Iron
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You train for the worst case on race day: a sudden flash of fatigue in some crucial muscle, or wildly excessive heat, or heavily rain-slicked roads. Should any of these hazards materialize, it’s often not that you can’t get through physically. But you might lose heart. A lot of training is about keeping that or recovering it.
In the months before Ironman Lake Placid, one of the hardest distance triathlons in North America, I got to know these worst-case scenarios well. I ran a winter half-marathon in freezing rain, and another one, as it turned out, the day of the deaths of my brother and nephew. I did a full marathon without tapering and with my wrist in a splint, plodding an extra hour onto my previous time for that distance. I squeezed out the last of a six-hour training session in a heat wave by calling in an emergency water drop from my boyfriend, shuffling the last mile home. I rode my bike more than 100 miles outward from the city on a Saturday to run without stopping into the woods. More than once I felt myself on the verge of overtraining: irritable, tired, and taking a little too long to recover. More than once I questioned the wisdom of testing myself in this way so fresh off both a bodily and then an emotional trauma. The momentum it was giving me, the space to reflect and process, were enough to warrant going on. But the decision was always narrow.
I’ll be honest with you now as I couldn’t quite with myself before the race: I went in with less than full faith—stung by defeat, unconfident of my ability even to get down that mountain (twice), and, quite frankly, primed by all these self-solicited training hardships to expect that my race would resemble them.
Another path came into view maybe 80 miles into the ride. A cyclist in a smart sponsored kit on an aerodynamic triathlon bike said, as I passed him, “I want your legs.” I thought about it, and I couldn’t blame him. The actual race-day surprise was that I’d been flying past the other Ironmen on every uphill stretch for hours—then, alas, watching them bomb past me downhill, on faster bikes with their confidence intact. But as the contest accumulated, this dynamic worked to my advantage, because so much of the course is a long upward grind. People fall apart on climbs; I watched their faith leave them in the very moments when mine was gathering. When it was time to run, also a hilly stage, a good number of those Ironmen were already walking. To my surprise—but in absolute accordance with my training, which I might have dared to trust—my legs never quit.
So here’s how it went: I crossed the finish line in 12 hours and 58 minutes, more than a half-hour ahead of my plan. Seventieth percentile overall, if you count the nearly 400 Did Not Finishes (which I do, because getting through that thing at all is no joke). As I turned the corner into the finisher’s chute in the Olympic skating oval in Lake Placid, N.Y., I saw James and my friend of decades Amy. They shouted my name like rocket fuel, and my adoration for them crested into a final, fiery flight. The smile that had winched its way across my face while I ran the 26th mile, it widened even more somehow, layered under tears, and I leaped off the ground and down that last thronged trace of yardage and over the line into a joy so pure that it burned, for a moment, through this year’s every hour of pain.
This has been the broken year. The legs my rival envied hold up a heart corded with yearning for my brother not to have done what he did; a wrist that excavates new layers of outer hell through each hour on a handlebar. Not broken anymore, however, are the said legs—which once in two successive Los Angeles surgical wards threatened a life of pain and limitation. Now they are my triumph.
There’s no universal rule that broken things come back stronger. But nor is there one that they don’t.
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