Writing all of this down has been circling in my head for the last few months. To be honest, I was waiting for the point when I would climb up out of hell, and then I could casually talk about it in the past tense through a veil of optimism & strength, oh yeah, sure, it was hard but I got through because I'd be beyond it, finally spit out the other side. But, without being melodramatic, I'm not sure if or when that is going to happen, and spouting my overly-wordy crap in this space is one of the few coping mechanisms I have left.
It didn't start, as many injuries do, with a thunderclap. It was more like a splinter, so small I barely noticed it. Then another piece cracked, then another, and then one day I woke up and everything had fallen apart. It began in April. I noticed in the pool that the back of my shoulder felt a little bit tight and that the last two fingers of my hand were going numb. I chalked it up to the fact that 99% of my swim training for the last six months could be described as, maximum effort & still getting lapped and made a mental note to get a massage. It came and went, barely noticeable, forgotten once I was out of the water and dragging myself home to eat, work, and then scrape into the next as hard as I can session on tap.
Later that month, I woke up one morning and couldn't turn my head to the right. A crick in my neck, I thought, we've all done it, slept a bit weird and then spent the day popping your jaw and Advil both. I had an appointment with someone the very next morning, he worked on my neck and shoulder and upper back, frowning and harrumph-ing and saying more than a few times, this is really quite bad. It fixed me right up, though, I treated myself carefully the next few days as it eased off and then got straight back to it. Anything to be great, right?
But a week later it was there again, worse, sharp, shooting down along my spine and up into my skull, into my shoulder, through the rotator cuffs, wrapping around the ribs, wrenching me into tears should I momentarily forget and look over my shoulder to change lanes in traffic. I started ringing the alarm bells into the village I've grown here in Colorado, talented intelligent people who have been key to letting me continue to do this crazy thing that I love for so many years now. And that's where it all just gets a bit blurry and difficult to trace. Everyone was able to provide relief - for a few days, and then it would come crashing right back in. Four months later, I've seen three orthopedists, one sports medicine specialist, seven physical therapists, two massage therapists, a chiropractor and an acupuncturist. I've taken a dictionary of medicines, I've been through a glacier of ice, heat, don't even fucking twist your mouth to ask me if I stopped training, stretchy bands, injections, strength, walking, yoga, meditation, therapy. Nothing has changed. Without exaggeration, I am in pain all of the time. That's incredibly hard to type, to admit. As athletes we are meant to be strong, stoic, tough; we silently agree to never admit to weakness or suffering or distress until it is long over, and then only in flip references to how much it absolutely sucked. But I am not past it. It is not over. And it stopped being about swim bike run quite some time ago. It became simpler than that - breathe. Move. Live. Many days - just survive.
I've had two MRIs - loudest nap ever! Both have shown something pretty seriously wrong but somewhat common to athletes of my age, which means the only thing that practitioners can really agree on is that surely it must be something else. The sports medicine doctor (that I trust inside and out) sent me to the shoulder specialist to get scheduled for surgery, who instead immediately turfed me over to the neck specialist so they could quibble about who would stick needles in me first and where, which pretty well sums up my journey through our healthcare system. It reminds me of a time about four years ago when cycling was causing knee pain. The physical therapists all told me I needed a new bike fit and the bike fitters all told me I needed physical therapy and I recall venting in frustration to my friend Scott, I need a physical therapist who also is a bike fitter just so that he can't kick me out of his fucking office. And somewhere in the beginning of all of this, a saddle-sore-turned-cyst reappeared, ruptured and needed to be surgically cleaned out. Then a huge hematoma developed so on top of everything else, I've been frightening a completely different set of MDs about my seven-week-old purple donkey testicle that refuses to die or be swallowed back into my body and honest to God I would love it if I could go just three days in a row without someone asking me casually and without humor, how's the vag today?
Chronic pain is different from an injury. This isn't, my knee hurts when I run after fifteen minutes. This is, my neck hurts when I breathe. How to baffle all the, well if it hurts when you do that, don't do that doctors around! It's nerve pain, I think we are nearly agreed. It's chronic, it moves around, and if I could amputate my neck and the entire right side of my body above the waist, I would do it. That's where I'm at. Being in pain this long has changed me, not for the better. All my dials are cranked up to 10. You know that morning, the one where you oversleep and forget to eat breakfast and then drop your coffee cup on the floor in the garage where it shatters but you're late to work so you have to leave it and then someone cuts you off in traffic and instead of giving you the finger gives you the smug little wave, you know the flash of pure rage you get in that moment? That's how I feel, all of the time. And I may be a dramatic person but this is not drama talking, this is honesty stripped raw, any filter or fluff worn away by how plain old hard the last few months have been. I'm angry at how I ended up here, at how no one has fixed it yet, at the people who I feel like have abandoned me along the way because they can't be troubled by a complicated problem that doesn't have a clear answer or an athlete who dares to feel pain, at the fact that I can't do something as simple as get out of bed in the middle of the night to pee without wincing. And I don't think anyone really knows how bad it has been, other than my husband, who is destined for some sort of mega cotton-candy-naked-lady-wine-coolers-and-cocaine-bounce-house afterlife after the last five months (not to mention, the last seven years) of surviving our marriage together. He knows, he feels it too, he would do anything to fix it and he might be the one person on the planet more angry than me about what has happened here; I know how hopeless he feels, every day, that he can't take away my pain.
I know I've retreated from the world, it's hard to have the energy to support the friends you love when everything is though a haze, and that is a horrible truth for someone who loves people the way I do. Eight. My pain is an eight. Each new doctor, therapist, everyone I see asks the same stupid fucking question, where is your pain today? I've spent a lot of time facedown on a lot of tables repeating the word fuck and counting to three because I can't process any more numbers than that, I've had a lot of really horrible close-to-blacking-out treatment and a lot of those things have worked. For a day. Maybe two or three, which is just enough time to shake myself off and believe that I'm at the end of this hell, just enough time to breathe, and then sure enough, it slams back into me and I go down. Again. And that's even worse than whatever the fuck is going on in my body, this rollercoaster of hope and despair is what is actually going to break me down completely. When someone asks, hey, are you okay? what they are generally hoping to hear is some version of, yup, hanging in there! Because after a while it becomes too depressing to repeat all the time, nope, not okay, still in pain, horrible actually, I feel completely broken, my body has failed me, I'm falling apart, I can't bear it, I don't know what to do and I'm not actually sure I'm going to make it here. The truth is awkward, it's exhausting, no one likes to be the friend that's in crisis all the time, no one wants to complain constantly, so at some point it just becomes easier to lie, or to simply not reply at all, to hide just a little bit more in the blazing nightmare that your life has become. I know that there are people in the world dealing with chronic pain much worse and longer lasting than what I have been through and I am here to say that I honestly do not understand how they do it. I'm not sure I could do it, I don't want to live like this, I can't, I won't.
It would be easy to blame it all on ironman, of course everyone wants to dump it on either the distance or my own stupidity, but here's the thing. On the inside, I work hard to do this right. I educate myself, I do the strength training, the recovery, the sleep, mostly the nutrition (cookies have never herniated a disc or compressed a nerve bundle or torn a labrum in any research that I have read), I don't cut corners, I do the 1%, I don't do this alone, and after so many years in this sport I know that you do not get to nine finish lines if you are being a jackass about it. I surround myself with people that I trust in order to protect myself, to protect my life in this sport that I love, to protect my own body, and while sometimes I have been really incredibly wrong about the people I have chosen to trust, this seems like a pretty harsh way to learn that lesson.
When things fall apart, everything gets pared down. Friendships, travel, adventure, joy, it all gets cut away. I don't like who this has made me, this fat angry person who cries all the time and flies off the handle at nothing because my sympathetic nervous system is so beyond wrecked that I have no ability to tolerate even the smallest amount of stress. This isn't who I want to be. I want to be a person who rips into life full tilt, with humor, joy, gratitude, patience, the girl who bounces off to Hawaii on three days notice, who drags you up a mountain at 4am just to see the sun rise like it doesn't happen every day, who shows up with tequila when life takes a rotten dive, who is up for any adventure, who tackles fear by running straight at it, who will maybe always have five pounds to lose, the girl who works hard to love life so damn hard. I miss it. I miss that life, I miss movement, it's as simple as I miss my bike. I miss my own happiness so much that it's hard to breathe if I stop and think about it for more than a moment before doggedly cracking on, calling another doctor, getting another opinion, pulling the ice pack out of the freezer with a sigh. Which is why I had hoped that I could write about this when I came out the other side, because then I could rationally discuss the science of everything that happened and how it was solved, only show the highlights, the patience and grace that everyone talks about as a virtue of devastating injury. But that's not where I am. Instead, I am here. I am broken. I am in pain. I am not okay.
It's been nearly two years since I stomped a marathon in Boulder.
I haven't set foot on the vast majority of the run course since. Maybe (probably) I'm overly superstitious, but it's been easy to avoid. There are squillions of places to run in Colorado where I don't have to face my ghosts. Because that's truly how it has felt since then. Haunted, by grief and failure both.
The month after Santa Rosa brought another one of those little stormy seasons in training, the kind that only lasts a few weeks but when you're in it, feels eternal. The crick in my neck flared out angrily in every direction until I ended up parked in bed with my laptop, working between muscle relaxers and people diagnosing me with too much stress. I am fortunate to not have had too many of these train-screeching-to-a-halt injuries in the last six years but this one came all too soon on the heels of a rough 2016. It took a while to sort out the root cause, then a few more days before it actually started calming down, yet another day or two before I stopped eating like a jackass and living in my pajama pants and suddenly it was the day before ironman. I had signed up to volunteer throughout, supporting the swim and the run and the finish line. I ended up having to bail on swim support thanks to the still-crabby neck/back/shoulder nerve situation but was grateful that I felt healed enough to sit on my mountain bike, mostly coasting, for three-plus hours as an escort on the run course.
I got up early on Sunday and went for a run; it's the first time in about a month that the miles came as freely and easily as they did that morning. I thought about my athlete racing, her first marathon and ironman both, and winged good mental mojo her way as I chugged along on deserted roads. I got out to the bike course and caught her on the first lap, happy, smiling, working, then headed down to Boulder to wait for the pros to come into T2.
I'll be honest, when I signed up for this job, I wanted to escort the first place female. Who wouldn't? There was a pretty decent chance that it would be one of my swim teammates, i.e. someone who swims in the lane next to me but obviously in a completely different zip code along with most of the rest of the pool. I'm a dork with a huge heart and that seemed like it would be pretty much the coolest (or likely the most annoying thing ever, for her). But when the little cards got handed out, I ended up with fifth, so I started trying to sort out via the internet who that would be. Ironman athlete tracking hit a new level of incompetence this weekend, meaning that from my phone I was unable to even pull up the list of athletes racing as the tracker produced nothing but a blank page.
So I noodled around while I waited, mainly being a pain in the ass on twitter. I was panicked that I would have to pee while escorting and be forced to choose between exploding or abandoning my person for 90 seconds, which led me to make 800 trips to a portapotty plus one sorta behind a bush on the creek path after telling the guy sitting there, I'm just going to duck behind your tree, don't mind my butt cheeks I hope none of this is poison ivy? That turned out to be the husband of the athlete I ended up riding with for the first 16-17 miles, as these things happen. The pro men came flying through, then the first two women, then a few age groupers blasting the front of the race, then women 3-4-5, little ducks in a row, off we went.
I told my athlete, hi, I'm Katie, you don't have to talk to me, I'm just going to ride right here behind you. She asked what place she was in, I told her, and then for a while it was so quiet on the path that my squeaky rear brake made me cringe in the silence.
She worked her way steadily through the course; random spectators kept throwing out wildly inconsistent splits or helpful commentary of the eye-rolling variety akin to, she's right up there go get her! (Great idea, let's try that!) My natural inclination is to chatter like a monkey but I know that when I am hurting, any stimulus makes me want to screech with rage so I mentally stapled my mouth shut and simply tried to not run her over with my bike.
I can't think of a time in my life where I have been so close to another human being suffering at that level, and it was indescribable (but bloggers lead their lives using seven thousand words where none would do, so let us crack on). It felt sacred, holy, to bear witness to a fight of that magnitude. Her suffering is not my story to tell, but I know suffering when I see it, the empty scent of pain, the devastating wrench of grief. And from my own experience I do know that sometimes there is nothing better to be said or done other than to silently be present and hope to lift the isolation that surrounds.
I've been fortunate to spend the last several months seeing what triathlon looks like when it is approached as a job, not simply a passion. A great deal of that has been really good for me, it has been a positive practice. But the danger here, I've realized, is that it may become water on the fire of what drives me, dousing the spark into damp ashes instead of letting it burst into flame. It's possible I'm making that mistake now, attributing so much importance to what was simply another day at work for someone. Ironman for me is an emotional swan dive into all the crap that I hide under a rock, so that's what I saw on Sunday; one of Frankl's three sources of meaning in life, courage during difficult times. He believed that suffering is without purpose until we give it meaning by how we respond. I think of my own experiences with this distance, and the races that stand out are not the ones where I ran the fastest but the ones where my suffering meant the most. Coeur d'Alene last year, done on a body slack with physical fitness but in memoriam of what I had lost. Arizona, the first time I believed in myself. And yes, Boulder, one of the worst days of my racing life but a catalyst for change that has propelled me forward and brought so much good into the groove I am wearing around the sun ever since. What is to give light must endure burning.
I believe in a lot of bullshit that I'm confident makes a lot of people roll a lot of their eyes into a lot of their heads. But this was too clearly a gift from the universe to consider it any kind of coincidence. Where I was not given what I wanted but instead what I had no idea that I desperately needed. The grit, the fight I saw in the exact moments that left me crumbling two years earlier, the raw courage that I was privileged enough to brush up against on Sunday afternoon - that will stay with me for the rest of my life.
A couple of weeks before Santa Rosa, I remember swimming one morning and having the very clear thought, I don't want to do this anymore. Not like this. Tears in the googles, Amanda Beard's memoir, not like this. And don't ever try and fucking tell me that the body can't hear what the mind spits out, because served up promptly a few weeks later, BAM, injury, exactly what I had asked for on a silver platter, nuclear shutdown, no swimming, then no training, then nothing at all except pain, blinding and white. I was frustrated, I was stamping it small and shoveling rocks on top, and if I should have learned anything in 36 years it's that your body does not take that shit, can not, will not. Suppression is simply delayed explosion. I asked myself back in February, what is inside you? What are you born to do? And in the months after ironman, I lost that drive, trying to navigate life without all the awkwardness that is part of what makes me, me, trying to be perfect, not make waves, scrunch down, stay quiet, be seen but not heard. That's the baggage I carry. But I don't want that to be my experience, your playing small does not serve the world, I want to be the fucking universe in ecstatic motion.
I rode back out on the run course late in the day, the look of the race quite different in the hours that had passed. But instead of haunted, it felt like the morning after hard rain, as if the water had washed everything clean. Athletes, silent and stoic, each fighting their own personal battles on a field gone quiet. I wanted to say to every one, but didn't, I am here with you. You are not alone. I spent more time volunteering at the finish line, the best moments of the day, when the suffering is over and the junkfood drunkfest can begin.
I was confident after New Zealand that I needed to walk away from ironman for a while. It wasn't a negative decision, it was simply wanting to cast light in a different direction, dance on a different playground. But god, it's my heart. I don't quite know yet where, or when, or how soon (other than, not soon), all I know right now is that it will be. A spark, bursting into flame.
As far as race weeks go, this one wasn't great.
My neck/upper back freaked out. It started as, weird, maybe I slept wrong and pretty rapidly degenerated into, that's cool I don't need to look left or right or up or down ever again. I had some life stress going on so it wasn't exactly a mystery as to why it popped up then. I wasn't even sure if I was going to be able to go race, but by the time Thursday rolled around, it had calmed down enough that I packed up the bike and got on the plane.
I landed in San Jose to spend the weekend with my remember-that-one-time-when-you-rode-your-bike-straight-over-me good friend Ashley (and her four ounces of new kitten). I built the bike, got it checked over by an awesome friend-of-a-friend who fixed all the little things that I may or may not have noticed (tires on backwards?) & we drove up to Sonoma.
The logistics Friday were relatively easy. I woke up and went for a short run; it felt as awful as I would have expected the day after traveling and driving and so much stress in the week. We rode down into Santa Rosa, where packet pick-up went much more swiftly than I anticipated. I was able to drop my run bag off right there and then we headed out to the lake. I did a very short test ride to make sure nothing was caddy-wompus, checked the bike, and we got the heck out of there before the place got crazy. Lunch, a nap, and then I managed to find a completely empty SCM pool somewhere to do a shake-out swim before bed.
I actually slept okay, a bit twitchy and I overslept my alarm by about fifteen minutes before Ashley poked me awake. I was worried about the logistics of the morning but we followed the cattle through and I had plenty of time for a jog, a few potty stops, and a pretty short warm-up swim. The race was a self-seeded rolling start so I lined up right around the thirty minute sign.
I chatted a bit the day before with another friend about the day and my thoughts on how it would unfold. It had been almost two years - and three IMs - since the last time I raced a 70.3 and I was pretty sure that I had completely forgotten what it felt like to race any other way than, calm down slow down you have a long way to go. But as we talked, I realized that what I really wanted was to just mostly race by feel, bust off the rust, encounter no drama and see where things landed at the end of the day.
Swim: 1.2 miles, 31:45 3rd AG
I had hoped to blast out a bit and grab some good feet for the swim but we were sent off into the water one-by-one, which nixed that idea. I did hop on the feet ahead of me out to the first buoy but the effort was so overly easy that I went around him as we turned and then was alone in clear water for the rest of the swim. The effort felt okay, maybe a bit on the easy side as I was worried about what was going on in my neck, but steady. The swim course had been changed at the last minute due to gusty winds but I didn't notice much chop in the water so either it worked or IMNZ has forever ruined me in terms of conditions. I had a weird coughing fit coming around the second or third buoy and, remembering all the articles I've read lately on coughing = heart failure, stopped to freak out for a moment and spit into my hand to see if I was hacking up blood (of course I wasn't). I got moving again and was just considering picking up the effort when we went around the bend and there was the exit. The theme of the day: oh shit we're done already I probably should have worked a bit harder. Please enjoy this incredibly flattering photo of me blowing my nose into my wetsuit.
T1: 9:06
Transition was so long that for the first time ever, I regretted not leaving shoes at the swim exit. With air temps in the 40s and water temps in the 60s, running hard uphill with frozen feet on steep rubbly concrete was the worst part of the day. I've heard that the run was somewhere between .3 and .4 miles and that seems right. By the time I got to my bike, my feet ached from the cold and the rocks. I swam in a sports bra only so I could pull on a dry top in transition, plus socks, both of which I was grateful I took the time to do once I got on the bike.
Bike: 56 miles, 2:50:59 14th AG
There's a teeny bump up after going over the bridge out of transition but then a long descent follows. 2-3 weeks prior to the race, I crashed and then had a terrifying very-near-miss so I'll be honest and say that I was riding MUCH more cautiously and hesitantly than usual. I got passed multiple times on the descent and was cursing myself for riding like such a weenie but those near misses were just too close in the past for me to really be over it. I'll own it, it's what I needed to feel confident again.
Once we got down the descent, I was able to get into a good rhythm for a while but about 45 minutes into the ride, I noticed that something just felt out of whack. A few minutes sitting up and I realized that my aero pads had gradually and completely collapsed onto the handlebars over the first fifteen miles. I tried to yank them up but the bolts were clamped on too tightly to be able to move them back. It turns out that the clamps were defective and have since been replaced by Felt, but in the moment I didn't know that and granted myself the luxury of a few minutes of mentally swearing at everyone who had ever touched the bike in its relatively short lifetime (including myself, although this did not get disassembled for travel).
It actually wasn't a bad course to ride mostly sitting up as the roads were rough and there were a lot of sharp turns. There was a bit of gusty swirly wind here and there but for the most part I didn't notice it. I think we were all expecting a killer tailwind based on how it was blowing the day before and the general sense I got post-race was that no one experienced that and rode a bit slower than they had hoped across the board. I rode completely by feel, glancing at the Garmin every now and then to make sure that my 10s power didn't start with a 3 but otherwise just went. Somewhere around mile 40 I realized that I wasn't hating every pedal stroke and my adductors weren't being torn from my body so I don't think that I rode nearly as strong as I could or maybe even should have. But in hindsight, I would much rather have had a day where everything unrolled smoothly and maybe a hair under the right effort level than have had another race where shit blew sixteen times sideways because I took a risk.
I got through my bottles, stopped once to pee as I still cannot pee while moving, I ate every single thing I had packed and it was just over so quickly (but also, well, not that quickly). The last 15-20 minutes I noticed that I felt hungry; I'm still adjusting my pre-race breakfast and it's obviously not dialed in quite yet. I had no idea what my ride time was as I rolled into town but I felt fine and ready to run so I was happy.
Nutrition: Two Bobo's Bars & two Honey Stinger Waffles for 1000 calories or 352 calories/hour, nearly three bottles of NBS Hydration for 72 ounces or 26 oz/hour.
T2: 3:54
T2 wasn't nearly as long as T1 but my bike was racked right next to run out so I had a long jog to get there. I made sure to grab all of my snacks as I felt a bit bonky but got out of there as quickly as I could.
Run, 13.1 miles 1:58:25 14th AG
I know better than to shovel down a huge pile of calories in the first mile of the run, no matter how much I am bonking, because that is the recipe for running potty to potty for the rest of the race. So I put down a few chews, waited twenty minutes, put down a few more, repeat. In hindsight, I think I could have pushed this closer together or maybe put down more than three at once because I never really felt like I got on top of the bonk throughout the entire run. Miles four through eight in particular were about as miserable and sluggish as I've felt in a race for a really long time. I started the coke early, hoping that the extra calories and caffeine would help but I never really came around. But I didn't crash, either, I ran quite steadily throughout, there wasn't much decoupling in terms of heart rate and pacing but - more confidently than the bike - I can say that there is a lot of room here for better execution the next time around.
After riding either in half-aero on busted bars or sitting up for the last two hours, my body was cranky in a few places where it never really is cranky but that all worked itself out over the first few miles. I decided before the race that I would run 100% on feel, I never looked at heart rate or pace or splits or anything until it was over. In hindsight, of course, I'm curious about this decision. I ran a full 10 bpm lower than I usually do in half IM and the pace was closer to what I would associate with an ironman effort, but I suppose that's to be expected when I really haven't focused on the 70.3 distance in some time. And I'm okay with all of it. I do wonder if I had been watching pace or heart rate if I would have pushed harder on the run, but paired with just barely holding off a bonk it might have ended up in complete disaster if I had. After the last couple of years and races, I would much rather end a race feeling like, hmm, that was relatively unremarkable than push something too hard and have a meltdown.
Nutrition: Almost two packs of chews for ~300 calories or 150 calories/hour plus a mishmash of NBS/Coke/water etc.
70.3 miles, 5:34:09 14th AG
Top to bottom, I'm pleased with this day, but I'm not satisfied with where I am, if that makes any sense at all. This was a great opportunity to get out, to roll through this distance and to remember the feel that is associated with racing it (mostly, oops is it over already I wasn't even hurting yet?). I wasn't sore at all the next day and felt ready to go a few days later, although I've had a few setbacks in terms of my neck continuing to freak out and try to kill me with nerve pain as well as some bike issues that I'm hoping to find long-term resolution on shortly. So I don't know what's next quite yet but I do know that this felt good. Being able to stand on the line made me happy, and really, that's what matters most. I do this for fun, I do it because I love it deeply, and after a couple of rough years, it's good to feel nothing but quiet joy (and horrifying chafing) at the finish. Everything else will work itself out. Life always does.
I've been sitting here for a while. Alternating between staring at the blinking cursor and tabbing over to answer emails, adjust schedules, other normal work tasks. Because when so much time has passed without diving into this space, it's hard to know where to begin.
The remainder of my trip to New Zealand was amazing. It's easy to reflect on how hard I raced by measuring how many days pass before I get the itch to move again. Ironman was Saturday and by Tuesday night I was ready to jog a local 5K with my friend which answered that question: not hard at all. I found a 33-meter pool nearby and swam a bit between consuming mass quantities of chocolate and coffee and before too long, it was time to return home.
My first stop in the US was a doctor's office, where I had a very minor medical procedure done that left me with sixteen stitches, a slew of inappropriate jokes and nearly a month off the bike when all was said and done. That turned out to be a good thing as United Airlines managed to crack my frame flying it back from New Zealand, so my time was pretty well occupied with jumping through their hoops attempting to file a claim (spoiler: don't bother), as well as the normal nonsense of life: coaching, puppies, training, selfies, skiing and being snippy on twitter (and most recently, this instagram story thing).
I sat down here to draw a line from New Zealand to racing in Santa Rosa last weekend, because race reports are the ones I almost never skip, the ones that I want to remember. But instead of talking about training (it was not much! then it was more! then my hamstring hurt! then it stopped! then I crashed my bike and someone tried to kill Amanda and I with a pickup truck so I rode in my basement for a month and I swam really fast but also not that fast and I took some selfies and I tried to lose some weight but I really love potato chips so I didn't!), I realize now how much I've been ruminating on the coaching part of my life over the last few months.
First, to be fair, I try not to talk too much here about my work, and that's for a lot of reasons, most of which don't matter to anyone else. One is because I want to allow myself room to go through my own process as an athlete, despite all (ALL) the times when my coach brain is yelling, yo jackass seriously you know better here. The process is honest, it's authentic, and the whole reason I have a coach of my own is usually to be able to hand off some of the responsibility of babysitting me to make sure I don't fall down a set of triathlon stairs backwards in the dark. Often when I am struggling, a well-meaning friend will ask, well, what would you say to one of your athletes right now? This happened so frequently this past spring that eventually I lost the plot and snapped at someone (sorry), don't fucking ask me what I would say to one of my athletes I am not my own fucking coach I am a coached athlete and I have the right to make mistakes and be frustrated and pissed off and struggle just like anyone else without having to nurture myself through the whole fucking process too. It would be exhausting, another good reason why coaches almost always have coaches; the endless cycle of questioning and second-guessing yourself would eventually, and quite frankly, drive you mad.
However, there are many times in the last five years where the distinction has become blurred. When my knowledge as a coach is enriched by my experience as an athlete, or my dedication as an athlete is inspired by those that I coach. I think it would be impossible to separate them completely, I've seen that over the last few months as some of my athletes have gone through periods of struggle but with others I've been lucky enough to be along for the ride to some incredible breakthroughs. That's the easy part of coaching, is it not? As a coach, it's not difficult to support an athlete when everything is going well, when all cylinders are firing and the body is at full throttle. When the job is as uncomplicated as reviewing the successfully completed workouts and then writing a plan that continues the trajectory, that's when it's simple and straight-forward. That's when anyone can do it.
However, when an athlete struggles, that is where I believe we separate the wheat from the chaff. Sure, coaches spend a tremendous amount of time studying the science, the physiology, the programming, bettering ourselves in the professional field; I was recently mentoring someone and I told him repeatedly, at least of 50% coaching is reading until your eyes bleed. (At least 2% is bike selfies). But an athlete is not a robot, and coaching is not as simple as firing up the TrainingPeaks account and cashing the paycheck. I think of a friend of mine who often comments, there are only ten workouts. The magic is not in the workout - sorry, none of you invented big gear strength work on the bike or the fifty minute aerobic run - the magic is in the delivery, the experience as an entity. And all athletes will go through periods of struggle. We get injured, or get divorced, we get unexpectedly pregnant, sick, we fight with out mothers, someone passes away. We have insomnia, we crash our bikes, can't get pregnant, get laid off, get promoted, or any one of our deeper struggles with inadequacy, anxiety, fear, failure. We grieve. We walk the goddamned marathon. As coaches, we can say, call me when your shit is straight, or we can be supportive, a sounding board, dare I say - a friend - someone on the other end of the post-workout notifications box who is listening when you need to shriek your life into a void. There are plenty of coaches out there who may be successful in remaining stoic and detached from their athletes, and certainly there is no one right way to do this, but I'm not sure that I personally would be fulfilled by that experience. Some of my greatest days in this job have been when an athlete that has gone through hell finally finds their own version of success, the finish line they have been desperately chasing, and I am there to be one of the closest spectators to their success, a tiny chapter in their tale.
Michelle wrote a few weeks ago, I think that a lot of athletes these days are craving the coach/athlete relationship where they know that their coach truly cares, and that bonged the biggest deepest chime, YES. When athletes come to me, I always ask them why they left their previous coach. Not all of these reasons are negative, sometimes athletes simply need a change and there is nothing wrong with that when it is handled with maturity, but the answer that I hear over and over is, because I felt like my coach didn't give a shit about me. I know how awful that feels, how it eats away at you every day, little teeth nibbling away at the heart of your passion; I have experienced trying to salvage a relationship where the only message that is communicated clearly and consistently is, you are not good enough, you are not fast enough, you do not matter, you are worthless, worthless, worthless.
The poet says all the time, as is our tendency to overanalyze life, that when it comes down to it, what I want to do in this world is to help people make their lives better. To me, that is the essence of my work, not just telling people to ride their bikes kinda hard for a while or as hard as they can for not a while. We aren't electricians or filling up cereal boxes, we shouldn't be rubber-stamping an assembly line of athletes out the door as quickly as possible so we can get back to refreshing instagram.
Not many talk about coaching, not openly, not really. I've seen plenty of people flood the field because they love the idea of riding their bikes all day on a Wednesday (sometimes I do this) but swiftly exit stage left once they realize it's much more working around the clock to stay on top of the research and the science and updating the website and answering emails and posting on social media and who has a cold and who tripped over the coffee table and who needs a race chat and who just maybe needs a virtual hug (much more often I do this). It seems taboo to admit that it can also be hard at times; there is an unspoken agreement among us that we will constantly blast the world with how much we truly love our jobs! And most of us do, trust me, there is not a lot of money in coaching and if we wanted to be billionaires we would all go back to our engineering/technology/project management/executive positions, but that doesn't mean it is a charmed life. Coaching is not a job for the selfish. I am fortunate to know many great coaches, each one works harder than the last and they do so because they are passionate about the success of every single one of their athletes, no matter how fast they can run.
And that brings me back to my own experience. When I think of great coaches I have known, what stands out are not the ones who wrote the most complicated workouts or the most aggressive send-offs or scheduled me to run the hardest on the tiredest legs. Instead, I think of the coach who patiently rode with me despite the enormous gap in our abilities, as I wobbled down the street and fell over at stop signs (fucking clip-in bike shoes) and finished the Wednesday night hill ride with me, fifteen minutes behind everyone else. The one who, after I went blazing off the front of the group, chased me down to find me cowering in anticipation of being told off and instead hollered, good girl! The one who did not sigh heavily when my fat-out-of-shape-ass called up to ask about oh hey there's this ironman in four weeks but instead said, well, let's just see what we can do. I think about all of my athletes who have also been my coaches, who have taught me more about myself than any other "job" I have ever had. And the coach who, despite not coaching me for some time, reached out after New Zealand to talk, who probably had no idea that the hour on the phone vomiting general exasperation with my entire existence was a crucial step to shoehorning me out of my rut of self-loathing and back into the gentle rhythm of life.
Santa Rosa. I've said to a few people, it wasn't great, but it was good, and I think it's as simple as that. This is not a ridiculous social media cliffhanger, I'll probably come back and yap through the day or I might be too lazy and busy and let it go, it doesn't really matter. It's been almost two years since I raced this distance. I know I can go faster, I have gone faster, I probably should have gone faster this weekend according to my maximum heart rate of 152. My splits are unremarkable, my kit doesn't quite fit (fucking potato chips), my bike isn't right yet, I was startled by the shortness of each leg, but nothing went catastrophically wrong and that was the step forward I needed.
Feeling like someone believes in a dream you are chasing - it is a rare and powerful thing. My best races have been the ones where I know there is someone on my side, equally invested in my success, when I know that they are madly refreshing the total crap tracking system or texting me repeatedly even though my phone is stuffed in a bag somewhere, channeling perseverance and strength and don't you dare fucking give up now through hundreds of miles directly into my brain, feeling as if my journey matters even if I never finish any better than 172nd in the field. But it's also okay, some days, to move quietly through what you love, knowing that the only person who always believes in it, is you.
