One More Step

by Bonner Paddock

  At the end of February, I went splat against the wall. I didn’t want any more pain. I felt as if I had completely plateaued and wasn’t seeing any improvement in my performance. I was too tired, too drained, to continue. Everyone, including most recently Paul, who had volunteered at the beginning of my training to compete at Kona with me, had now dropped out. Perhaps I should join them. On a rare night out for dinner with Mike, I sat slumped in my chair, almost too weary to muster up the strength to order and eat.

  “What have I gotten myself into?” I asked, thankful at last that I had someone I could open up to, and thankful even more that it was my brother. “How can I do everything?”

  “You’re making progress,” Mike said. “You’re doing the best you can.”

  Not long after returning from Hawaii, Mike had left his boyfriend, and in early January he had been in a car crash that had put him in the hospital. He hadn’t had a drink, but I knew he was battling his alcoholism. More and more, we were leaning on each other. Mike told me that the rest of the family was worried about how I was doing.

  “You need to figure out a way to recharge, to get your Bonner time,” he said.

  “I’ve made commitments,” I said, unable to see beyond that wall. “I mean, I’m not even in the race yet. I hope I can pull all of this off.”

  For a long time, we just sat quietly and ate our dinner. I knew I needed to get some balance back in my life, to find a way to do Ironman, but still have an existence beyond it.

  Soon after, I went to see Welchy at Oakley. Although he had undergone yet another heart surgery earlier in the year, he seemed his usual boisterous self when we sat down in the conference room near his office. On the other hand, I slouched in my chair, numb to the world.

  “I’m really struggling,” I said, masking the truth no more. “I don’t have any energy. I’m not recovering well. I’m constantly tired. I don’t seem to be improving from the workouts. I’m not sure what to do.”

  He looked at me for a long moment. I thought he might cut down on some miles, give me a window of rest. I mean, he had to understand, show some pity.

  “You’re at about phase three of five in your training. There are still a couple more to go, so we need to find you more energy.”

  I nodded. Maybe this was a kind way of introducing the idea that I needed a vacation. Maybe Tahiti. Bali. Heck, I’d even take a week on my couch, shades drawn.

  “Okay, let’s go over your diet,” he then said, listing what I shouldn’t eat. Hydrogenated oils. Anything with high-fructose corn syrup. This was no problem.

  “Cut out the booze too.”

  “Okay,” I said, a little less sure, but still, fine. At most I was drinking a couple of drinks two or three nights a week.

  “Alrighty, mate. What else takes it out of you?”

  I hesitated, knowing the answer, though not the medical reason why the act left me exhausted for a day afterward. “Sex.”

  “Then you’ll stop having sex.”

  This conversation was veering in a very wrong direction.

  “Uh-huh,” I think I said. “And my training schedule?”

  Welchy did not pull back on that either. He did not give me a month off. He asked for more, said to hit the schedule harder. I was to remember why I was doing this. Remember Jake. Remember who I was fighting for and why. Remember I was fighting for myself. I had to dig deeper, to go all the way, if I wanted to be an Ironman. And even that level of commitment might still not be enough.

  I was at a loss for words.

  “I told you this wasn’t going to be easy, mate. You’ll get through this, but you’ll have to make more sacrifices.”

  Welchy gave me a hug, and I walked out to my car a little stunned. I’d gone in wanting a break, and instead he’d told me to work harder. As I sat with my hands on the steering wheel, the enormity of what I’d tasked myself with sank in. I couldn’t fake my way through this, couldn’t realize in the middle that I wasn’t prepared enough, yet still force my way to the summit. If I was going to succeed, if I was going to complete this race in spite of my CP, it would require everything I had—not just on race day, but during all the days leading up it. And I couldn’t fight it anymore; I couldn’t pretend that I could have a normal life and still pull this off. For better or for worse, I had to embrace it all or run the very real risk of failure.

  And so I became a monk, faithful to only one thing: Ironman 2012. Everything else fell aside. Funnily enough, there was some comfort when I stopped trying to balance everything else in my life. I had climbed Kilimanjaro almost in rebellion against my cerebral palsy, as if it were the opponent. I wanted to prove there was nothing I couldn’t do. That wouldn’t work with Ironman, and Welchy had known it from the start. More than a year into my Kona quest, I was only beginning to accept the fact that to finish the race I needed to embrace all my weaknesses—every single one of them—and find a way through them.

  An able-bodied, “normal” person probably only needed a year to train for Kona. Not me. Because of my cerebral palsy, I needed two. So it goes. Others may not need to watch every single thing they eat or drink; others may be able to have sex, to go out, to enjoy themselves. Not me. I needed to save every ounce of energy. Others may experience much greater improvement in their fitness from devoting that number of hours to their training. Not me. My body and my brain were simply not working on the same level. Fine.

  More than simply understanding how to train around my weaknesses or limitations, this Ironman demanded I accept my cerebral palsy as part of who I was. I was not, by definition, normal. I would never be. I needed to stop resisting the idea that I should be able to do things exactly as normal people do. Different did not mean impossible. I could still achieve whatever I wanted in life, but I needed to embrace the fact that I had to do it my way, harder though it may be. For years I’d been talking about limits, but for the first time I was beginning to understand how to work with mine, instead of against them.

  “Biggest week yet,” Welchy wrote for the first week of March. Yup. Thirty-five hundred yards in the pool. Done. Two-hour hilly ride during the hottest part of the day. Gotcha. Weights with LeFever until my arms went numb. Alrighty then. It was a whole new level of commitment, and I rose to it. It was not as if I made a conscious decision to accept my cerebral palsy completely (there was no switch to flip), but each day that I finished what my training schedule demanded, another measure of acceptance came with it.

  Before the 2012 race season began, I rode in a charity event outside San Diego with Billy Ruddell from Cannondale and Chrissie Wellington. Prior to battling through her injuries to win at the 2011 Ironman, Chrissie had watched my Kilimanjaro documentary, and it reminded her that sometimes you just need to show up at the starting line and give it your all, even if you’re not at your best.

  It was great to see her again, and we rode side by side for a long stretch. I gave her a rough breakdown on my training, and she asked about my nutrition. I rattled off what I was eating and not eating.

  “Where’s the bloody coffee?!”

  I told her I didn’t drink coffee. Chrissie simply laughed and told me that I need to drink coffee after eating my first meal in the morning at the least. She also promised to set me up with her nutritionist.

  The coffee certainly helped me to bring it in the mornings, and over the weeks that followed I tinkered more and more with my diet, particularly with what I ingested during workouts, trying to consume the 275 calories an hour that Welchy wanted me to maintain (any fewer calories, I wouldn’t have enough fuel to maintain energy; any more calories, and I was risking diarrhea and the like). I turned into a bit of a mad scientist, mixing powders, gels, and sports drinks of various quantities and tastes during training to see what worked for me.

  Welchy had told me that no two people were the same with regard to the nutrition they needed to operate at the highest level. Endurance events like Ironman often come down to making sure you have enough gas in the tank—if you don’t f
uel properly during the race, finishing becomes nearly impossible. Through experiments, I found that I powered through workouts easier with GU Roctane than plain GU. The addition of caffeine in the carbo-rich energy gel made the difference. To stay hydrated, the C5 powder by Carbo Pro, which has a mix of electrolytes, sodium, and other things, worked best. And, for instance, I discovered after many rigorous tests that chocolate-flavored GU tasted better on the bike than on the run.

  In April, I got ready for the Bonelli Sprint Triathlon, in San Dimas, California, the first of four events before the big one. Had the months of training made a difference? I couldn’t say for sure, but at least this time I brought a waterproof bag and some water in a plastic container to wash the sand off my feet before putting on my clip-on shoes.

  I didn’t exactly crush Bonelli. I pushed very hard on the swim, passing people left and right in the water, and posted a good time of ten minutes, twenty-four seconds, but my shoulders were worn out. The bike was better—much better—in spite of my struggles on the steep hills, and I finished in fifty-four minutes, seventeen seconds. However, I made the mistake of guzzling too much of my water mix (C5, salt tabs, and glutamine) before the run. Feeling sick, I had a sluggish 5K at thirty-one minutes, nineteen seconds and finished wiped out. Overall, my time of one hour and forty-five minutes was slightly better than my first sprint triathlon. More important, I could now identify my weak areas and where and how I needed to improve: better shoulder strength, more practice working the hills on the bike, better nutritional awareness, more muscling through the run.

  In May, at the ITU World Championship in San Diego, I knocked the Olympic-distance triathlon (basically a quarter of a full Ironman) out of the park. My time in the 0.9-mile swim was slow, the result of some serious snaking from side to side, but it was the most comfortable I had felt in the ocean. The 26-mile bike course was solid. And I ran what was for me a blistering 10K. I tried to look as strong as I could at the finish—Welchy was the announcer. With my transitions between the swim and bike and the bike and run improving as well, I completed the race in three hours, thirty-three minutes—beating my target time by almost half an hour.

  Welchy was impressed. That alone sent me moonward.

  These were all warm-ups for the Ironman 70.3, a half Ironman, nicknamed Honu, on Hawaii’s Big Island. This one would decide whether the Ironman organizers would allow me to compete at Kona. Some of the bike course was the same as for the big race, but the swim and run courses were in different locations. But the conditions made this the best dress rehearsal out there: the heat, the humidity, and the hurricane-like winds were all the same as what I’d face on Kona race day.

  Welchy was clear about my target time: eight hours or less. I needed to hit this mark or it was unlikely the organizers would grant me a special spot for the World Championship. They needed to know I had a chance of finishing the full Ironman before the midnight cutoff.

  There was never any question about Mike joining me in Hawaii. He was my pit crew, my training partner, my moral support, my nurse, my cook, my driver, and my right hand. We were a team now, and I would have been helpless without him. We had a practice swim in Hapuna Bay, with its long crescent beach and sapphire-blue waters. I kept up with him stroke for stroke and had never felt more comfortable in the water. Mike gave me a huge smile and said, “Just do it like that on race day, no faster, no slower, and you got this.”

  The next day, after a practice ride on the Queen K Highway, he told me, “Bro, it’s night and day. You’re not the same person on that bike. So comfortable. No wobbling. You’re looking good.”

  Mike’s praise aside, I was heart-in-my-shoes nervous. This was it. I needed to hit my times or all the training and all the pain and effort would have been for nothing. This thought ran through my mind again and again in the days approaching the race.

  For almost forty-eight hours before the start of Honu, Mike and I holed up in our rental house, watching Whale Wars. There was something about the show’s mayhem and cliffhangers that kept my mind off what was ahead.

  Race day saw the Big Island walloped by an advancing storm. The ocean swells were much larger than normal. The trade winds were howling, gusts bending the trees that bordered the Queen K almost horizontal. Hitting my goal time was going to be a challenge.

  “Wow, we have some winds today,” the race announcer said, moments before I hit the water. With all the bodies, legs, and arms chopping the water at once, it looked like a bunch of people were getting eaten by sharks, Mike told me. Given the swells, the densely packed waters, and a thousand swimmers all angling for position, I had trouble taking a breath without getting slugged in the side or swallowing some water. I steered out of the scrum, though I knew it would make for a longer swim. The wind blew one of the outer buoys farther out to sea, making the race longer still.

  Overall, it was a very tough swim. I came out of the water tired, and with the race clock reading forty-two minutes, I knew I needed to keep moving fast. I moved so fast, in fact, trying to keep up with the others rushing through the transition area that I neglected to slather myself with sunblock before hopping onto my bike.

  We headed south toward Kona and then made a turnaround toward Hawi. It was then that the 40–50 mile-per-hour winds hit. I could barely remain upright. Other riders were literally blown off the road. I bore down on the handlebars and fought my way through it. Halfway through the 56-mile ride, ascending the steep road to Hawi, the wind roared so hard that it almost brought me to a standstill.

  On the downhill return, I was propelled by the wind at my back. It was like being shot out of a cannon. At times, I had to brake to keep from being slung into the black lava fields. I finished the bike course in three hours, forty-seven minutes, which left me three and a half hours within which to reach my goal time.

  I tried to jog the run course, but ended up walking for most of it. At times I was forced to do so by the gale-force gusts. For the stretches when there was nobody else on the road, I felt as though I were in an old western movie, leaning into the wind as tumbleweeds crossed in front of me. I picked up the pace for the last couple of miles and finished with a total time of seven hours, fifty-three minutes, right under the mark.

  My neck and back were scorched red—“like a rotisserie chicken,” Mike said, with horror in his voice. I should have cut my shirt off with scissors rather than lift it off over my head—the pain was excruciating.

  That night, when we had a celebration dinner on the beach with Welchy and his wife, Sian, I still wasn’t able to lean back in my chair. He told me that they had only seen worse winds one other time in the thirty years the Ironman had taken place on the Big Island. Excited as he was about how I had done, he was also brutally honest about my chances of finishing the Kona Ironman.

  “We have our work cut out to make this all happen.”

  Even so, I got the feeling that, for the first time, he actually thought I could do it.

  When I got back from Hawaii, I received word that the Kona Ironman organizers had granted me a spot in the 2012 race. With that, any vestige of the life I had known disappeared. I became a machine, built to train. Michelle and I broke up. My friends I never saw. Work only got leftovers. Weekends of fun were a thing of the past.

  One day I did a six-hour bike ride on the Santa Ana River trail. The trail, along a concrete river basin, starts at the Pacific and runs almost due east away from the coast, between Huntington Beach and Newport. My plan was to do two loops of three hours, so I could restock with water and food at the halfway point.

  I got there at dawn. As I did every time before settling onto my bike, I closed my eyes and accepted the agony that was to come. The ride would be awful. Over the hours, the tightness in my legs, hip flexors, and lower back would sear and burn. I would have to put a Great Wall of China around the pain. And that was okay now. The suffering was the price I had grown willing to pay. It would not stop me.

  There were only a few other joggers and cyclists about. I ro
de through one neighborhood after another. Because it was so early, the parks were all empty, the lots barren. Then farther east I finally got into some wooded hills. After an hour and a half, I turned around and cycled back. By now, a bunch of cars had gathered outside Angel Stadium in Anaheim to tailgate before the game. The neighborhood playing fields had also begun to rumble with activity.

  Three hours into the ride, I refueled at my parked car. My muscles were on fire. So be it. I closed my eyes again, rebuilt that wall, and got back on my bike. Others may have moments of exultation on their rides, the cyclist’s version of a runner’s high. With my CP, those moments never came. It was a start-to-finish panorama of pain, and there was no reward in paying attention to it.

  Instead, I focused on little goals, reaching the top of the next hill, crossing the next bridge, pedaling through the next underpass. On the loop this time I heard the screams and laughter of children playing soccer in the park. Angel Stadium was surrounded with tailgaters, music blaring, a real party going on. On my way back (hurting, hurting, hurting after more than five hours on my bike), the parking lots outside the stadium were still full of cars, but the people were all inside, cheering at what sounded like a great game. The neighborhood parks remained crowded—different kids, different families. And there I was too, still fighting to maintain the wall, still pedaling those wheels.

  The effort was showing a return. My swims, bikes, and runs were all faster and longer, and my body was recovering from the workouts much better as well. Now weighing 200 pounds (down 20 pounds from when I started), I was almost showing a bit of a six-pack, in the right lighting.