I wrote this for my mental conditioning coach. This is the second draft.
I began running when Jim Fixx died. He had “spurred the jogging craze with his best-selling books about running and preached the gospel that active people live longer[; he] died of a heart attack [July 20, 1984] while on a solitary jog in Vermont. He was 52 years old.”[1] His death made the front page of The New York Times and other newspapers; the articles had a strong appreciation of irony.
But for some reason it intrigued me. I don’t know why. I borrowed his two running books from the library (The Complete Book of Running, 1977; Jim Fixx’s Second Book of Running, 1980). I bought running magazines. I bought running shoes.
Two to four mornings a week I would get up before dawn and jog as far as I could, walking back, sometimes jogging a bit more. First, of course, just getting around the small city block I lived on was an effort. By midwinter I was running about an hour. Thirty-eight years later I remember that first winter of running. I must have sweated mightily—I wore a sweatsuit under those K-Way nylon yachting outfits—I didn’t get technical running clothes until the late ’80s. But I don’t remember that—I remember what downtown Toronto was like at 4 and 5 a.m.: the transition between the night people—the prostitutes, people leaving parties and illegal bars, et al.—and the day people—bakers and other folks who had to start work before the cafés opened for the day. Cops would wave at me unbidden.
So I came to running lateish in life (the fall I turned 31) but I loved it. I succumbed to a constant string of injuries, resulting in surgery, but I couldn’t run; finding a solution became important to me.
In the eight or so years from Fixx’s death my girlfriend and I had moved in together, we’d gotten married, I’d changed jobs twice, we’d broken up, I’d started going out with Mona, and we’d moved in together. We’d bought ourselves cheap hybrid bikes and I was now biking to work (4½ miles). I was still bedevilled by injuries in my running.
I had a great doc.[2] She sent me to yet another orthopædist, who admitted he was perplexed, and referred me to a physiotherapist in private practice (which meant my insurance wouldn’t fully cover). This changed my life. Anita[3] didn’t look at my ankles, calves, shins, knees—where I hurt—she had me bow, repeatedly. She poked her bony thumbs into my back; my legs felt better. Huh?
And here’s the best part—just typing this I get a frisson! She told me to run through the pain. Counterintuitive. Not at all what the running magazines and books tell you what to do. But her diagnosis was that I had a nerve impingement in my back, and that if I ran through the pain it would resolve.
And she was right. In no time I was running an hour or more. I was still commuting, 12 months a year, on my heavy steel bike. I bought a sport watch (a Timex Ironman!).
In the fall of ’94, so coming up to age 41, I ran my first race, a half-marathon fixture on the local calendar (since transmogrified into the Waterfront Marathon).[4] I’d followed a magazine marathon training programme. The race was hard but I finished (I’m guessing here) about ¾ of the way through the pack.
That fall I started a long “residential” assignment in Prince George’s County, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. I decided (on a whim? I don’t remember) to run the Marine Corps Marathon, just a few weeks after the above half-marathon. The half-marathon was fine (I’d almost certainly run far slower than I could’ve gone), so all I had to do, I thought, was finish that marathon training programme.
The year I ran was the year Oprah ran (she beat me handily), so I kept seeing signs for and about her. I could say the race was a disaster; it was warm and sticky (this is Washington, after all) and the last miles were a death march. As I walked from the finish line to my car I saw the last legal finisher, a middle-aged woman being tailgated by a bus full of Marines.
In the meanwhile, remember, when I wasn’t working in a foreign city, I was biking to work every day. I took to e.g. biking to work, running home, running to work, biking home. I had an elaborate schedule. Rather than run directly home I’d take longer routes.
I know this is all about running, but there’s a point. 🙂
For her last year in high school, 1998/99,[5] my daughter Liz wanted to recapitulate her 8th-birthday trip to Disney World in Florida. We decided to go for a week, starting with the Walt Disney World Marathon. I did a million things wrong preparing for that marathon, and I turned out to be my only running DNF ever. (It was totally the right decision; if I’d finished I’d’ve been a wreck for the rest of the week. As it was we had a wonderful time at Disney World.)
As a result I got a coach.[6] He was awesome, and I started setting PBs. My mileage got up to 50 a week. I was almost 50. And of course I got injured. Nothing serious, just frequent niggles that I’d have to take time off running for.
By this time I was working on a project in southern California, working in our Irvine office and living in a furnished apartment in Newport Beach. I am, perhaps, surprisingly, not a fan of southern California, but the running was awesome. Mona had a cousin living in Cardiff-by-the-Sea and when she came to visit me we’d drive down to visit her cousin and his wife. They semi-talked me into getting a proper road bike. I bought it from Jeffrey Justice, ex-editor of Triathlete, who was managing a bike store in Del Ray. A road bike was a new experience; it was an entry-level aluminium Trek but it was awesome. I started riding hours on the weekend. I even biked to work among the crazy Orange County drivers.
On this California project I was working with a work-friend, John. Before John immigrated to Canada from Poland as a kid he’d been in an elite swimming programme. Someone naturally athletic, and all about performance. I’d always been vaguely interested in triathlon; now John started to promote it to me.
When I got back to Canada I started taking swimming lessons. The municipal lessons were awful; I wonder if any adult ever learns to swim that way. This was earlyish days of finding stuff on the Web but we found a local swim coach, Kelvin,[7] who offered a course for people afraid of the water. It was 1-on-1 and therefore very expensive; you weren’t paying just his time but also renting a pool. Still we went for it; it took a couple of years, but Kelvin was patient, and I learned to swim. He was much influenced by the late Terry Laughlin’s Total Immersion[8] approach; I had a chance on one of my visits to Los Angeles to go to a weekend camp Terry put on. (Sadly, it was a little too early in my development for me to benefit.)
Now John started to put the (friendly) pressure on me. So I wanted to do a triathlon. I was over 50, i.e., it was late. John’s position was that, contrary to the usual advice, I should start with an Ironman. And, to be honest, it appealed.
So my first triathlon was Ironman Wisconsin in 2006 or ’07. John and I made a couple of trips to Madison to ride the course that summer. But I DNF’d the race: I’d cracked a rib earlier in the summer and I just couldn’t make the bike cutoff. I was disappointed but not daunted.
In 2008 I volunteered at both Ironman Canada (in late August) and Ironman Florida (in November). In those days your best chance to get a spot in an Ironman was to volunteer the year before. I still remember volunteering as awesome experiences, especially at Florida where I worked far past my allotted shift, and was a very different person than I usually am. (I was the “pointer” who told runners who weren’t finishing the 2-loop course where to go. I danced to the finish-line music, kibitzed with the spectators, chatted to the couple of people I knew.)
And I will say something about the training. I was slow. I was inconsistent (relatively). I think I only trained 400 hours. But I still remember the looong bike rides, the runs in the dark, the capability I had.
In 2009 I didn’t feel I was ready for Canada, so everything was on Florida.
In October, I think, I rode my bike from our home in the east end of Toronto to Table Rock at Niagara Falls.[9] This was just a McGuffin, but it worked. I knew I could do the bike.
I drove to Panama City Beach, Florida, in our loaded-up Honda Odyssey (I somehow drove into the annual peanut festival in Dothan, Alabama!), and Mona flew down for the weekend.
My Ironman: The swim was awful. By my 2nd loop the wind had come up, so there was a chop; I was swallowing salt water; the jellyfish were stinging me, and I was trying to avoid them. By the time I’d finished I was completely nauseated. Though folks were yelling at me to get to the timing mat so I wouldn’t violate the cutoff, I stood, leaning on a rescuer’s swim buoy, and threw up and threw up and threw up. (Mona stood in the surf and captured all the pictures!) So breakfast was gone.
Nonetheless I jogged over the timing mat and got an ovation, and a name-check from Mike Reilly. I forget now, but I think I was about 2:10, awful close to the cutoff. If this had been a training day I would’ve quit, of course; but we were here so I thought, well, I’ll push on.
What I did was one half of the only mistake I made all day: I didn’t carefully clean all the sand off my feet before I put on my cycling socks.
The Florida bike course is very flat. Under the leg of my shorts I had a pace chart: what time did I have to hit, every 10 miles, to make the 5:15 p.m. cutoff. At mile 10 I was dead on. At mile 20 I was ahead by a couple of minutes.
Now I was hungry. But my stomach was so upset I couldn’t drink the maltodextrin mixture I’d trained with. After a while I could eat the two soggy sandwiches in my bento box: jam-and–cream cheese and jam-and–peanut butter.
About midway I was starting to sag mentally, even though I was getting farther and farther ahead of my worst-case pace chart. There’s one part of the course where you do an out-and-back into the wind, and the surface is uncharacteristically bumpy. I realized I could drop out; lots of people drop out. What stopped me was that I didn’t have a good enough excuse; I couldn’t think of what I’d tell Mona and my friends; so I kept on.
At special-needs I picked up another pair of sandwiches (as above) and ate them. I cruised in well before the cutoff. The sun was setting. Now the second half of the only mistake: I didn’t change from cycling to running socks. Though I hadn’t trained it I started walk/running. I still couldn’t eat anything.
Florida has a double-half-marathon course. At the half you run within feet of the finish line. The crowds were loud and urging me on and I was mad at them. The cutoff (still hours off, of course) was still a risk. I felt awful. I was “running”—and two athletes passed me walking. That was a sign. I walked—marched, really—the whole 2nd half-marathon. It felt fine. I started drinking the flat Coke and eating the potato chips on the course. I started kibitzing with other “runners” and the spectators. At some point I realized I was going to make the cutoff so I slowed down, and gathered other runners with me. I knew the folks I passed would miss the cutoff, so I felt I should help folks get to the finish. About two miles out I took off (as it were). I “flew” (making an airplane) under the finish banner 7 ′12″ under the cutoff:
I didn’t hear Mike Reilly say “You are an Ironman”, but Mona says he did; he noted that my occupation was “just a guy”, and he said, “Richard Nelson, you’re not just a guy, you’re an Ironman!”
A huge disappointment was that they’d run out of finisher caps. It was the only thing I really wanted.
Now for my mistake: when I took off my shoes and socks I found blisters all over my feet, caused by not getting all the sand off my feet. If I’d changed socks in T2 I would have dealt mostly with that. I was really lucky that none of the blisters were on load-bearing parts of my feet.
We had a week-long or so drive back, stopping in scenic towns on the way, visiting friends in Philadelphia. When I got back, a Facebook friend who’d also finished Ironman Florida 2009 and had several IMFL finishes, sent me his finisher cap. I still have it. 🙂
My race had been a close thing—I’d always been chasing cutoffs. My bike had been surprisingly (well, to me) strong. After a couple of weeks’ recovery I began thinking of just keeping on going and doing e.g. Ironman Coeur d’Alene in the spring. But I faltered, and I’ve never really recovered. We agreed that our big focus for 2010 would be a drive across (half) the country (Toronto to the west coast and back); we ended up crewing for a friend at Ultraman (as it then was); it was a bitter experience for me, though Mona remembers it more fondly.
Ironman Florida 2009 was the apotheosis of my triathlon career. Since then I’ve started four triathlons and finished one. At my DNFs I had a panic attacks in the water. My half-Ironman DNF in ’18 is a little more honourable; it was the hottest and most humid that day of the year had ever been. And I finished a sprint in ’19.
So since 2009 it’s been a struggle to recapture some of that Ironman-year feeling. I’ve cycled through three coaches, though I’ve now been with Mary a long time now.
[1] “James F. Fixx Dies Jogging; Author on Running Was 52”,The New York Times, July 22, 1984 (https://www.nytimes.com/1984/07/22/obituaries/james-f-fixx-dies-jogging-author-on-running-was-52.html?searchResultPosition=4).
[2] Hon. Carolyn A. Bennett MD PC MP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolyn_Bennett).
[3] https://www.linkedin.com/in/anita-lorelli-975a7b3b/?originalSubdomain=ca
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_Waterfront_Marathon
[5] In Ontario high school lasted 5 years; we had a Grade 13. This ended in 2003.
[6] Peter Pimm: a top-level running coach. Still active: http://www.servicesforrunners.com/.
[7] Kelvin is still my swim coach, 20+ years later: http://npconsultants.com/oannesswims/coaches.htm
[8] http://www.totalimmersion.net/
[9] https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Table+Rock+Welcome+Centre/@43.0785758,-79.0800966,816m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x89d3430906a14f7d:0x2b82046b4569d2ea!8m2!3d43.0791675!4d-79.0788306!16s%2Fm%2F02r432r
I tend toward the dark, but I do find I’m grieving—tho’ for what I’m not sure.
Road of Iron 