by Rich Roll
One foot in front of the other. Turn the brain off. Keep it simple and just begin. And so I did.
We headed out along Kalakaua Avenue, Waikiki’s main commercial drag, where I soaked in the warm air and absorbed the electricity of the lively tourist crowds. After spending the last two days traversing the remotely populated and undeveloped corners of Kauai and Oahu’s North Shore, it was surreal to now witness flip-flopped teens fiddling with iPods inside a brightly lit Apple Store as we dodged packs of college students pub-crawling their way through spring break, women surveying handbags outside Louis Vuitton, and honeymooning couples dining at the many outdoor cafés. The energy of it all returned needed life to my tattered body. And after about two miles, I felt like a brand-new person. I actually felt good.
As we cleared Waikiki and headed up and around Diamond Head to tackle the Honolulu Marathon course, our group slowly dwindled. Twelve became ten; ten became eight. And soon all that remained were Jason, me, and a small core group from the Hawaii Ultra Running Team (“HURT”). Given that it was already nine o’clock on a weeknight, I figured they, too, would drop off soon, so I tried to enjoy the company while we had it. But I underestimated the hard-core nature of this crew. It became evident that these people—endurance junkies with names like Chet “The Jet” Blanton—intended to run the entire marathon with us. No big deal. Apparently, banging out a casual marathon after dinner on a weeknight was just a normal thing to do. And I thought I was nuts.
Beyond Diamond Head, we ran as a group through the night along Kalanianaole Highway, a heavily trafficked, grimy thoroughfare, before turning around at the half-marathon mark. It was here that the rubber began to hit the road. My blinders came down and I stopped chatting. I purposely isolated myself away from Jason and the group to eliminate distractions. I was laying down a decent pace and feeling strong, but I was still facing about nine miles and my thighs were growing heavy. The iPod went on. And even though it was dark, I pulled my visor low on my forehead. At times I even closed my eyes for as long as I thought I safely could, engaging a deep active meditation, enveloped by the dark. I was now deep in the “pain cave,” that impossibly dark place where all sensory perception is obliterated and replaced by one overriding and singular sensation—suffering. My peripheral vision narrowed to the oval light cast by my headlamp. Each stride brought shearing pain up my thighs, as if my quadriceps were being julienned by daggers. And the bottoms of my feet were on fire, as if I were running barefoot on hot coals. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t happy. I was exactly where I wanted to be.
As we entered the marathon’s final two-and-a-half-mile stretch in Kapiolani Park, the HURT crew continued to chat, miraculously appearing as fresh as they had during mile 1. In contrast, I struggled. Forget about form and technique—that had dwindled miles ago. Staying upright, moving one leg in front of the other was a victory. Just get to the next lamppost.… Two laps around the park seemed interminable. But Jason and I made it to the finish and even mustered up enough energy to hug and get out a few celebratory words in the haze of exhaustion. And as we sat on the curb with the HURT crew still cheerfully chatting as the clock ticked past 1:00 A.M., it dawned on me. We’d made it. Two consecutive iron-distance triathlons in the books. Even if we stopped now, we’d accomplished something nobody else had ever done.
But what about tomorrow? Our itinerary called for a 3:50 A.M. wake-up call. If we didn’t abide by it, we wouldn’t have the time required to get out of bed, pack, check out of the hotel, and make a 6:20 A.M. flight to Molokai to begin Day Three. Jason and I both knew that this wasn’t going to happen. I wouldn’t say that it was impossible, but it was close. The primary idea was that we’d complete the five iron-distance triathlons. The goal was to do it in five days, but the schedule didn’t anticipate the mechanical obstacles that had so severely delayed us. If we adhered to the schedule, we’d face maybe ninety minutes of sleep before heading to the airport to do it all over again on another island.
We were too tired. If we stuck to the schedule, the bigger goal—finishing the five—would likely capsize. Better to stick to the challenge than to stick to a schedule that would bury us. So we decided to sleep in the following day and hop an afternoon flight to Molokai. In other words, we’d take a much-needed rest day. It was disappointing to know that we wouldn’t be able to complete the challenge within our five-day goal. To be sure, part of me was pissed. But this was something I just had to make peace with—and it turned out to be the right decision.
By the time we got back to the hotel, it was after 2:00 in the morning. And with our nutrition cooler completely depleted until Rebecca could restock at the grocer the following day, we once again found ourselves eating lousy Thai food out of Styrofoam boxes, apparently the only food available at this late hour. All I could think was Are you kidding me? Again?
It’s easy to criticize Rebecca for failing to ensure an appropriate meal at day’s end. In a perfect world, we would have enlisted additional volunteers to avoid such mishaps. But all of us had underestimated the overwhelming logistics of pulling off this adventure, not to mention the sheer volume of food Jason and I ingested each day. Without a doubt, Rebecca had been overworked and underappreciated since the first day. Her hands were more than full. And she was doing the best she could under extremely challenging circumstances. There was simply no point in getting upset. So despite my desperate need for proper nourishment, I happily turned off my morning alarm and instantly lost all consciousness.
DAY THREE: MOLOKAI
THE REAL HAWAII
When I awoke around 10:00 A.M., the fatigue was deep but manageable, especially knowing that we’d have a little recovery time before taking on the Island of Molokai, Hawaii’s most remote and mysterious atoll. Rebecca returned our van and arranged for an afternoon flight while I stayed in bed for two more hours, eating and talking to my wife and kids on the phone.
“Hi, Daddy! Are you still riding your bike?” The greeting from Mathis boosted my spirits higher than any double espresso. “Mommy says you’re very tired. You should really get some sleep, you know. Sleep is very good.”
Truer words had never been spoken. Julie was anxious to hear all the details of our previous day. I did my best to recount the highlights, but in truth I was simply too tired to spin a proper yarn. But that was okay; just knowing I was safe was all Julie needed.
Around one o’clock Jason, Rebecca, and I met in the hotel lobby, where Jason proudly greeted me with a copy of the day’s Honolulu Advertiser, Oahu’s primary newspaper. Right there on the front page was a picture of Jason and me biking along Oahu’s eastern shore.
“Cool!” I said, amazed that our adventure had made the news. Reading the piece, my disappointment that we’d blown our tight schedule faded. People were watching, taking notice, reminding us once again that we weren’t alone. What was important now was that we finish what we started.
After a brief and stress-free bunny hop of a flight, we landed in the tiny, sparse, and relatively unpopulated island of Molokai. Measuring only thirty-eight miles long and ten miles wide, Molokai is best known for its history as a quarantined leper colony. Now acknowledged more for its staunch preservation, the arid and tourist-free hamlet was a welcome and stark contrast to the urban landscape of Oahu.
At the airport—more like a landing strip—we were greeted by Jessie Ford, the field administrator for Coffees of Hawaii, a five-hundred-acre premium coffee plantation. The business is family-run by Albert Broyce, a fellow Stanford graduate as well as an accomplished and passionate endurance athlete who’d graciously agreed to sponsor our efforts. And the support was superb, soup to nuts.
Jessie didn’t waste time filling the role of our very own Molokai Princess, helping us load our gear and then driving us straight to the plantation. As we pulled away from the airport, we saw a road sign that read: SLOW DOWN, THIS IS MOLOKAI. And as we’d soon discover, Molokai indeed has a velocity all its own.
After a short drive, we arrived at the Coffee
s of Hawaii plantation, where Jessie gave us the keys to our own guest house—a first-rate home complete with kitchen, laundry, and fully stocked refrigerator. Not to mention our own vegan chef, who later that evening brought us a cornucopia of home-prepared dishes sufficient to feed a dozen people. Talk about ohana!
For the first time since we began the journey, I was able to fortify with the foods my body was screaming for. Our host’s chef prepared a mind-blowing menu that included organic olive-oil coconut butter; garden-sprouted quinoa; mole with tomatoes, raisins, chopped walnuts, and garlic; vegan fettuccini alfredo made with pureed squash noodles; cashew cheese; beet borscht; mashed potatoes; and a dessert of avocado chocolate mousse with macadamia nut whipped cream. I was in heaven.
After eating as much as we possibly could, we hit the sack early. I slept like a baby and was up before dawn, raring to go for iron-distance triathlon number three. With the sun now rising, Jessie and Rebecca shuttled us across the island to the western coast, where we met up with Molokai native Phillip Kikukawa and his nine-year-old son, Luke, who’d serve as our morning swim crew. Phillip teaches at the island’s only middle school, and he and his wife Sue—a Dartmouth-educated Olympic cross-country skier and yogi from Alaska who continues to train for Alaskan Nordic events by “sand skiing” along local Popohaku Beach—own Molokai Bicycles, the island’s sole bike shop. To give you a sense of the pace of life on this sleepy isle, the shop is open only two days a week for three or four hours at a time.
In a battered pickup truck, Phillip and Luke led us down bumpy dirt back roads to Popohaku Beach. The second-largest beach in all of Hawaii, Popohaku is a three-mile stretch of pristine shoreline almost untouched by man. I watched deer dart through kiawe trees alongside us as we made our way to the water, and it was undeniable that we’d found the real Hawaii—a big reason I was even on this adventure in the first place.
Given the strong north-to-south current and considering Jason’s swim struggles on Kauai, we settled on a point-to-point swim course beginning at the north end of the beach and exiting 2.4 miles downshore to the south. This would make for an “easy swim” with favorable currents. As we walked down the sand to shore, not one soul could be seen in any direction. “I’m going naked, guys,” I said to Phillip and Jason, only half-joking. They laughed, of course, and I chickened out, but in retrospect, I really wish I had.
Feeling like I wanted to make this swim in solitude, I declined any crew aid and hopped in the ocean, leaving Phillip to meet me on the south end while Luke paddled alongside Jason in the family kayak. As I began, it was immediately apparent just how strong the current was, in my favor. I felt as though I could have rolled onto my back and floated to the finish. To put things in perspective, I’m usually able to cover an iron-distance swim in forty-eight to fifty-two minutes, give or take. But this swim required only forty-three minutes, barely raising my heart rate in the process. It was so quick that when I finished, Phillip had yet to arrive. I took solace in the isolation and sat quietly on the beach to meditate for a full fifteen minutes.
Soon, Phillip, Rebecca, and Jessie arrived. As I waited for Jason to complete the swim, I washed down a plate of leftover vegan fettuccini and mashed potatoes with coconut water, changed into my cycling gear, and helped the crew load our van with the day’s provisions. Greeting Jason as he emerged from the ocean, I joined him in hauling the kayak almost two hundred yards up the beach to the truck.
“I think this is the only triathlon where the athletes have to haul a boat as part of the swim-to-bike transition,” Jason remarked with a wry chuckle.
Because Molokai is only 38 miles long, cycling 112 miles required a creative course that entailed multiple loops crisscrossing the island. Meeting strong headwinds and a sparse terrain, we pointed our bikes eastward and had only tracked a few miles when we were met by local cyclist Will Carlson. A mainlander who’d originally migrated to Molokai to lead mountain biking tours and now worked as a special education teacher, Will was a strong rider who solidified himself as our official bike sherpa and tour guide for the day. He regaled us with stories about the history of Molokai, local political gossip, and points of interest along the way.
Having banked a day of rest, Jason and I were both feeling good on the bike. Back to our normal selves, we took in the landscape of the “most Hawaiian” island of Hawaii (other than the privately owned island of Niihau) and truly enjoyed the ride. Despite the island’s population of only 7,400 and almost complete absence of stoplights, there seemed to be an impossible number of churches. “The highest per capita in the state,” Will informed us, an artifact of the work of Father Damien, the Belgian priest whose work ministering to the legally quarantined community of people suffering from leprosy came to define Molokai and resulted in his sainthood.
Churches aside, Molokai is also widely known as the “spiritual hub” of Hawaii. People with psychic abilities have widely commented on the power of this particular island, and although I wouldn’t consider myself extraordinarily empathic, I did feel—as we cycled through the dilapidated hilltop village of Maunaloa, which had been left essentially deserted in the wake of the anti-development political forces that had compelled closure of the ill-fated Molokai Ranch development many years earlier—the conflict of light and dark energy. For a momentary spell, the effect was so powerful I had difficulty maintaining a straight line on my bike. But as soon as I descended eastward with Maunaloa firmly in my rear view, the aching vanished and my balance returned.
Before I departed for Hawaii, Julie had repeatedly implored me to “respect the power of the islands. No matter what, stay in gratitude. And most important, ask the kahunas for permission to tread their sacred land. Every day. Out loud.”
Her urgings had at the time seemed, well, very in keeping with her spiritual outlook on life, but after this disorienting experience in Maunaloa, I was suddenly hyperaware of my tenuous guest status on the island. I’m not sure whether I was drunk on endorphins or truly more conscious of the reality of things, but I actually found myself calling out loud on my bike: “Thank you for letting me experience your home. Please allow my friends and me safe passage; permit us to grace your sacred space. I promise to tread lightly and repay your blessing with gratitude and service.”
Did I really just say those words? Out loud?
As we approached the eastern portion of the island, the terrain morphed from parched to lush forest—a welcome break. But that break would be brief. Hugging the rugged coastline, we wended around the craggy shoreline before heading up the climb to Halawa Beach Park, a tough ascent with grades of 14 to 15 percent at times. Though conscious of maintaining our energy reserves, we were nonetheless careful not to slow too much, which would have required grinding gears to climb—something to avoid with a marathon in view. After successfully reaching the top of the ascent at a state park, we took a quick bathroom and nutrition break before heading back down to the western edge of the island without incident. Fatigue was creeping in and the heat was taking its toll, but Jason and I managed a strong and consistent pace through the flats of Kaunakakai town, to complete the ride on the port village’s long pier with plenty of daylight to spare.
After a shower at the pier that washed off the salt and grime of the day’s ride, we quickly changed into our running gear, anxious to keep moving while we still had plenty of daylight. Jason and I drank some Endurance Elixir and greeted Rodney Nelson, another schoolteacher, training for Ironman Arizona, as well as high school cross-country standout Akona Adolpho, who were both anxious to join us for the entirety of our next leg—the third marathon of EPIC5. Without fanfare, we began with a light jog down the pier, then headed east through town along the main road, where we met up with a large crew made up of more schoolteachers and local schoolkids, pumped to join the fun.
As the sun went down, we welcomed the cool evening air. Jason and I chatted with the excited kids and Jessie, jogging right alongside us. A natural-born runner, Akona told me about his favorite local trail ru
ns and life as a teenager on Molokai. At around the eight-mile mark, in a demonstration of his mettle, he shot ahead, leaving us in the dust.
“See ya in a few miles, youngblood!” I called after him, sharing a knowing laugh with Jason. It wouldn’t be too long before he hit that certain wall. We’d all been there. But you can’t tell a teenager anything. Soon enough he’d learn for himself.
With the sun now set, we had to make our way along the main road in near-total blackness—there are no streetlamps on Molokai—guided only by our headlamps, dancing beams bouncing off the pavement to the beat of our communal rhythm. At about eleven miles in, I pulled off the road to relieve myself in the bushes. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of doing this right next to an old RV partially obscured in the brush, alarming a group of dogs, supposedly fenced in. Alerted by their furious barking, a man emerged from his house across the street to see the beam of my headlamp darting about in the direction of his dilapidated trailer.
“Hey, you! You’re trespassing! If you know what’s good for you, you’ll get off my property! Now!”
I’d chosen what might have been the absolute worst place on the entire island for a bathroom break. The barking escalated in ferocity as the islander marched toward me, intent on rooting out why I was snooping around his property with a headlamp.
“What do you think you’re doing!?” the man roared. It wasn’t what he thought, but I doubted he’d appreciate my answer. I said nothing.