Against the Odds

by John L. Pendergrass

  It’s not just a sporting event. It’s a lifestyle, a mystical spiritual journey of self-discovery, a triumph over pain and adversity, a place where ordinary people achieve extraordinary things. Or so they say. No one is given to understatement in the world of the IRONMAN Triathlon.

  The key piece of the puzzle is the actual name, “IRONMAN Triathlon.” It’s a magical word that conjures up images of heroic athletes covering vast distances, overcoming daunting physical and mental challenges, and struggling valiantly to reach the finish line. Nothing else comes close in endurance sports.

  Much of the allure revolves around a question of supply and demand. There are only around thirty IRONMAN® Triathlons in the world. These races are held on six continents and serve the nearly seven billion people on our planet. The number of official triathlons varies as new venues are added each year and occasionally one drops off the schedule. By contrast, USA Triathlon, the governing body for the sport in our country, sanctions thousands of triathlons each year in the United States alone. If you want to do a triathlon you can probably find one very close to where you live, every state in the union hosts multiple races. IRONMAN races are another story, the choices are few, the opportunities are limited. It’s not something you can decide to do on the spur of the moment.

  While there are more than thirty IRONMAN Triathlons, there is only one IRONMAN World Championship, and it is held each fall in Hawaii. This is the most famous triathlon in the world, but not just anyone can show up and race; most athletes who compete in Hawaii qualify by winning an entry at one of the other IRONMAN events. These slots are awarded to the top finishers at the various IRONMAN races the preceding year. A few of the shorter IRONMAN 70.3® Triathlons also award slots to Hawaii.

  The professionals earn slots as do the age groupers. Competitors in every age group, both men and women, have a chance to win a spot in Hawaii. The more popular age groups with many athletes have more slots available than those age groups with few competitors. There are a lot of men age 35 to 39, for example, but few women age 60 to 64. Regardless of the age, the competition for these spots is always intense.

  Intense may be too mild a word. For some athletes, their very existence revolves around qualifying for Hawaii. Every workout is carefully dissected and evaluated. Eating habits, body weight, and heart rate are logged and charted. Things like family, job, friends, and faith go to the back of the line. It all goes into a big IRONMAN cauldron that contains the meaning of life.

  The day following a qualifying race, a meeting is held and the slots are awarded to the winners. In some cases these slots “roll down” to the next in line if the winners don’t show up at the meeting or if they choose not to go to Hawaii or if they have already qualified at another race. The qualifying athlete must be physically present, money in hand, to claim his or her slot, otherwise it rolls down to the next person.

  WTC has another way to generate funds and, at the same time, give the average Joe a chance to reach the Promised Land. It’s the annual IRONMAN lottery. Most competitors in an IRONMAN Triathlon have no realistic shot at ever qualifying for Hawaii. For a nice fee, they can join many thousands of other athletes hoping to win one of the approximately 200 slots awarded in the lottery. Not only that, if they pay a little extra, their chances increase.

  It’s a lot better odds than the Powerball, but it’s still a long shot. Plus, there’s one other crucial difference. In the Powerball lottery you win big piles of someone else’s money, in the IRONMAN lottery you win the opportunity to spend big piles of your own money.

  It’s not all take, WTC gives back in a big way. In one area, IRONMAN racing stands head and shoulders above the rest of the athletic community. It has established a division to allow athletes with special physical challenges the opportunity to compete. Blind athletes, deaf athletes, amputees, paraplegics, and others with a variety of physical challenges participate in IRONMAN races around the world. This isn’t a separate competition like the Paralympics; these athletes are integrated into the main event.

  There are currently two different divisions for the physically challenged. In the handcycle division, athletes use a hand-cranked cycle for the bike and a special racing wheelchair for the run. This division has become so popular that athletes must qualify for the IRONMAN World Championship at other events. The second category is for competitors with other special physical challenges, such as vision impairment.

  If I had to name the one thing I most admire about IRONMAN® races and WTC, it is the special effort to incorporate the physically challenged into the triathlon community. These athletes are featured prominently in all aspects of the event. You see them before, during, and after the race, and they are part of the television specials. These outstanding men and women have overcome tremendous obstacles and are a true inspiration to everyone.

  WTC is a great success story. It stages around thirty IRONMAN Triathlons a year, and each of these events can handle no more than 2,500 entrants. Unlike big city marathons, you can’t pack thousands and thousands of athletes at the starting line, the logistics are too difficult. With thousands of people aspiring to earn the name of an IRONMAN finisher, the races commonly sell out the same day that registration opens. The demand is great. How can WTC open the event to more athletes? How can they bring more people into the IRONMAN tent?

  WTC offered an answer with the IRONMAN 70.3® Triathlon series, a natural step for the athlete who is beginning to take triathlons seriously and dreams of becoming an IRONMAN athlete. Early on, finishing a full IRONMAN race may seem to be an impossible task, but attempting an IRONMAN 70.3 event is easy to imagine.

  Currently, there are over fifty races in the IRONMAN 70.3 Triathlon series with new ones being added frequently. The events are staged around the world on six continents with a championship format similar to the IRONMAN series. The IRONMAN World Championship 70.3 is currently held in the Las Vegas area. Athletes qualify for this event by winning slots at other IRONMAN 70.3 races.

  Communities around the world jump at the opportunity to host one of these events, paying directly and in kind for the privilege. An IRONMAN 70.3® Triathlon is less cumbersome to stage than an IRONMAN race, the logistics are much simpler for race promoters. By late afternoon, everyone is finished, the course is clear, the roads are reopened, volunteer workers are done, and police are no longer needed. Both the full distance and half distance races are blue chip events for local businesses and governments. Athletes and their families come from all over the world to participate, bringing a level of prestige and a boom in tourism. The IRONMAN name is magic at any distance.

  The appeal carries over into merchandise.

  WTC sells a multitude of products at their races and online. All their events have expos with mountains of merchandise for sale. Naturally, this spot is called the IRONMAN Store and it racks up huge sales. The day after the race, the IRONMAN Store reopens with a different line of items. The shirts, jackets, jerseys, and such have Finisher boldly inscribed. This lets friends and families know that you not only entered but actually finished the event. I have seen long lines of exhausted athletes waiting patiently the day after a race, anxious to pick up finisher merchandise. After all, completing an IRONMAN Triathlon needs to be memorialized in every way possible.

  Every major sporting event sells lots of merchandise, but there’s one area where IRONMAN Triathlons have them all beat: the official tattoo. This is the ultimate triumph of marketing, an advertiser’s dream, a no-cost permanent billboard for your product. It’s there for the world to see and admire twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. In their wildest dreams, the big ad agencies could never imagine such a bold stroke of good fortune.

  A substantial number of people who finish an IRONMAN Triathlon have the official M-DOT logo tattooed on their body. In the triathlon world, the M-DOT is an ubiquitous icon that never fails to impress the impressionable. The tattoo is an indelible remembrance of your journey that you’ll carry to y
our grave.

  The tattoo is a great, symbolic event, but for an old guy like me, it’s the most mystifying of modern styles. Throughout history young men underwent the rite to mark the passage from boyhood to adulthood. In today’s society the IRONMAN® tattoo marks the transition from the everyday leisure life into the world of the athlete. People with one of these tattoos are not casual aficionados, they love this event. For many, their whole identity is wrapped up in the race. It’s as if they’re better people because of it, as though fitness equals character. According to these folks, the world is divided into those who have finished an IRONMAN Triathlon and those who can only dream. Since it’s one of the most important events in their life, they want to commemorate it in a permanent way.

  The experience is definitely unique and life changing, but that doesn’t mean there is no room for improvement. I have some concrete suggestions to offer, things that will make this event even more mysterious and elite. To start with, I think we need a secret handshake, just like we had in my college fraternity. Once you complete an IRONMAN race for the first time, officials could pull you aside in a special secret tent and show you the handshake. This handshake would, of course, only be known and used by finishers.

  Similarly, a secret password would be valuable for identifying fellow finishers in public. If you are in a bar and appear to be a finisher (thin, muscular, tattooed), someone could approach you and ask the secret password question. For example, “Do you know what time it is?” or, perhaps, “Where is the restroom located?” Any of these secret password questions would trigger the secret password reply: “Hell, yes, I’m an IRONMAN!” Both parties would then embrace warmly and exchange stories of their race experiences.

  “The waves in that swim were tough.”

  “I never thought the bike would end.”

  An IRONMAN Triathlon lends itself to great drama. No one can fully grasp the experience. The media is filled with stories of people who overcame tremendous obstacles to become a finisher. Athletes survive horrible accidents, terrible diseases, drug addiction, and many other barriers on their way to the finish line. No sport celebrates the triumphs of regular people like this one does.

  Old people like me can sometimes manage to finish. Then there are “Biggest Loser” kinds of stories where athletes go from gross obesity to IRONMAN veteran. The blogosphere is full of folks like the Marshmallow Man, the Couch Potato, and the Lard Boy who are training for an IRONMAN race. A couple of middle-aged friends of mine shed 50 pounds, threw away their blood pressure meds, and finished a race—all in 18 months. Now if I can just get them to quit talking about it all of the time. No obstacle is too great; a heart transplant recipient recently competed in an IRONMAN Triathlon.

  Every IRONMAN story is interesting. I love and admire everyone who competes in one of these events, the details are always fascinating. There are few dilettantes in the world of this incredible race. There’s no sense of entitlement, no room for whining or victimhood, no place for laziness. It’s just a hard, time-consuming goal to reach, and that’s what makes it so worthwhile.

  The IRONMAN mystique lives on.

  I’M ALL in. After talking about it, thinking about it, ruminating about it, and pontificating about it, I’ve finally signed up for an IRONMAN® Triathlon. I’ve sent in the entry fee, bought my airline ticket, and booked my hotel reservation. There is no turning back.

  I’ve entered the 2004 IRONMAN Brazil in May, less than four months away. Time is short but I’m determined. I can already see myself trotting across the finish line, modestly accepting the victor’s laurel, describing the race in excruciating detail to family and friends, basking in the glory.

  Choosing Brazil was easy. Entering an IRONMAN Triathlon here in the United States is too much of a long-term project for me. All of the American-based races are very popular and fill up a year in advance. I’m not ready to look that far into the future. I seldom know what I’ll be doing next week, much less twelve months from now. I could be injured, unmotivated, swamped at work, in bankruptcy, dealing with family problems, living at an extended care facility.

  With just a few months to race day I’ve got a rough idea of what kind of shape I’ll be in. More important, I’ll be in full-time training mode for weeks, not months. Some people are able to stay on a strict schedule for a full year leading up to the big event, but that’s not for me. My attention span is short and my good intentions tend to weaken over time.

  Besides, Brazil is a great place. Why should I go to Idaho or Wisconsin for a grueling triathlon when instead I can visit the land of the samba and the Carnival?

  Now that I’ve signed up it’s time to start training, but where do I begin? I know I need to swim, bike, and run and I know I need to do a whole lot more of each discipline than I’m doing now.

  First things first, I’ll start with the swim. It’s the first event in the triathlon and if I’m not able to swim 2.4 miles in less than two hours twenty minutes then the bike and the run won’t matter. Missing the swim cutoff would be a cruel fate, the worst ending imaginable.

  For the past three to four years I’ve been doing a little swimming every now and then, and I’ve managed to finish a few triathlons, mostly the sprint distance. These races usually feature a swim of a half mile or less, so it didn’t take a lot of training to get ready. My basic preparation for these sprint triathlons consisted of swimming around a thousand yards twice a week for two to three weeks before the race. In the winter I would often go for months without swimming at all. Obviously for a 2.4 mile swim I’ll need to do a lot more training than a half mile twice a week. The big question is how much more?

  I look on the Internet and I skim the triathlon magazines. There’s a lot of advice floating around. Quite a few experts have written books and articles devoted to training for an IRONMAN® race. I also ask the few people I know who have done an IRONMAN Triathlon for their recommendations. There’s no simple answer, the advice bounces all over the place. Some of it is practical, some of it is inspirational, some of it is useless. Even those athletes who have never done one have strong opinions. There are experts hiding behind every bush, waiting to point out my shortcomings.

  The problem is that there’s too much information, too many anecdotes. Besides, how relevant is the advice? None of the athletes I speak with are in their sixties like me, none are even in their fifties. There just aren’t that many triathletes of my age to draw upon. My experts have Mercedes bodies with Porsche hearts and lungs, but I’m an old Volkswagen chassis with a lawnmower engine. What works for these young guys may be a bit too much for me. These days a hard workout sometimes leaves me feeling like someone has walked over my grave.

  I read all the various training programs that I can find. Lots of famous triathletes have devised detailed training programs that can be individualized for any athlete. These programs are not simple, though. They talk about various zones and heart rate levels and such. Some training programs are like a tutorial on the physiology of exercise. For me, it’s like a return visit to medical school.

  None of the training plans say something simple like “swim this number of yards this number of times a week.” Instead, there are a lot about warm-ups, drills, strokes, intervals, intensity, and things like that. Some programs measure workouts in time, while others measure them in distance. It’s hard for me to know how long these training sessions will take. A good swimmer needs only 30 minutes to finish a workout that takes me over an hour.

  All my friends and acquaintances who swam on a swim team growing up are much faster than me, so I ask them for advice whenever I catch them in the pool. They take pity on me and give me lots of tips. Rotate with your hips, don’t cross over with your stroke, your legs are sinking, your head is too high. In swimming, form trumps function. I try to incorporate their advice but it doesn’t seem to make me any faster. It’s hard for me to think and swim at the same time. If I correct one error, another pops up to take its place.

  In the end, I decide to conv
ert the detailed advice on swimming into a rough number of yards per week. I add up all the yards in the various plans and then divide the total by the number of plans. The magic number turns out to be 6,023 yards per week. A pleasantly precise number that sounds like something I can do. I’ve been covering around 2,000 yards a week, so I decide to start swimming three times a week instead of two, and I gradually increase my distance each week.

  It all seems to work out pretty well, the more I swim the easier it gets. I’m slow, I make a lot of waves, I’ve got poor form, but I’m better than I used to be. Once a week I’m at the pool at 5:30 a.m. for my long swim session. In a couple of months I’ve got that long workout up to two miles.

  These long sessions are very monotonous; swimming is the ultimate form of sensory deprivation. The same scenery, back and forth, lap after lap, a mind numbing immersion in a blue-green world. I don’t seem to get tired, I just get bored.

  When I glance at the swimmers in adjacent lanes, I’m often amazed. A middle-aged man, 40 pounds overweight, whizzes past. He is shaped like a big marshmallow but he has no trouble repeatedly lapping me. Some days a tall, young, muscular guy who resembles Michael Phelps swims next to me. We do lap after lap at almost the exact same speed. I tell myself I’m giving Michael Phelps all he can handle. Unfortunately he’s not Michael Phelps, he’s just another slow swimmer. I find out later that he first learned to swim only three months ago.

  Since the swim leg of an IRONMAN® race has a 2 hour 20 minute cut-off time, anyone not out of the water by then is disqualified and not allowed to continue. I can make the distance in the pool in about 1 hour, 45 minutes, so I should have a little cushion in the race. Still, I’m a little concerned. In the pool, everyone stays in the proper lane, during the race it’s every man for himself. Pushing and shoving are the rule; open water swimming is chaotic and jagged.