Peak
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Trail. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
You hear about people who just up and decide, a few months out, to do an Ironman. That’s lunacy, but a form of lunacy that some bodies will support, especially if they’re on the younger side and their operators’ objective is just to cross the finish line before the cutoff time. (The cutoff time is 17 hours from the moment you pass over the timing mat into the lake—roughly midnight.)
Elsewhere on the preparation spectrum is my own experience, in which Ironman didn’t even figure as a conceivable endpoint three summers ago when I took on the—already radical for a non-runner and plodding swimmer—task of training for the Malibu Triathlon, which is lower, flatter, and 77 percent shorter than Ironman Lake Placid. Actually, back then the Ironman held for me the same Olympian rarification that marathons did—cloud-peaked and wispy, but with lightning; subjunctive more than indicative; to be quantified in the volatile terms of gods rather than a human numeracy. To approach these races you had to pass into a new constitution, a fifth state of matter or a divine right. That’s funny now, because it turns out the only thing that separates a marathon from a 15-minute warm-up jog is that it’s longer. Yet I still feel some of the old reverence.
And good, that, because anything short of it is begging for trouble. In one account of my upcoming race that I read this week, a woman describes being kicked in the face so hard as she swam—a triathlon swim is like one of those ball pits at Chuck E. Cheese, but populated with a scrum of rage chimpanzees in wetsuits; or maybe it’s like a rugby game in space—that she spent the next few hours in grievous head pain while doing an Ironman. Eventually she decided two Aleve were worth the risk (given dehydration) to her kidneys. That woman did manage to finish within the 17 hours. I had to stop reading, but I think she can still see.
This week is the “peak” training period on the 10-week pre-race schedule for first-timers that I borrowed, starting with Week 4, when I got back from Utah. If I could do Week 4 on time and as written, I decided, then it didn’t matter how many disruptions and alterations my training had sustained up to that point, because I’d still be on track. The theory is holding. My body is tired, but with each shuffle to the edge of my ability seep out new increments of ease and grace for the more modest efforts that used to pass for maximum. A 30-minute run, not long ago the SAT, now is the beach.
Given the compounded blows of the spring—the crash and then the deaths—this particular peak lives in the depth of a dark valley. To my pleasant surprise, the culture of grieving that I’m encountering in 2024 is pretty grown up: not so insistent on a teleology of “healing,” open to but relying less on certain belief systems’ consolatory promise of an afterlife, more willing to accommodate and sanctify the permanence of loss. I’ve been thinking about this as I study the Keene descent, a five-mile stretch of the Lake Placid course in which you lose 1,500 feet of elevation—like riding your bike from halfway up the spire on the World Trade Center into the basement of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That’s the beginning of the ride, more or less, and then for a much longer time you climb. But it’s a loop, so all of it comes back around.
It occurred to me this week—beleaguered wrist whistling at me from the handlebars—how often big achievements have landed when I wasn’t “healed,” just had made room for whatever was, in that moment, broken. I don’t suggest that we shouldn’t seek to be whole; but wholeness is a versatile, indeed a depurified state. You get to whole not by hitting the Undo button enough times, but by reconceiving the composition—understanding it to comprehend the loss, the break, the scar. In two weeks I’ll ride the Keene descent, both times, and if luck is on my side I’ll finish the race as the sun goes down. Two days later is Adlai’s birthday. The descent, and then the climb, in what condition we can muster. That’s the course.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.