Ironman Louisville 2019 Training

Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan until he gets punched in the mouth.”  Well, I got punched in the mouth on Saturday by biking 106 miles in 100-degree temperatures.  I thought that I could finish the ride before the heat set in.  I was wrong.  All of the signs were there for me to not make the ride that day, but I didn’t pay attention.  The heat and humidity had been predicted well in advance.  On the day before the ride, I had jogged nine miles and had no recovered from my run.  Diarrhea had plagued me the morning of the ride but I still chose to get on the bike.  My thought was that if I am going to do the Ironman in October then I have to prove how tough I am by riding the course whether I felt well or not.  If I waited for the conditions to be perfect then I could never train outside.  It is that bull-headedness, that stubbornness, which has kept me in the race for eleven seasons, but also almost caused me to collapse from heat stroke.

I still had 35 miles to go, and was the furthest distance from my home, when I could feel myself weaken and had to stop and take half hour breaks.  Dehydration was my enemy so, after I had drained my water bottle, I had to fill it up again at a gas station and then again at a flower shop.  It didn’t seem to matter that I kept myself hydrated because it was so hot that every time that I exerted myself, I felt faint.  My heart was racing in the mid-day sun so the best that I could do was to slug it out until I got home.  When I still had 20 miles to go my nose began to bleed, something that it had never done before, and once the spigot opened I could not get it to stop.  An image of myself, that I do not like to recall, is me on my hands and knees, struggling to get off of the ground after stopping for a rest, clearly distressed with a stream of blood dried out below my nose, and yet determined to get back on the bike to finish what I had started.

The lesson that I learned that day is to pay attention to the signs that it is too hot to get on the bike.  I am not proud of this ride but I do feel like I have suffered in my preparations for the Ironman this year; I feel like I have earned my place at the starting line.  By the end of my ride, my voice was a couple of octaves higher and it had become raspy after breathing in the hot air for so long.  Further, my eyes were dark and hollow, giving my face a half-crazed look.  When the ride was finally over and I looked at myself in the mirror, I saw that my eyes had sunk back into their sockets, and they felt like they would melt down my cheeks.  My face remained flush because of the near miss with heat stroke. Peering unsympathetically at myself in the mirror, I looked and felt ten years older than I was when I began the ride and, once again, I asked myself why on earth I would do this to myself.  My brain could not come up with a satisfactory reply.  

Canadian Grand Tour

                                    The Canadian Grand Tour
            Whenever I told anyone that I was starting my Grand Canadian Tour with Detroit, the inevitable question that I heard was “Why in the world would you want to go there?”  But Detroit has an underserved bad reputation because the tourist area of Detroit was beautiful.  The revitalization of this once decrepit city started with the construction of three casinos, a huge convention center, and a brand new walking path along the Detroit River.  My tour of the city didn’t start until late in the morning so I had time to walk around downtown by myself for a while and I saw the stadiums where the Lions and Tigers play, and I took pictures of the public art that the city has scattered around the entertainment district.

            Bob was our tour guide in Detroit.  He is an attorney and has been giving tours of his city for the past twenty years as a side gig.  Obviously intelligent and extremely patient with the tourists who were always lagging behind, Bob was nothing but charming for the three hours that we spent with him.  Just as any tour guide can make a good tour even better, the other people on the tour can make the experience more interesting.  I met a couple from Seattle who had just returned from a vacation in Kyoto, Japan so carting around their two year old in a stroller through the streets old Detroit was relatively easy.  Geoffrey was the older man from the U.K. and his wife had just died.  He was determined to visit all 50 states in the U.S. before his time on this earth was up and he had already visited 48 of them.  The other tourists included a couple from Stuttgart, a man from Toronto, and a woman from Israel; we had the United Nations of tour groups.

            The theme of our tour was the revitalization of the downtown area so Bob did not tell us the history of the city but instead concentrated on the buildings in the downtown area.  He emphasized the art deco design of some of the high risers and how the buildings had been refurbished and remodeled.  We toured the Renaissance Center, which is the pride of Detroit with its hotels and business towers, and the River Walk, which abuts the complex and continues for over five miles.  At the end of the tour, we took The People Mover, or the elevated tram, back to the entertainment district where the Tigers and Lions play.  I could not have been more impressed with the beauty of Detroit or our charming tour guide and happily moved on to the next phase of my Canadian Grand Tour.

            As I crossed the Ambassador Bridge from Detroit into Windsor, it occurred to me that I had never driven in a foreign country before, so I was unprepared for the new paradigm of being behind the wheel in Canada.  The road signs, for example, were in the French language and used kilometers instead of miles.  These signs used different symbols.  For example, the exit numbers were encased in yellow and were outlined in the shape of Tennessee.  There was only local information on the signs and rarely did I see the distance in miles for the larger cities if they were more than 50 miles away.  There were no billboards but I didn’t like that, because many of the commercials on the boards would tell me how far the next exit.  This information helps me to plan my breaks.  Also, the roads were bad, the reflective tape that acted as lane dividers had faded so I had to guess as to where my share of the road was supposed to be, and I was driving east in the mornings so the sun was always in my eyes,

            MapQuest was a godsend on my trip.  This app showed me where to go and rerouted me around the heavy traffic.  This became important to me, especially as I navigated the rush hour in Montreal, even though I was on the road by 6:20 every morning.  MapQuest automatically clicked on to warn me that I was approaching a traffic jam or that I was approaching an intersection where I was to exit the interstate.  My problem was that I was always worried about my phone running out of power, which it did in Montreal and Syracuse, and I knew that I would be lost without it.  As I hurled myself down the bad roads of Canada, I had a death grip on the steering wheel with my left hand, and my phone featuring MapQuest in my right hand.  My posture was to lean slightly forward to get my face closer to the windshield; in this position, I could better concentrate on the traffic.  I was always squinting to keep the morning sun out of my eyes.  Whenever I arrived at my final destination and got out of the car, I was literally shaking from the exertion of navigating the road, but I have never felt more alive.

            Toronto is about five times that size of Louisville and is the largest city in Canada.  The centerpiece of the city is the CN Tower and it is the most popular tourist attraction so I went there first.  I got in line before 8:00 am so I was among the first into the Sky Pod, which is the highest observation point, and I took my time to enjoy sky-high view of the city.  On the Lookout Level, they had replaced the floor with Plexiglas, so that when you stood on it there was seemingly nothing between you and an 1800-foot drop.  I do not scare easy but even I was nervous when I stood on the Plexiglas.  When I moved off to the side for a while to people watch as the other tourists took their turn, I saw them laughing at the fact that nothing stood between them and death but a thin sheet of plastic.

            I walked around Toronto for about three hours before my bike tour began and I saw where the Raptors, Blue Jays, and Maple Leafs play.  It was Canada Day so there were free concerts at the public square at the corner of Dundas and Yonge.  The Church-Wellesley Village is the gay area of Toronto (it is designated as such on the tour map) and as I walked through it, I saw the Pride flags everywhere. They had even painted over the crosswalk white stripes using the colors in the Pride flag.  Moving towards the west, I saw the Queen’s Castle, where the military was firing off artillery pieces in the park to commemorate Canada Day.  In the front of the castle, there was a huge party, with free ice cream and a D.J., to celebrate the unification of the provinces of Canada.  I moved on quickly so that I wouldn’t be late to meet the bike tour.

            Peter was our guide and I shared the tour with a family of five.  The youngest girl started to cry after the first two miles because she was tired and wasn’t used to being on a bike.  I told her that I am an old man and if I could do it then so could she.  That seemed to buck her up and she finished the tour without any more tears.  Another girl looked fresh and energetic when we first started but by the end of the tour, she was all sweaty and used up.  As for me, I was so excited by the thrill of riding a bike through the streets of Toronto on Canada Day that I began to sing WWI songs to myself.  I only sing these songs when I am in a really good mood.  We rode through the public square at the city hall, the distillery historic district, and on the Queens Quay Road.  There was a designated bike lane downtown so when the Blue Jays game ended, and the fans emptied into the streets, we rode through the crowd as if Moses had parted the wave of humanity just for us.  The whole experience was exhilarating and I don’t see how the day could have gone better.

            It took me four hours to drive to Ottawa and then another three hours to get to my hotel in Montreal.  Ottawa was always meant to be a brief interlude between major cities, and I had to drive an hour and a half out of my way to get there, but I wanted to see the capital of Canada.  Pierre was the teen-age guide for our Duck Tour.  Purposefully, I took different types of tours at each city so that I could remember the differences between them, and Ottawa had an amphibious vehicle tour available so I took it.  Ottawa is a small city in comparison to Toronto, so there wasn’t as much to see, but from the boat on the St. Lawrence River, I could make out the Notre Dame Cathedral, the National Gallery, and the Parliament building.  Pierre was fun because he kept switching back and forth, from the English to the French languages, and he obviously had to concentrate to keep his stump speech straight in his own head while balancing the two languages.

            I decided that I needed to take a break from driving so I took a Gray Line tour bus from Montreal to Quebec City.  It took three hours to drive there and I was able to relax and read the paper while Andre, our guide for the day, drove the bus.  While on the tour, I met a couple from South Africa, a schoolteacher from New Zealand, and a lady from Georgia.  The highlight of the day was seeing the Chateau Frontenac, where my parents and my grandparents spent their honeymoon.  I also toured the Plains of Abraham where the British General Wolfe defeated the French General Montcalm, thereby ending the French occupation of Canada as they ceded the territory to the British Empire. It could have been a beautiful space, like Gettysburg or Shiloh, but the city put a huge concrete and steel amphitheater right in the middle of the battlefield and destroyed the aesthetics of the place.  The guard at The Plains didn’t speak English, nor did many of the locals, so being in Quebec City is about as close to being in a European city as you can get on the North American continent.  Finally, on the way back to Montreal, Andre pointed out that we could buy cannabis on our tour because it is legal to smoke marijuana in Canada.

            The final destination of my Grand Canadian Tour was Montreal and I power walked the city before my tour began.  Bruno was my tour guide for the day and he asked me why I would go on his tour if I had already seen the city, and I replied, “Because I have no idea what I just saw.”  Bruno had the air if a retired theater teacher; he spoke dramatically and had a heavy French accent.  We toured the Notre Dame Cathedral, the clock tower and the exchange, and walked down Victoria Street.  What made this tour different was that I made some new friends whom I hung around with all day.  Lisa was born in Taiwan, grew up in New York, and then moved to Quebec so that she could study French.  She had to leave the tour early to go to the recital hall where she had an evening engagement to play classical music and to sing.  Revlon was from Dubai, stank of money, was obviously well travelled, and he patiently explained to me the politics of the United Arab Emirates.  The other people in our group was a lady from the U.K. who taught Mandarin and a couple from New York who were obviously work out fanatics.

            No one else would want to do this trip with me because I exhausted myself every day by driving long hours and taking vigorous tours.  At night, I drove to the hotel and went straight to bed.  The hotel breakfast is free so I pounded down eggs and waffles and still managed to be on the road by6:15 am.  Yet it was fun to allow myself to be myself in that I was always on the go and only stopped to sleep and eat.  I gained a lot of confidence because I had planned everything well, followed through with the plan, and had the energy to endure hours of touring every day.

            My daily mantra was, “keep it light and loose.  Go with the flow yet remain mentally tough.”  I had to compartmentalize my thoughts to put my problems at home on the back burner; otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the trip.  The weather was perfect for the whole week and I was able to get the best out of the five cities that I visited, although I realize that by staying in the tourist areas, I didn’t see the real life of Canada.  However, the tourist area is all that I wanted to see.

            This trip was a real confidence builder because I wasn’t afraid to succeed, wasn’t afraid to do it alone, and I avoided all of the triggers that could send me into a bad mood.  Instead, I felt sunshine on my brain.  I felt fresh, I felt electric; it was if I could feel my synapsis glow red hot as the neurons sped through them.  I was amped up.  My body took a pounding with all of the power walking that I did, but one of the reasons why I work out so much is so that I can unleash myself on a demanding trip like the Canadian Grand Tour.  I was mentally exhausted as well but it was worth it to give myself some seasoning, to make myself more interesting, and to shake myself out of my complacency.  I wanted to give myself some depth by gaining some new experiences and to take a break from my usual routine.  Finally, travelling makes me appreciate how good I have it in Louisville.  I have a nice life with a luxurious condominium, a family who loves me, and a job that I find rewarding.  After a week living on the road and in hotel rooms, it certainly felt good to be back home.