sucess.  I think that I didn’t hydrate enough on the bike and my stomach was starting to shut down.  I slowed my pace even more, filled my jersey up with ice at every aid station, and just kept putting one foot in front of the other.  By mile 10 even that was getting tough.  My timing chip was rubbing my ankle raw and I stopped and reached down to adjust the strap, and my hamstrings totally locked up.  I started running again and they loosened up, so I just decided to keep moving slowly to the finish.  I knew that no matter how tough it got I could finish three miles.  The volunteers and the aid stations were awesome, I don’t know how they had so much energy out there in the heat, but they really kept me going out there.  The thought of ice and water was the sweetest thing in the world over the last mile.

It’s hard to sum up the feelings I felt as I approached the finish line.  On one hand, I was disappointed that my time was so slow, I was over an hour off my best 70.3 time.  But on the other hand, I couldn’t help but feel proud of having overcome some major obstacles on the way, and of finally reaching the finish line again.  I remembered a quote from an interview with Mark Allen, when he mentioned Luc van Lierde’s withdrawl from Ironman Hawaii just a day before the race.  Luc van Lierde had apparently dropped out because of having some difficulties getting products from his sponsors, and Mark Allen had talked about how sometimes just getting to the start line was the most difficult challenge in a race, and how he thought that Luc would have a very tough time racing again if he had really dropped out for such a trivial reason.  Now, I really can’t compare myself to Luc van Lierde, and I don’t mean to take anything away from his amazing career, but you can see that even the greatest champions are sometimes overwhelmed by the difficulties of balancing life and sport.  I may have been slower than I hoped, but I did the best I could, with what I had, where I was.  And I learned some important lessons along the way for the next race!  Thanks for reading these triathlon tips and stories, now turn off your computer and go for a run!

Okay, so last year I started a series of blog posts called “Tales of Endurance”, which was going to be the ongoing story of my return to racing after three years off following shoulder surgery and, um, let’s just say “life”, which is, to paraphrase John Lennon, what happens while we’re busy making other plans.  Since my last post I’ve started my own coaching business (which you may have noticed, since you’re visiting this website), and more recently, had a bit of a car crash. The crash happened two weeks ago; I was on my way to meet some friends for a ride, and a woman ran a stop sign and broadsided my car, totaling it in the process and sending me to the ER in the back of an ambulance on a stretcher and in a C collar.  Fairly scary stuff, and also not the best development with my first A race of the season looming just around over the horizon.  Still, I’m hoping that I’ll have enough time to get healthy, and fit, before Eagleman 70.3 rolls around on June 12.

In the meantime, I’ve had plenty of time to think about some things, mainly the importance of gratitude.  Seems like a funny thing to be thinking about after you’ve nearly been crushed by a 4000 pound SUV, but all the same, not being killed by said SUV does give one pause for thought.  As I was laying in the ambulance, staring at the ceiling (I couldn’t stare anywhere else because my head was immobilized), the one thought that kept going through my head was “Don’t give up, no matter what, don’t ever give up.”  I knew that no matter what, I was going to find a way to get back on track and keep working towards my goals.  Now, that may sound completely melodramatic considering that I didn’t end up in a wheelchair or anything like that.  But still, one’s mind races when being wheeled feet first into the ER.  Fortunately, my injuries, while painful, weren’t life threatening, and didn’t require surgery.  Well, not that I know of at this point.  

Which, in a roundabout way, brings me to gratitude.  I think that many triathletes, and people in general, tend to look at a lot of things in life as just one more chore.  Like working out.  We think to ourselves “Oh no, it’s cold and I have to go ride now”, or “I’d really rather just sleep another hour instead of going to the pool” (I’m especially guilty of this last one).  We rarely stop to think about how incredibly fortunate and priviledged we are to be able to do what we do.  I remember quite a few years ago at the World Championships in Perth, Australia, a friend of mine attended a seminar on women in sport.  She told me about a group of women from India who were racing and about the hardships that they’d endured in their training.  It was frowned upon in their community for women to participate in sport, and so they had to train in the middle of the night, often meeting at 2 or 3am in order to run or ride.  Just think about how much triathlon meant to them. Would you be willing to go run in secret under the cover of night if you had to?

So perhaps, instead of feeling like training is one more commitment, one more thing to check off of the day’s to do list, look at it as the priviledge that it is.  Next time you’re swimming, biking, or running, try to take a second to remind yourself how good it feels to be moving through the water, or to be sailing along the road with the wind in your hair and the sun shining on your face.  After my car accident, when the EMT’s were finally able to get me out of the wreckage of my car, the first thought that went through my mind as they loaded me onto the stretcher was how incredibly good it felt to be in the sunshine again.  So appreciate every single moment you have when you’re moving, breathing, and sweating.  You never know how long it will last.

Be safe, and train happy!