After an hour, I stepped out of the pool, almost losing my balance when I hit the level deck. Knowing that I now had to go do sixty minutes of “W” work almost made me cry.
“Our goal here,” Welchy wrote of my weight training, “is to gain enough strength to allow you to sit over your bike with great posture, so that your core muscle group doesn’t fail.” I slumped down in the seat of my car and drove over to the park near my house. A wise man would have had a snack between the two workouts. I had a drink from the water fountain.
Waiting for me at the basketball park by the parking lot was Greg LeFever. Built like a square block, Greg was a personal trainer in his early forties. We had met as neighbors. Greg was making a mint working for Jaguar Land Rover when one day he got up and quit his job to follow his passion for fitness. When I was training for Kilimanjaro, Greg had offered to help me get in shape, but I hadn’t felt I needed it (how wrong I was).
He now ran boot camps out of the park, with a lot of whole-body circuits and core work, and I had attended a few of them since Dr. Millhouse had given me the go-ahead to exercise again. Greg loved using your own body weight and stretch bands to exercise, believing that they allowed you to work both the dominant muscles and the smaller supporting ones. At each class he had handed my ass to me, and now that we were working one-on-one, I was in real trouble.
I was already exhausted when I stepped onto the court. Greg passed me a stretch band to warm up. He had a whole rainbow of colors, each one a different level of resistance. Green was the easiest. Dark orange was like trying to stretch a tire. We started with green. I stretched out my arms and shoulders, then did some “birthday cakes.” These entailed standing on the band with bent knees, one end in each hand, and then straightening up, working the lower body.
We followed these with some mat work. Lying on my back, I pedaled my legs as if on a bike. Then Greg had me hold myself in a plank position, forearms and toes pressing into the ground. Within thirty seconds, my whole body shook from the effort. Next, I ran through a set of pushups; then I jumped rope. Five swings of the rope, and I was out of breath and hurting bad.
“You got this,” Greg said.
I definitely did not have it, but I forced myself to continue, trusting that he knew my limit better than I did.
We went on to throw a weighted ball back and forth. Then Greg had me balance on a BOSU ball—or, more to the point, he had me fall off the BOSU ball several times. The more fatigued I was, the less coordinated I became. A half hour into the session, I was failing miserably at each exercise and becoming increasingly frustrated. At some point, Greg tied a stretch band to the basketball pole and had me try to do sidesteps away from it. When I lost my balance, the band almost flung me back into the pole—and it was only a green band. By the time I staggered back to my car, I was feeling muscles in my body that I hadn’t known existed.
At home, I made myself a bowl of cereal and sat down on the couch. The next thing I knew it was two hours later, drool was running from the side of my mouth, and I was late for work. I rushed into the shower, fell on the way out, hobbled into my suit pants, and drove like a madman to the office. That night I skipped the forty-five-minute walk during which I was to “stand up tall and use good posture.”
On Thursday, I eased my sore body onto the RevMaster and did my sixty minutes as Welchy advised: “at your own pace, however you know how.” It was quickly becoming obvious to me that my biggest challenge with the bike was maintaining the same position for a long time. My spastic muscles fought against it, and the pain spread from my lower back through my whole body with increasing intensity.
Friday. Another swim session at the master’s program and another session with Greg. Somehow I managed that evening’s brisk walk without staggering into oncoming traffic. Saturday. A torturous ride on the Yellow Beast, as I now called the stationary bike. Sunday. An hour’s walk with a few jogs (well, a slightly faster walk) in between. “A good week,” Welchy wrote in advance on his note. “A great way to get started.” By the end of my first week, I wasn’t so sure.
Actually, I felt as though someone had hit me in the face with a shovel. I wandered about in a daze, unable to concentrate on anything and wanting only to sleep. My stomach was constantly upset. I barely had the energy to shower. On the way to work, I had to shake my head every few minutes just to stay awake. In the office, my eyelids felt as if they had thousand-pound weights attached to them, and a couple of times I dozed off at my desk.
To keep myself from crawling under my desk to sleep, I took frequent short breaks outside to refresh myself. Each night, I conked out at 7 P.M. on the couch while watching SportsCenter. A few hours later, I would stumble upstairs and crash into bed, but then I would wake up around 4 A.M., not quite sure of where I was and feeling weaker than when I first went to bed.
Friends asked me to go out on the weekends, but I said I was too tired. Only a few people knew about my Ironman intentions, and fewer still knew that I had started training. I wanted to see how my body responded to the training before I made any kind of announcement. Well, now I knew, and the reality of what I was facing hit home.
This was the first of eighty such weeks before my Ironman, and each one would be progressively more intense than the one before. If I was to become a Kona Ironman, I would have to become a monk, devoted to my training above and beyond everything else in my life. This left me in a pretty dark place. I was already lonely. I had no girlfriend. Besides occasional visits with my father, I didn’t really see my family. My brothers and I spoke infrequently, and my mother and I had stopped speaking altogether after the poisonous battle over my grandparents’ estate (spurred, in part, by unresolved feelings about how she treated me, my brothers, and my dad over the years).
In truth, I had nobody close enough to me to share my doubts and fears with about committing to such an ambitious undertaking. Even if I’d had someone to confide in, the idea of admitting weakness or insecurity ran counter to the image I was trying to project; in trying to convince others that I was capable of living my life without limits, I couldn’t be fully honest with myself about my own fears. This was exactly how I’d faced Kilimanjaro, and it was something I did not want to repeat. Still, I wasn’t sure how to resolve it.
On Sunday night, Welchy called me, eager to see how everything had gone over the course of the week. In my mind I heard, I’m tired, scared, sore. I fell asleep at work. I skipped a workout, and I’m not sure I can do this day after day, week after week, month after month. But there was no way I was actually going to admit the truth to Welchy. He might lose faith in me and back out of coaching me.
So instead I joked about how I wouldn’t be having any children if the RevMaster had any say in it. Welchy suggested adjusting the seat.
“The swimming was pretty hard,” I admitted. He seemed happy about that. It meant, apparently, that I was learning.
“I’m a little more tired than I expected,” I sugarcoated. “And my bedtime’s moving up a little more.”
Welchy chuckled before saying, “It’s okay if you don’t do every workout. You have to listen to your body, and that’s most important. Remember, don’t get an injury.”
Then he asked me what I was eating, and I told him I was eating three square meals a day. He laughed at me and then in so many words said I was an idiot for starving myself. He suggested snacks before and between workouts—“Try a PB&J on long sessions on the RevMaster”—as well as a few more meals throughout the day. “See what foods work to keep your energy up,” he said, “but no matter what, increase your calorie intake. Your body can’t work out properly if you don’t give it enough fuel.”
“Okay,” I said, properly admonished.
“We’ll get it right, mate.”
After three more weeks, I felt sure of two things: my body had not completely disassembled itself during the first bout of training—and was actually beginning to accustom itself to all these new movements; and, second, realizing my triathlete ambitio
ns would demand everything I had—and more.
A visit to Dr. Aminian confirmed this beyond a shadow of a doubt. As with Kilimanjaro, he tried to talk me out of the endeavor.
“I got hooked up with a coach,” I said.
“That’s great,” he answered deadpan. “No matter what you do, what diet, even if you have the world’s best exercise physiologist, nothing will fix your brain. You’ll always be the guy who starts the race at best with half a tank.” He then went on to explain how my joints didn’t move well, how my coordination was off, how my spasticity wouldn’t allow my muscles to develop the needed endurance and strength.
“Yes,” I said. “But this time I recognize all that. I’m training smarter now.”
He didn’t give his blessing, but I think we both knew that I wasn’t going to be talked out of this.
Days afterward, I stood in front of a huge assembly of people gathered at Young’s Market and announced my intention to be the first person with cerebral palsy to compete in and finish the Kona Ironman under his own power. There was a huge roar of support.
A number of friends, including Paul, committed to racing beside me in Hawaii. (Dilly bowed out, saying bluntly, “It’d kill me to try.”) But each morning, whether on the pool deck or stepping into my shoebox of a garage with the hulking RevMaster, I knew it was up to me alone.
My brother Mike wanted to catch up. It was a couple of days before Easter, and he invited me to dinner at an old-school sushi spot in Laguna. We had not spoken in months—and, to be frank, it had been years since we had spoken in any meaningful way. We took a table in the back. Mike was one of the few people I knew who was as tall as I was. He still had the rounded shoulders of a swimmer, but he looked older than his forty-three years.
He asked about my Ironman training, particularly about my swimming. I said there was a lot to learn and, having spent an hour in the pool that morning, I admitted that it was hard. Mike nodded. I asked him how he was making out day trading. He said it was all right. I asked about his boyfriend, whom he had been living with for over fifteen years. Mike said he was okay, but I knew he was lying. My family called his boyfriend German Mike the “Cyborg” for what we felt was his lack of warmth, and my brother seemed the same whenever he was around him. At least in my view, their relationship centered on what German Mike wanted—and my brother’s own needs were left to take second place.
We ordered some sushi rolls. Mike fidgeted, and his eyes kept widening. He had something to say, and he was stalling. Finally, after a long lull in an already pretty quiet conversation, Mike got to it.
“My drinking . . . got out of hand, and it got the best of me. It overtook my life.”
“Okay,” I said, a thousand thoughts and feelings rushing through my head at once. I had seen Mike at family events over the past couple of years where he had been a little out of hand, drinking a lot of wine. At the premiere of my documentary, when I finally found him in the back of the auditorium, sitting by himself, he seemed out of sorts, as if he had been drinking before he arrived. Then there was, of course, the strain of alcoholism that ran through our family: an aunt, a great-grandfather.
Still, none of this had been enough to raise a red flag—until now. Looking at him across the table, I remembered his coming out to me during a visit while I was in college. The prelude to the conversation had felt a lot like this evening, and his eyes had been as wide and expressive (and avoiding my gaze) as they were tonight. I had just turned twenty-one, and Mike called to invite me to a movie. I met him at his apartment.
“We need to talk,” he said, at that time twenty-nine years old.
I jumped the gun, saying what suddenly was obvious: “You’re gay.”
The way he looked at me, I might have been a ghost.
“How’d you know?” he asked.
Well, there had been that young German guy I kept seeing him with—and other hints here and there. I told him that I loved him and only wanted him to be happy.
Mike had struggled through so much in his life. His birth father, John, basically abandoned him when he was still a baby. Growing up, Mike saw him once a year, when John usually took him on some crazy trip. Mike was less a companion on these journeys than a piece of luggage his father felt obliged to bring along. Yet Mike always wanted to be like John and craved his approval. This contributed to the wars he had with Tom, his stepfather and my dad.
Still, when I was younger, Mike had always been there for me. Mike had been the one who had bribed me with the promise of a visit to his college Animal House, so that I would go do my tests with Dr. Starr and visit the physical therapist. It was Mike who had advised me on my career path, who always took me out to dinner or bought me groceries in my early twenties when I didn’t have two nickels to rub together.
We had been so close back then, which was why it hurt so badly when he wasn’t there to help with my preparations for Kilimanjaro. Though I’d seen him off and on during the two and half years since my climb, I continued to feel slighted by his detachment and couldn’t understand his absence from something that had become such an important part of my life. And now, sitting across from him at this sushi restaurant as he tried to share his personal struggle, I was struck by just how far apart we were.
“I’m sober now,” Mike said, interrupting the swirl in my head. “I have some people I talk with. They help me stay on course, and I’d love it if you came to one of our meetings, maybe at Easter. I go every day.”
“Absolutely,” I said, a big part of me hoping that this meant Mike would find something he loved to do again and, more important, end the relationship that was causing him so much suffering.
“Part of the process is going back to people in my life, those I’ve wronged, and making peace. It’s not easy.”
“I’m here for you, Mike,” I said, choking up. “Tell me whatever I need to do, and I’ll do it. I love you, brother. I’ve missed you.” I gave him a hug.
Two days later, I was there at his meeting with him to hear him admit, “I am an alcoholic.” After the meeting, I told him how proud I was of him. He admitted to me that one of his biggest regrets was not being there to help me train for Kilimanjaro.
Listening to those words, I felt myself beginning to let go of the anger that I’d been carrying around toward him since those dark moments of my climb. As it turned out, his apology was just the start.
“I’m here if you need me for Ironman,” he said.
10
Brothers
You have to learn to walk before you run,” Welchy said, before describing what he considered to be a slow ramping up of my training. To walk?! Five months into his schedules and already I felt I was in a full-out, howling sprint and that my body couldn’t handle any more pressure.
Monday was the best day, because I had the benefit of a weekend of late-morning sleep. But by Monday evening, after a swim, core work and plyometrics with LeFever, and a walk or jog, any reserve I had built up over the weekend was gone.
Then, on Tuesdays, it was a case of, “On yer bike, mate!” My bike—that dreaded machine. Every morning on the RevMaster was slow death. I strapped on the heart-rate monitor, mounted the seat, and then pedaled away, clocking up mile after mile but going nowhere. There was nothing to do but ponder the sweat pooling by the front wheel and check my watch to see if my forty-five-, then sixty-, then ninety-minute sessions were nearing their end.
The bike was ripping apart my legs and shredding my lower back. As I pedaled, I tried to keep my knees pointed straight ahead, but as I fatigued they followed their natural tendency to lean inward. This tightened my grip on the saddle, numbing my groin until there was no feeling at all. Often, Welchy had me doing intervals, two minutes easy, ten medium, two easy, five flat out hard. “This should hurt a little today,” he wrote in his notes. “But I know you like it.” By July, I was riding 150 miles per week, double what I had started with in February. I wasn’t so sure I liked it.
Contrary to the bike, my swimming was co
ming along nicely. Once a week, I hit the master’s program, learning to bilateral breathe (a struggle at first with my equilibrium issues), to kick with a slightly bent knee (against my unnatural, stiff, straight-leg technique), and to rotate in a balanced way with each stroke (versus favoring my dominant right side—again a result of my CP). As Welchy said, a big part of mastering swimming for me was ingraining the muscle memory. At the start, my head was dizzy trying to coordinate everything I was being instructed to do (bend arm, reach, kick, turn neck, breathe every third stroke, pull arm through, cup hands). My brain was never good at orchestrating multiple movements with multiple limbs. Endless repetition was the solution, so after my Monday master’s session I spent the other two swim workouts alone at my Newport Coast pool: repeat, repeat, repeat. Come summer, at 12,000 yards a week, I had done a lot of repeating. Welchy came out to see me one day, and he gave my technique a thumbs-up—“You are Michael Phelps!”—but with the caveat that there was much still to improve.
At my private training sessions with LeFever, I was slowly increasing the time I could balance on the BOSU ball and jump rope without coughing up a lung. My walks developed into partial jogs, and I focused on maintaining my body upright, eyes ahead, feet landing straight instead of pigeon-toed.
Part of my improvement, I was sure, had to do with better—but by no means, perfect—eating habits. In the mornings, I had a big bowl of oatmeal straightaway. Then after my workout, I downed a vanilla protein shake with fresh fruit. Lunch was usually something with chicken, and then in the afternoon I had a snack. By dinner, however, no matter what I ate during the day, I was starving. On the way back from work, I usually stopped off for a burrito at the Mexican restaurant by my place. In sum, I was eating roughly 2,000–3,000 calories, which I thought was enough.
In my weekly schedule, the one workout I tended to skip or shorten more than any Welchy had assigned me was the walk/jog/run. Often, I couldn’t do it because of work or because of full-on exhaustion. I was at the office fifty hours a week and traveling on average ten thousand air miles a month, not to mention my commitments with the foundation.
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