Ceremony
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Last Sunday’s 70.3-mile half-Ironman triathlon in Cambridge, Maryland, really maxed out the lifespan of a “maybe.” I’d spent $400 last year signing up for it, and trained well beyond the necessary thresholds in running and swimming. But the first day of my spring cycling program was the last, most of it spent in a morphine haze at Harlem Hospital. Later, when I (sheepishly) asked my orthopedic surgeon at Mt. Sinai if that kind of race might be in the cards this summer, he said: “Sure, if you do it without training.”
I chose to focus on the “Sure.” The next day, I went for a swim. When I saw that doctor again a few weeks later, I went home by way of an East Village bike shop. The wrist splint cut into my thumb webbing and made a test ride of more than a few blocks unbearable, but it was enough to decide that I would be the owner of a black Cervélo Caledonia. My renter’s insurance company had cut me a check for the old bike, which fared much worse than I. That covered the price of the new one as well as an indoor trainer, so I could station the bike in my living room and get used to its geometry. None of this offered even remote assurance that I’d be capable of a long-distance race.
My first indoor training ride was on the last day of my brother’s and nephew’s lives. When I got home from Utah, 11 days later, no time remained to figure out if my wrist could handle an outdoor ride. I shot over to Prospect Park, and around it six times, and home. That was 28 miles, half the distance of a half-Ironman cycling leg, or, in other words, enough. I hadn’t made a nutrition or hydration plan for the race. I knew nothing of the route. My confidence on the bike was still in shards. I didn’t have a place to stay. I was mildly delirious with exhaustion and shock. But the wrist had held up OK. Grief (including my gray, gauzy, amorphous instance of it) is bridges: the bridge from now to a minute from now, the bridge from today to tomorrow. Ten days ahead lay a landing.
It took most of the race itself for me to comprehend its significance—which was that this was my biggest athletic undertaking, an 80 percent time premium over the New York City Marathon, six hours of hard aerobic effort. And also that my Ironman wristband lay across a scar whose staple marks were new enough to tan faster than the rest of me. And also that the heart pumping calmly in my chest had just palpitated its way through a week of obituary-writing and memorial-throwing and a thousand tearful hugs at altitude. Getting to that race was a race of its own, an ultra-distance endeavor through uncanny obstacles at night. What a mercy it was to finish that other race and start this one, plunging into the murk of the Choptank River in search of a sense of ceremony—the thing I’ve always brought to such big days, the thing that this one brought back to me.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.