Why I am doing Ironman Louisville 2020

           Why I am doing IMLOU 2020    

            My back and neck still hurt from the accident that I was in for Ironman 2019 but, with a lot of stretching, I think that I can overcome my injuries.  My right hand suffers from a malady that a specialist termed “Thor’s Hand.”  The tendons in my hand have tightened up to the point where I cannot open my hand all of the way and it is permanently cupped.  My toenails are bent and misshapen.  My shoulder never recovered from the bike wreck that I was in ten years ago.  The “Achilles Tendon” in both of my legs have tightened up and require a lot of stretching and, like other men of a certain age; I have continual troubles with my knees, hip, and ankles.  In spite of all of these aches and pains, I have decided to do the Ironman again in 2020.  If I am going to give the race another throw then I need a good reason as to why I should spend the time and energy to try it again.  This blog entry is an attempt to give those reasons.

            “I regret that you could not have suffered longer,” said the race director of an ultra-marathon when one of the runners quit earlier than expected.  This line has some resonance for me in that I quit the IMLOU 2019 race early because I felt like that I didn’t have a chance to finish it.  There was a sense of resignation after my bike wreck on the first loop of the race; it was the final nail in the coffin.  After searching my feelings, and really digging deep as to why I wasn’t even angry at the triathlete who cut me off and made me take a horrible spill, the only answer that I could come up with is that I felt like I never had a chance at a medal.  To paraphrase another line from that same race director, “triathletes don’t quit the race because they can’t go on.  They quit the race when they realize that they cannot finish.”  The first reason as to why I am participating in IMLOU is that I have some unfinished business.    

            A student of mine, who I taught twenty years ago, ran into me at the grocery store.  She looked me up and down before saying, “You haven’t changed a bit.  Do you take supplements or something?”  Susan wasn’t trying to be nice; she really wanted to know my secret for staying young.  When I am asked that question, my pat answer is, “I work out twice a day, every day, because I am training for an Ironman.”  When I weighed myself yesterday, I found that I weigh about ten pounds less than when I was in high school, and I wasn’t overweight in high school.  The second reason why I do the Ironman is that the training keeps me young and in incredible shape.

            The third reason why I do the Ironman is that it fills a huge hole in my life.  The children have left the house and are establishing their careers.  Tracey, my wife for over thirty years, leaves the house for work before 6:00 am and usually doesn’t get home until 6:00 pm, so I don’t see her much throughout the week.    My career has become unfulfilling and I view my time at the office as a time to rest between training sessions.  I get up at 3:30 and run eight miles, or bike nineteen miles, before work.  After work, I either swim a mile and a half or lift weights.  If I had a more demanding job then I would have to give up my two-a-day training days.  Unless I change jobs, I have a lot of time on my hands and may as well use that time to train.

            My final reason for participating in my twelfth Ironman Louisville is I am not feeling burned out at all.  My training days, especially doing the long bike rides on the Ironman route, contain some of my happiest hours.  I feel calm and at peace while on the bike.  Besides, if I didn’t spend my time training then I would probably sit in front of the television to drink beer and eat chips.  Father Time is not my friend and if I was to stop training now, at the age of 58, then I would not be able to start it up again.  I must try to finish the race while I am still young enough to do it because there will soon be a time when I cannot hope to participate in such a grueling race.  

            I hope that this blog entry has inspired you to find new and personal reasons for participating in triathlon.           

St. Kitts, St. Lucia, St. Thomas, and the B.V.I

Norwegian “Epic” Vacation

            Our first port of call was Barbados and our guide for the bus trip was Janelle, who was born and raised on the island and who was very proud of her heritage.  She made it a priority to point out the beautiful spots on Barbados, which is only 23 miles long and 14 miles wide, but Janelle couldn’t look past the fact that her island has a high cost of living and high taxes and bad roads.  Our tour included a full circumference of the island where we saw an array of unfinished houses and poverty.  On the other side of the coin, we saw St. James Church, whose origins date back to the 1600s, and Rhiana’s house on Shady Lane.  Rhiana is a native and she has donated a lot of money to the local hospital so that it could purchase medical equipment.  At the end of our tour, Janelle gave Tracey and me a big hug, something that no other tour guide has ever done, and she was such a positive person that I hugged her back because I was grateful to have a guide who had such a boisterous personality.
            On New Year’s Day, we walked around Castries, St. Lucia, because we didn’t want to take another bus trip.  Everything was closed for the holiday but there was a church service on the small island so Tracey and I went to listen to the preacher for a while.  We left the service early and made our way over to the only restaurant that was open and it was a Kentucky Fried Chicken.  Since we are both lifelong Kentuckians, we got a kick out of clinking our KFC glasses together in St. Lucia, an incongruous spectacle because they were paper cups and we were in the middle of the Caribbean.
            The next island on our itinerary was St. Kitts and we spent most of our time in that port milling around in Independence Square, waiting for the Carnival Parade to begin.  Since we were in the Caribbean, where time is an abstract and flexible idea, the start time for the parade kept being postponed, so we walked around the square and saw the Anglican and Catholic cathedrals.  A British couple that we ran into said that they also skipped the bus tour, preferring to “amble about.  But since we have become older our path to amble has become greatly constricted.”  We enjoyed talking to the Brits while we waited for the parade to begin but when it started to rain, we decided to cut bait and make our way back to the ship.
            Hurricanes Irma and Maria, which hit the Caribbean in 2017, cast a dark cloud over everything in Tortola, British Virgin Islands.  For example, the sugar factory closed because much of the building was damaged and management couldn’t find enough of the parts of the machinery to make the works run again.  We visited the botanical gardens and the lady at the front desk said, in broken English, “I lost my roof.  Everyone lost roof.  Some rebuilt.  Most did not.”  She looked so sad as she looked around the bay and pointed out all of the abandoned houses.  Tortola saw 90% destruction of all of the standing buildings by the hurricanes.  Even the botanical gardens didn’t get away unscathed; a Banyan tree had been uprooted.  These trees are very expensive and the woman said, “I can’t bear to get rid of it,” but she couldn’t afford to hire a crane to put it back in place.  The Banyan tree lay derelict and, much like the abandoned houses, will remain in place until decay turns it into an unrecognizable relic.
            Our final port of call was St. Thomas and we began our day at “Coral World Ocean Park” where Tracey got to hold a star fish, a sea urchin, and a sea cucumber at the “touching pool.”  In the aviary, a lorikeet named Pi stood on Tracey’s arm and drank nectar from a small cup that she held in her hand.  Our driver for the day was Cat, who got his nickname because his eyes were copper in color, similar to a cat’s eye.  He drove us to “Coral World” and waited for us outside of the park.  Since Tracey and I share a dream of her working for the U.S. Attorney’s office in St. Croix and us buying a condo in St. Thomas.  She could commute to work via the local ferry and my only job would be to drive her to the port at the beginning of the day and take her back home at the end of the day.  Cat drove us to a couple of condominium complexes while he told us his life story.  He has lived in St. Thomas for all of his seventy years and, when he was in college, he had a scholarship to play baseball.  Cat’s only ambition was to vacation in Puerto Rico, but he “has to find a honey” to go with him.  Just as with Janelle, Cat had a delicious Caribbean accent and all of his anecdotes were punctuated with an uproarious laugh.  He was a character.  It is always the people that you meet while on vacation, and not the places that you go, who always make the trip interesting and memorable.