run this amazing day

You can choose courage or you can choose comfort but you cannot choose both.  -Brene Brown (duh, who else) A lot of athletes in ironman feel fantastic off the bike and then blow up 13 or 15 or 18 miles in (or so I've read on the internet).  I’ve never had this problem.  I have always believed that feeling great off the bike was a myth concocted so that everyone could collectively deny how much it blows and lure in other suckers to try it out (I feel the same is true of childbirth).  Because every time I’ve started the run, my body feels like a sackful of broken bones still vaguely in the shape of a bicycle plus bloated and sunburned and kind of annoyed that I've exercised for like seven hours and I'm not even close to being done.  For me, the hardest miles have always been the first few.  I have been able to rebound into some great second halves, but in the past, the beginning is where things have fallen apart, and as I left transition and ...

As I rolled out of town, I didn't do anything but settle.  I’ve made the mistake, more than once, of trying to shovel down a truckload of calories as soon as I get in the saddle and it never ends well.  This time I deliberately waited until I was thirty minutes in to start rotating through all the snacks I had packed.   The day was, as each of the four times I’ve stood on the line before, all about the run.  Not the bike, and this mentality is a double-edged sword for me.  On one hand, there is the saying that falls out of the mouths of coaches and armchair triathlon quarterbacks all over the world: there is no such thing as a good bike and a bad run .  Meaning, of course, that all bad runs are a product of riding too hard (or massive nutrition failure).  Throughout my entire racing life as an athlete, I’ve had the start slow finish fast  mentality absolutely bludgeoned into me, to the point where I am not sure if I will ever be able to get tha...

Graham and I hit the road on Monday afternoon just as a big snowstorm was starting to roll into Boulder.  Choosing the road trip over a flight plus a rental car was exactly what I needed for this race.  I was completely content to drive on my own schedule.  I stopped when I wanted to (almost never), chatted on the phone with friends and spent plenty of time singing at the top of my lungs.  We made it into Scottsdale early Tuesday afternoon where the weather was sunny and (womp womp) breezy and warm.  Good friends of mine let me use their empty condo for the week, and it was brilliant.  Quiet (Graham being the strong and silent type), I could sleep as much as I wanted, be picky about food, throw my triathlon shit everywhere and generally rock the 1% of my soul that is introverted (it's not much but it's in there). I did most of my pre-race workouts with my also-addicted-to-overpriced-running-shorts friend Krista , who lives in Scottsdale and was happ...

Last year when this race happened I was rolling out for my last long ride going into IM Cozumel.  It starts less than 1/4 mile from my house, so this year I was happy to sign up and smash it into my last "long" run going into IM Arizona.  And really, the only reason I'm bothering to write a report for it at all is because our friend Rick came out and took some amazing photographs, so don't bother reading the words, just look at the pretty pictures and click away. I dragged a few of my local athletes into this race, and did about a half-hour easy warm-up with one.  The morning was cold enough that I warmed up in crops and a long sleeve but then changed at the last second into shorts and a tee shirt.  My very rough plan for the race was to run a couple of miles easy and then a couple of miles somewhere around ironman race effort and/or pace, ish.  So I decided I would run the first couple of miles with one of my athletes to have some company as we all know...