IM Texas 2021: Anything Is Possible

It’s been six months since I raced IMTX21, and I think I am finally ready to tell the story. For months, when asked about that race, all I could say was “it was a weird day.” I just left it there, I really didn’t want to explain why it was weird. It was weird because there were too many emotions wrapped into a single day, emotions that had nothing to do with the race, and I guess I just didn't want to talk about it. It was a day with a spectacular outcome, except that it was also a day with a pretty non-spectacular outcome, and I couldn’t resolve all that, so I didn’t want to talk about it. I couldn’t put all those pieces together into a story that made any sense, and so “it was a weird day” was the only story I could tell.

IM Coeur d'Alene 2021, a.k.a. IM Hades Redux

It's taken me a long time to gain enough perspective on this race to be able to write about it in a productive manner. Even two weeks out from race day, I was still disappointed in my performance in a way that completely ignored its context and failed to see where I had been strong and brave and unwaveringly focused on the finish line. I always say that racing is where we find out what we're made of - that's literally the title of this blog - and I think that might've been especially true for this race.

FUIMTX Redemption Day

I was six weeks out from IMTX20 when it got canceled. There were approximately zero people who didn’t see this coming, given that the race got canceled on March 13, 2020, which my household officially considers to be Day 1 of the Global Pandemic. The only part of the cancellation that made me cranky was the timing - the email came in 15 minutes after I finished a 5-1/2 hour indoor bike and a 50 minute run off the bike. I mean, honestly, FML.

Everesting: Shut Up, Legs

I’ll be honest, I don’t really want to be writing this race report. Despite the fact that I logged the biggest ride of my career by far, I did not complete the Everesting challenge and I am having a hard time seeing the “win” in my day. I climbed 20,000 feet on my bike, but I can’t manage to celebrate that.

So as Vizzini said, when a job goes wrong, you go back to the beginning.

That’s a Horrible Idea … What Time?

I was mentally drafting a blog post last week about how training these days can still have purpose. I was going to discuss how you can use this time as an opportunity (I worked on increasing my run cadence and actually running in my endurance heart rate zone, which was absolute torture until suddenly it wasn’t) and how a shift in training hours with pools and gyms closed can lead to silver linings (hello surprise 6% bump in FTP!). But then on Tuesday or maybe Wednesday I started seeing posts in the Ironman Texas 2020 Facebook group about how right now we were supposed to be packing our bags and getting on a plane… but we weren’t.