Let’s get something clear up front: when I decided to do the AIDSRide 10 years ago, I was more than happy to raise money for a worthy cause, but it was not my primary reason for doing the event. Not that much had changed in May: I did not set-out to do charity and then decide to do it through endurance athletic training. However, I did have more of a personal connection this time around as my Grandfather Harold passed away 14 years ago after a long battle with Leukemia, so raising money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society certainly carried some meaning.
I was required to raise $3,000. I had hoped to raise $4,000, but I didn’t really work that hard at doing so. However, if I contacted you and you haven’t donated but would still like to, you still can. My fundraising page will be live for another couple months, and all you have to do is follow this link. (There’s a brief pitch/explanation of why I did this on that page as well.)
But fundraising was never my big concern. I knew enough people — family and otherwise — who I was pretty certain would happily donate to this cause (and I was pleasantly surprised by many not-close acquaintances who chipped in $10 or $25 or whatever they kid, many of whom I still owe official thank you emails). What obviously made me nervous was the idea that in four months time, I was going to have to run into open water, swim nearly a mile, bike 25 miles and run 6.2 miles.
Point of clarification #2: In May, I was nowhere close to being able to do any of this. After buying a new pair of running shoes, I went to the gym and couldn’t really make it through a full mile on a treadmill. I’ve always hated running. It hurt my back and my shins and my calves; it exhausted me nearly instantly; and frankly, I found it fairly boring. The first time I tried running outside (maybe a week later), I couldn’t even finish one mile. I was utterly incapable.
I was never that terrified of the bike. Having trained for the AIDSRide in 2000, I knew that being able to ride 25 miles, even with a few hills, was utterly doable, but my first time getting into a pool, I became instantly concerned about the swim. I always loved the idea of swimming, but the actual process of swimming laps was another story. I hadn’t even tried doing so in years, and my first attempt on my own (coached swim practices hadn’t started yet) was unbearable. Getting through one length of a 60 yard pool took my breath away, and not in the wonderful, awe-inspiring, majestic way. I had to rest after each length of the pool, and that was only 60 yards. How was I ever going to complete 1600?
This is where participating in Team in Training really helped me as they provided us with weekly training plans and offered structured and scheduled practices with coaches each week — eventually, we swam every Monday evening, ran every Wednesday evening and biked every Saturday morning. This proved especially valuable with the swim where I was taught an entirely new way of swimming freestyle in an efficient manner to carry me through the long hall, and while it was exceedingly difficult for weeks, eventually my capacity to distance swim got to the point where not only did I not need to stop for a rest after each 25 yards, 50 yards, 100 yards or 200 yards, but I was swimming a full mile (1760 yards) without stopping; in fact, during one solo swim session about a month ago, I swam more than a mile-and-a-half with only a couple brief breaks, and I could have done more, but I ran out of time.
Swimming easily became my favorite of the three events. I’ve always loved cycling, and I still do, but I became quite frustrated with my bike (a nearly 10 year old mountain bike which is incredibly heavy and slow). Plus, even though I was more confident and comfortable cycling than either swimming or running, and I had only had one bike accident my entire life and that was over 25 years ago when since I ran into a parked car and broke my tooth, the bike caused me some physical pain, and I have the scars to prove it.
Both accidents had one thing in common: I was seriously tired. My summers at work are relatively mellow, but our bike training sessions were Saturday mornings at 8 for the first half of the summer before moving to 7:30. I generally tried to get to bed “early” (for me) on Friday nights, but a few times, I would have trouble falling sleep, only getting three or four hours. Early in the season, I woke up, ate breakfast, got ready, and was all proud of myself for getting out of the apartment with time to spare so I wouldn’t be late. About 30 seconds later, while carrying my bike down the stairs, my bike shoes slipped on the steps, I landed on my ass, scraped the hell out of my left inner-arm/bicep and took a nice chunk out of my right inner-arm/bicep. I ran upstairs, cleaned them up, bandaged both wounds, and went off to practice anyway. But I was in pain for two weeks.
A much worse accident happened several weeks later on a Saturday morning where I got even less sleep. Our practices were in Prospect Park, and my apartment is about three blocks away from the Grand Army Plaza entrance. My bike was having a problem with the gear shift for the front rings. The levers for shifting the gear were loose, and you had to hold the unit in place while pushing on the lever for there to be any hope of movement. I tried fixing it before I left, but it wasn’t working. As I entered the park, my non-rested brain thought it might be a good idea to try hold the shifter with one hand and push the lever with the other, thereby having both hands on the same side of the handlebar and pushing on something attached to that side of the handlebar.
Stating the obvious: this turned into a very bad decision. As I pushed, the wheel turned to the left. I was riding the bike, traveling up the entrance road from Grand Army Plaza to the Prospect Park loop, going probably 13-15 mph, and as the wheel turned, the bike slid out from under me and I toppled to the left. My bike shoes came out of the clips, but my calf hit the bike frame hard. I put my hands out which would have been a terrible idea if I wasn’t wearing gloves, but probably helped lessen the impact of my head hitting the pavement right at my left temple. Thankfully (and I say “thankfully” not “luckily”) I was wearing a bike helmet (as should everyone, all the time, even if you’re not going to be stupid like I was). Without that helmet, I likely would have suffered a terrible head injury; as it’s supposed to, the foam on the inside of the helmet cracked, absorbing most of the impact. But I did have a brief abrasion from my forehead rubbing against the inside of the helmet.
I never lost consciousness, and in the immediate aftermath, I was pissed at myself more than anything else. While my hands were mostly fine, my knuckles on my right hand were scraped and bleeding. I also had two nice gashes on my left calf. But the worst part was dead center in the calf, which had quickly swelled to terrifying size and was immediately a horrific shade of super-dark purple/black.
I walked my bike home, cleaned up the cuts, and decided to call a car and head over to New York Methodist emergency room. It was not even 8 AM on Saturday, and here I was having already gotten dressed twice. I thought there was likely nothing seriously wrong, but the enormous hematoma (it was at least four inches in diameter) terrified me. You always here about people getting blood clots in their legs that lead to strokes; and then of course there was the fact that my head DID hit, and Natasha Richardson thought she was fine too. (Of course, she wasn’t wearing a helmet and had lost consciousness.) So I figured better safe than sorry.
I spent the next two hours waiting at Methodist before a nice resident cleaned up my cuts a little more, told me to keep icing the calf, gave me some prescription ibuprofen, and told me that it might be sore for a while, but I really had nothing to worry about unless after the swelling subsided, it then returned in a week or two.
Two accidents in one summer. One while riding … one while carrying. And that was with my best event. Go figure.
Running was always the part of this endeavor I dreaded the most. I never understood all those people who claim to find running relaxing. “I’m heading out for a nice 5 mile jog,” they’ll say. “Just to clear my head.” I’ll admit: I’m not as turned off to running as I once was, but that’s simply because after cumulatively running over 125 miles this summer, slowly building my consecutive distances from not even a mile to approximately 7.5 miles a couple weeks ago, I can at least do it now. And a three mile run to me is now comfortable (when my knees don’t hurt) and not exhausting. But neither do I find it especially relaxing or invigorating. Maybe one day? But I still don’t foresee me running any marathons.
The trickiest, and potentially most frustrating, obstacle arrived just about two weeks ago. The last two weeks before the event, we’re instructed to “taper.” That means that instead of the intense, multiple hour/long distance training sessions, we start to relax. We keep doing a little bit of everything, but just enough to not let the muscles say, “OK, time to go back to sleep.” Just before this, though, I had one of my most intense weeks and weekends of the entire period. On Sat 9/12, our Saturday morning session was a 15 mile bike ride followed by a 6 mile run. (This is affectionately known as “BRick”: bike + run, and your legs feel like bricks.) The next day, I went with a bunch of other people out to Rye to do a preview of the bike course, just to have a little bit of a feel of what the two hill climbs would be like and what the course looked like. My 25 mile preview ride turned into a 29 mile preview ride when a group of us missed a turn and went two miles out of the way before realizing the mistake.
The next morning I woke with a pain in my right knee. I wound up not training at all the following week. With the race only a week away, this actually made me supremely nervous. I’d trained for so long, and now, could there be a chance I wouldn’t get the opportunity to complete this goal? I went to our final Saturday morning, this time it was a run not a bike, and I tried running a bit on the knee. It felt OK, and then it hurt, and then OK, and then it hurt some more. I had already scheduled an appointment with an orthopedist on Tuesday (the soonest I was able). I actually didn’t think it was anything major, but I figured it might simply be something that needed a lot of rest, and I didn’t have time to rest it yet. Our head Brooklyn coach told me I had run enough, I should stretch, go home, ice the knee and take some ibuprofen.
Tuesday I went to the orthopedist who told me I had a minor problem common to lots of runners. He gave me a cortisone injection, told me to up my ibuprofen and suggested that it was unlikely I would cause any permanent damage to the knee. I was good to go.
Wednesday night was our final group training session. A short run … 30 minutes. The knee felt much better already. The run was easy. I had in four months gone from telling myself that I just wanted to complete this thing, and if I wound up walking half of the run portion, I’d still be happy. But that was no longer the case. I could run now. I had run 6 miles several times. I’d run 7.5 miles a couple weeks before. I’d run 6 miles after a 15 mile bike ride. If I had to walk any major part of the run, I was going to be pissed.
I had lost over 20 lbs. I hadn’t broken through the 200 barrier yet, but I was at 202-203. I was confident. I was ready. The race was just days away, and I finally thought about checking the weather report.
OH FUCK!
(To be continued ….)
Out of Focus 