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.