The Big Update Post

It’s been a while since I blogged.  This journey has been one of the most difficult and frustrating things I’ve done in my life including figuring out how to blog about it. But that will be the topic of another post.  If you want to skip reading the rest of this post, the following graphic pretty much sums up how this has gone:

Source

Let’s recap:

Plan:

Year 1 – Half IRONMAN
Year 2 – Full IRONMAN
Year 3 – Get Finisher’s Tattoo (possibly on my forehead) and choose new goal

Actual:

Year 1 – Half IM was a disaster

Year 2 – Got really sick just before IM. Didn’t race

Year 3 – Tore a ligament running a marathon (but got a Guinness World Record!) lost a ton of training time, and during the recovery, in what I can only assume was a fit of jealousy that my torn ligament was getting all the attention, my Achilles tendon developed tendonitis so bad that I needed a whole separate rehab for that. Now instead of referring to my ankles as right and left, I call them right and WTF. I wasn’t able to train for the run – which is my nemesis. Didn’t race.

These were frustrating not just in terms of not getting to do the IM, but also because the lost training time meant backsliding. Nothing about me is good at this sport so I need the constant training just to maintain, let alone get faster. It has been so, so frustrating. I make progress, something goes wrong, I watch the progress slip away, I start over again at what feels like square one.

Year 4

Here we are in the fourth year of my two year plan. And things have once again gone horribly awry. This year it was my partner – Julianne. She got incredibly sick, impressed everyone in the ER with her 105 degree fever, and spent about two weeks in the hospital. They sent her home earlier than normal based on the fact that her mom is a nurse and I watch a lot of Grey’s Anatomy. Ok, that’s not quite accurate (I do watch any and every medical drama, that part’s true,) and I was willing to learn how to administer IV medication through a picc line, and use an infusion pump.

The problem with training during the months of home healthcare was that there was something that I had to do (push an antibiotic, change a bag on the pump etc.) every 3-4 hours, 7 days a week. And, the only stretch I had to sleep was between 4am and noon which meant that even if I found the energy to workout, the longest workout I could do was 2-3 hours, which is nothing near what I needed to do. We are lucky to, at least currently, have good insurance, but we had to save the home nursing visits they approved for the times when I would be away giving talks that I had already been booked for (so that I could, you know, pay my bills.)

To be clear, plenty of people could have overcome this. They could have done the short workouts, lost a few months of full-out training and still made it. I am not one of those people. As regular readers already know, I am, to put it simply, glacially slow. The distances aren’t the issue for me, it’s the time cut-offs. At my best, I am right on the edge of the cut-off times. So losing that training time put finishing the IM out of reach for me – I would not be able to make the time cut-offs.

That meant I had to look at my options, remembering that I had told myself that this was definitely the last year. Here’s what I came up with:

Go to the race and get pulled off the course at some point when I missed a time cut-off

I entertained this for a while but ultimately rejected it based on my coach’s philosophy, that I agree with, that you shouldn’t do a race you can’t finish. If I’m out there, going slower than race pace on a course with loops like IMAZ has, I’m just in people’s way, and using resources that people who have a chance of finishing could use. I totally respect people who take another path but it just didn’t seem right for me.

Stage my own event at home, without time limits

Maybe I couldn’t get the times fast enough, but I could create my own looped course at home. I could just keep going until I was done. That would mean I kinda sorta achieved my goal?

Just fucking quit

Seriously, I gave this IM goal more than the old college try, hundreds and hundreds of miles swum, biked, and run, and I’m still at a place where losing a couple months of training means losing my chance at finishing. As someone who had spent her life only participating in sports that I was good at right away, I did this to get out of my comfort zone and work hard at sports that I’m not good at. I got way more than I bargained for and it has been far more difficult than I had ever imagined.

Honestly, I thought that this would go way better. I thought I would get faster much more quickly. So much of this journey has been soul-crushing, looking down at my watch again and again and realizing that I wasn’t hitting my speed goal, that I was still. too. slow.  Skipping shorter events that might have been fun because it would throw off my weekend workouts and I needed the training more than I needed to do a sprint tri. It sucked. And reminded me why I always stuck to fast twitch muscle activities in the past!

I set a massive, very difficult to achieve goal, I worked my ass off to achieve it. And I haven’t. I feel no shame in failing or quitting. And I can make plenty of good arguments for why quitting is the best idea.

Try again next year

I don’t feel shame in quitting, but I do feel…irritation, disappointment, frustration.  I’ve put a tremendous amount of work into this. I believe that I can do this. But do I really want to dedicate another year of actual blood, sweat, and tears to this goal?

I do. And a big part of the reason why is…Oceanside.

The IRONMAN organization has been incredibly supportive of me, for which I am eternally grateful.  Sarah Hartmann, the Acting Executive Director of the IRONMAN Foundation invited me to check out the 70.3 (aka Half IRONMAN) in Oceanside.

Sarah is inspiring, and amazing and super fun to hang out with and she knows LITERALLY everybody. LITERALLY.

She gave me a VIP pass, and some extra awesome Women for Tri and IRONMAN Foundation swag!

 

 

The VIP area was at the finish line. I was just a few feet away from the athletes e as they crossed.  Oh and Mike Reilly was there (you may remember me mentioning him in the very first post of this blog, in the FAQs and basically whenever I talk about the IM!)

 

 

I can’t even fully describe how inspiring it was to stand there and hear him call people’s names as they made it to the finish line – some were dancing, some were hugging and high-fiving friends who were on the sidelines, some were sprinting, and some were just barely vertical, but all of them were triumphant.

Sarah took me around and I got to meet the Editor-in-Chief of Triathlete Magazine, the IRONMAN publicity team, and Paul Huddle, head of IRONMAN’s operations, who were all phenomenally supportive and gave me great advice.

At this point I was completely overwhelmed – I am not good at remaining cool while meeting people I admire and so I had to split my energy between meeting truly amazing people, and not looking like a blathering dork while I was doing it. And then we passed the announcing booth and Sarah asked if I wanted to meet Mike Reilly.

She introduced us. He was exactly as kind and supportive as he seems when he’s up there announcing and encouraging the athletes. Sarah told him that I was doing IMAZ and he put his hand on my shoulder, looked me dead in the eye and said “I can’t wait to call your name.” I mean…I just..It was…

OMG I met Mike Reilly!!!!!

When I started this, I wanted Mike Reilly to call my name. And Mike Reilly wants to call my name. So obviously this needs to happen!

I still believe that I can finish IRONMAN Arizona but, perhaps more importantly, I still want to try. And, as I’ve said before, I think that my dreams and goals – however difficult or huge or possibly impossible –  are worth the effort. And so I’m in for one more year.

I’m so appreciative of the IM organization, all of you who have supported my journey with positive comments here, or on social media, and to the people in my life who support my dreams – including and especially Julianne who, in addition to supporting me day to day, has gone through these ups and downs with me and has never once wavered in her support of me or this goal.

Onward.

My unofficial motto.