It was October in British Columbia, in year two of the pandemic, and the fall rains had started, with this year’s deluge one of the wettest and windiest I’d experienced since moving to Vancouver Island. An “atmospheric river” (as the newscasters were teaching us all to say) dumped endless buckets on our metal rooftop. Fallen tree branches crisscrossed our island’s narrow roads.
My husband was out of town, visiting his aging mother for the first time since the pandemic had started. I was managing a multi-day online writing conference I run for an alumni group.
The torrential rains added a steady drip of anxiety because outages were probable, meaning I might easily flub my job as an online moderator. The possibility of a thawing freezer and dark evenings without any way to cook easily wouldn’t be fun, either.
I knew how I was likely to deal with the stress of work, weather, unreliable electricity, and flickering Wi-Fi: by overeating and overdrinking, especially at the end of each intense workday of nearly back-to-back Zooms.
When the conference was finished, I’d turn to challenging work of a different kind, returning to a novel I’d either finish in another few months—or very possibly, throw away. The project had started strong but then I’d plotted myself into a corner, losing track of what I was trying to explore in the first place. The price of creative freedom is a lack of certainty and security, a tradeoff I’ve always accepted, but some seasons are harder than others. This was one of them.
Usually, running is the way I battle my personal demons and restore my creative optimism, but during this stormy week, the local flooded trails weren’t tempting.
I was already visualizing how many tortilla chips and shots of gin I’d allow myself over the week when I spotted a notice from our local gym—still closed for the pandemic—offering spin bicycles for rent. The price was cheap and there was no long-term commitment. I sent an email and soon a man in a pickup truck delivered the bike to my door.
As he wheeled it inside, I apologized for not being strong enough to help him lift the heavy bike up the stairs and into my house. Lifting weights was another good habit I’d lost during the pandemic while picking up several bad ones. Would I forever remember our COVID-19 era as the time I stopped doing real workouts, increased my alcohol consumption by fifty percent, gained back the weight I’d lost in my mid-forties, and become more anxious overall? (I know, I know. One should be grateful just to be alive.)
My first twenty-minute ride left me slick with sweat and surprisingly saddle-sore. Taking a hot bath later, my private parts stung. Had cycling always hurt this much? Finally, in a basement-stored box, I found the old padded bike shorts I’d been wise (or lazy) enough not to toss the last time I’d dabbled with cycling, over a decade earlier.
Way back then, for a period of only three months, I’d thrown myself into the world of amateur local women’s bike racing, spending hours—well, maybe an hour at a time, singular—in order to sample and write about the sport. Was it all suffering? Mostly, if memory served.
Around this time, I’d also done two novice-friendly, women-only sprint triathlons with a friend. More suffering, leavened with pride and the full knowledge that I’d probably never attempt triathlons again.
None of those early experiences explained why, as I rode my way through wet October and into cold, sopping November, I began to fantasize about doing a half-Ironman. Not a full Ironman, mind you—that would be ridiculous. And yet, was it? Time on the indoor bike, struggling to last for a solid hour while my weak lower back throbbed, provided lots of time to watch YouTube videos about the race.
No, it made no sense to dream that big, much as part of me wanted to.
Just admitting the desire to compete in triathlon’s most famous event felt embarrassing to me, like suddenly dreaming of becoming a professional ballerina or an Olympic gymnast at the age of 51.
I assumed one had to be naturally athletic. I assumed there was an expiration date on Ironman ambitions—one’s thirties, possibly. I assumed that even attempting to train for something so hard was bound to end in injury and shame.
I’d missed the boat—and no wonder, because it wasn’t even a boat I was sure I wanted to be on. A full Ironman takes up to seventeen hours. There are deaths every year in Ironman races, and many more people look on the verge of death by the time they finish.
(By this point I’d discovered the famous YouTube video of Sian Welch and Wendy Ingraham death-crawling across the Ironman finish line. More on this later.)
But along with all of these false assumptions and legitimate concerns, I had a faint memory of some other lesser event open to mortals—something more than a sprint (.5-mile swim, 12-mile bike, 3.1-mile run—which takes about two hours, or less for the fast folk), and more than an Olympic distance triathlon.
Tin Man? No, that wasn’t it. (A Tin Man is usually Olympic distance.)
What I had thought of as a “Tin Man” triathlon was actually called a 70.3 event, I soon discovered. This “half-Ironman” consists of a 1.2-mile swim, 56-mile bike, and 12.1-mile run. The maximum finish time was eight and a half hours. Longer than a work day! Better than seventeen hours, but still hard to imagine.
The run I knew I could do, with training, having covered that distance—slowly—in the last month.
But the swim and the bike distances seemed staggering. All three sports done together in a single day, with the time pressure of strict cut-offs was mind-boggling.
And yet, clearly, this was a time in my life when I wanted my mind to be boggled. Needed it, even—like a late-pandemic reboot, shaking me out of bad habits and doldrums that no vaccination could cure.
Next up: Commitment.
Photo by PAN XIAOZHEN on Unsplash