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.
Here’s the real story. The full story. All the pieces that I can now just barely put together if I stare at it just right.I finished fourth in my age group at IMTX21. I WAS ON AN IRONMAN PODIUM. Before IMTX21, I would have told you that the only way I’d ever land on an Ironman podium would be if I outlasted everyone else. As in, if I was the only one (okay one of only five or maybe eight) left racing in my age group because we were all so old. And I’m pretty sure that’s the only way I’ll ever get back there. But on that day, because it was a weird day, I was fourth in my age group.
It was a weird day because only about 800 people started the race, versus the 2000 or 3000 that are typically at an Ironman event. The race had been deferred three times due to covid, and I suppose a whole bunch of people just gave up. And only 800 athletes racing means not a lot of athletes in my age group, which means a decent percentage of that age group mathematically ends up being in the top 5, or in other words, on the podium.
And it was a weird day because my race was not the race-of-my-life kind of day that in my wildest dreams I imagined could land me on an Ironman podium. I had a solid swim, and a solid bike, and a train wreck of a run. Not the kind of day that you hang your hat on. Not the kind of day that typically makes you feel like you earned that podium.
And it was a weird day because the reason I had a train wreck of a run was because my body was absolutely drained of energy. Not from swimming or biking, but because my little sister had died of a drug overdose 12 days before the race. She was 33. She wasn’t an addict, but apparently she was a user, and Fentanyl is unknowingly in a lot of street drugs and it’s lethal. So after a week of living in the trauma of her loss, and five days of trying to step away from that trauma to figure out how the fuck I was going to get the race done, I suppose it’s a bit of a miracle that I was able to will my body forward at all.
I wrote up a race report a week or so after the race, which I always do to capture the details and the emotions of the experience. I love doing that, because it helps me process in the moment and capture the details for when I want to look back. And I always, except this once, publish the race report once I write it. This time, some distance has helped me to process with more understanding of that day, and now I can finally publish it.
IRONMAN TEXAS 2021
Five days before the race my head was entirely stuck at “I have no idea how the fuck I’m going to get this done.” My brain was still in a fog from shock and grief. I was mentally functioning at maybe 50% and I was emotionally exhausted from the prior week. I was terrified, because I knew that getting through an Ironman requires incredible mental and emotional energy, and at that point I was running on emotional fumes.
The only thing I could think to do was to compartmentalize like hell. I could either exist within the emotional abyss of loss, or I could try to collect some emotional energy and use it for the race, but I couldn’t do both. So I deflected all conversations about Liz and about how I was doing and basically just did what I could to wall my brain off from that reality.
It took actually showing up at the race venue - going to athlete check in and doing my pre-race easy spin and packing gear bags - to really get my brain to shift. Thankfully this was a routine that was really familiar, and I think that familiarity allowed me to put aside the rest of my reality for the moment and live within the context of the race and nothing else.
RACE DAY
On race day itself, the focus on the long string of tasks that would take me from my 4:30am alarm through to the finish line and the challenge of constantly convincing myself that I could keep moving forward were enough to crowd out virtually any thoughts that were not race-related. Or maybe I just wanted that to be enough - really, needed that to be enough - so that I could momentarily step away from reality and devote all my energy toward relentless forward progress. Whatever it was that allowed me to detach so profoundly, it worked, and I somehow stepped out of my life and onto a race course that existed in a bubble with no outside reality.
The Swim / 1:19:13 / 1st AG
My Ironman swim times are bizarrely consistent regardless of my training and race effort, so I also don’t really get wrapped up in wondering about my swim split. Which is all to say that I didn’t think much about the swim and it was largely uneventful. I spent most of the time reminding myself not to swallow the water and hoping I wouldn’t get swimmer’s itch. All the talk of duck poop had really gotten in my head. I was happy that the yards went by quickly and wasn’t really thrown off that my swim split was, in fact, a few minutes slower than expected, even accounting for the no-wetsuit swim. It never once crossed my mind that I could be first in my age group out of the water, and it's still a little bizarre to wrap my head around that.
The Bike / 5:59:09 / 3rd AG
So much to say about this bike, and also very little. The roads in The Woodlands were pretty and shaded. The roads through industrial areas with the smell of manufacturing and the sounds of sizzling overhead electrical wires were not. Twenty-two miles on a highway into a headwind with nothing to look at beyond exit signs and another highway were torture. Twenty-two miles on a highway with a tailwind and similar sights weren’t nearly as bad.
The most interesting thing about the bike was that I had to pull it off without reliable data. And I am an absolute SLAVE to my power meter data. I stare at my bike computer, and have “watts-cadence-gearing” playing on an infinite loop in my brain. But I’d realized in the weeks leading into the race - after some spectacular blow-ups on training rides - that my (came with my new bike) power meter is, on any given day, either (a) super accurate or (b) about 20 watts higher than it should be. So my plan was, if the power meter turned out to be clearly wrong, to ignore the power meter data and just ride by feel. It is hard to understate both how unusual this was for me and simultaneously how bizarrely comfortable I felt doing it. I don’t ever want to be forced into that position again but it was also no big deal at the time, which was super fucking weird.
The Run / 6:17:21 / 15th AG
I started the run and knew that the key to my running any significant portion of the course was to actually run the first three miles. I had mixed results running off the bike in training (which in hindsight was likely due to the power meter inaccuracy causing me to over-bike) BUT I had one “failure isn’t an option” run off a long-as-hell 110-mile ride and that was my reference for how to pull off the first three miles. I had to listen to my breathing, use that to help me slow down to an all-day effort level, and “zoom out” in order to mentally adjust from the micro-focus on effort-cadence-gearing from the bike to the long gaze needed for the run.
And it worked. I wasn’t fast (okay let’s be honest, I was slow AF), and I had the occasional hiccup where I overdid effort level and had to take a mini-break, but for the first 10 miles I mostly ran aid station to aid station. My legs, which had been cranky as hell for the first four miles, had eased back to only being moderately cranky. I was getting it done.
But somewhere after 10 miles the wheels fell off. All I could do was find an effort level that let me run for at least a bit, and then only allow myself to walk for a tiny bit before I forced myself to start running again. That was it - that was all I had. I think out of some form of self-preservation, my brain didn’t even allow me to think about why. To remember that as of five days ago I had no idea how I was going to get this shit done at all, to realize that I had already used up any energy that I’d managed to store up in the few days I'd had to re-group, and to understand that I was almost a miracle that it was still moving forward at all.
The one thing my brain did allow me to remember was sitting on my bed the night before, picturing myself in the same spot 24 hours later, and deciding that when I sat there again I did not want to be full of regret and disappointment. When I decided that “running is your only fucking option” was my race mantra. Which is why, no matter what, I only allowed myself to walk for a tiny bit and then I had to fucking run again. It didn’t matter if I was slow, I just had to fucking run. It was the only option.
So I struggled along for about twelve miles, which was basically an eternity, then at mile 22 I finally got some near-finish-line adrenaline. I felt like I picked up my pace, and I felt like I was able to run a bit further before walking. That lasted maybe a mile, and then I hit the wall. Hard. All I wanted to do was to walk in the final 5k. But “running is your only fucking option” was still the only fucking option, and I willed myself to the finish the same way I’d gotten through every mile since mile 10.
Final Results / 13:51:26 / 4th AG
I saw the video of my finish the next day, and it was hilarious: I crossed the finish line and kept running, as if I didn’t realize that I was done. Which totally lines up with the fact that at some point after I’d crossed under the finish line arch I nearly asked a volunteer if I was allowed to stop running yet.
I was, as always, THRILLED to be finished. To have the entire ordeal behind me, to be able to lay down the nearly 14-hour burden of willing myself to keep pushing and not give up. I sat in the grass near the finish for a while. I changed into clothing that was dry and clean (yup, right there where I was sitting), ate some food, lay down for a bit, and after about an hour I finally looked at my phone.
As expected, there were a bunch of texts from friends, family, and my coach. I scanned through the text previews quickly and then came back to one that made no sense:
Way to go!!! Great race and 4th AG!
WHAT. THE. ACTUAL. FUCK?!?!? Complete shock. Utter disbelief. I quickly found the text from my coach.
Omg! You are 4th AG!! Podium!
It was a little hard to wrap my head around the fact that I had landed on the podium on a day that hadn’t felt like a success. In fact it took me months to find a way to be proud of that day, and of that award. To realize that yes, I hadn’t thrown down a PR, but what I had done was to dig deep into a well that had run dry days before, and to find every shred of energy I had in order to keep running. To keep fighting, even when I had no fight left.
