1978

During the awards ceremony for a Hawaii running race, a debate ensues among competitors about who is more fit — swimmers, runners or other athletes. One of the participants, Navy Commander John Collins and his wife Judy, dream up a race to settle the argument. They propose combining three existing races together, to be completed in succession: the Waikiki Roughwater Swim (2.4 miles), the Around-Oahu Bike Race (112 miles, originally a two-day event) and the Honolulu Marathon (26.2 miles). “Whoever finishes first we’ll call the Ironman,” said Collins. Fifteen men participate in the initial event held on February 18; 12 complete the race, led by the first Ironman, Gordon Haller. His winning time: 11 hours, 46 minutes and 58 seconds.

Comm.10 with Professor Cole; This was my first college course and I took it at UCLA in Westwood during spring semester of my high school senior year. I absolutely loved that course and at the same time, I was stunned at how different the scholastic expectations were moving from high school to college. I got a “B”. I was coming from a secondary educational background where I really just sort of coasted through without ever really cracking a book. I’m sure my parents are rolling over in their graves cursing me out for that one.

Eventually, both Professor Jeffrey Cole and I succumbed to the dark side with me continuing my education and he becoming the Director of the Annenberg School’s Center for the Digital Future across town at USC. In that course at UCLA, however, I recall that one of the topics we discussed was brand creation and those brands that had become so commonplace as to have become the everyday term used to describe the activities that they were associated with. For example, at fifteen years old, I don’t remember if I knew that Xerox was a company, but I did know what it meant to Xerox my report card before my parents saw it. I’m not sure I even knew what a photocopy was at that point. Kleenex was something you used to blow your nose in, only uptight snobby adults used the term tissue. Jacuzzi was what you jumped into after skiing; a spa was a place the affluent went to lose weight like Canyon Ranch, and on and on. I’m not sure why that stuck with me but it always has and I’ve been keenly sensitive to the importance of brand ever since, and thankfully my career has kept me involved in messaging and brand optimization throughout that time.

So why am I posting these college recollections on a blog about triathlon? Well the lessons learned in Professor Cole’s course have come fully to light in the current debate around the Ironman brand. What began in 1978 with a few guys planning a self supported race to see which discipline created the best overall athlete – swimmers, cyclists or runners – has turned into a multi-million dollar industry where brand police and attorneys fight ruthlessly to protect the Ironman brand.

A few years back, my alma mater’s triathlon team wanted to use a dot on their triathlon club’s logo and they were told that they would be receiving a cease and desist letter if they did, and it wasn’t even an M-dot, the logo most widely recognized with Ironman races. Just the dot itself was verboten. Right or wrong, the tri-club decided not to press the issue and went another direction.

Recently in Triathlete Magazine, Charlie Yu posted another brilliant opinion. He is known for opining that you don’t deserve an Ironman logo M-Dot tattoo unless you’ve qualified, raced and finished the Kona World Ironman Championships. This time around, he was interviewed by Dave Wallach who is a veteran of official Ironman races but not Kona, and Charlie is quoted as telling this reporter:

“If you want to call yourself an Ironman, I’m not going to say you’re not, however, I’m not going to consider you an Ironman, but go ahead.”

Such is the silliness of it all.

In Connecticut, there is a winter local road running race series called the Boston Build-up Series. The races are held every other weekend throughout the winter progressing from a 10K and culminating in the Boston Blow-out 30K in Fairfield, CT. The race series is designed to prepare athletes for the Boston Marathon. At these races it is not uncommon to see race participants pulling CycleOps trainers out of the trunks of their cars to spin on their bikes prior to the start of the race. The participants in these races are serious – Army marathon and triathlon team members, Boston qualifiers and Ironman finishers. The attitude is created long before anyone toes the start line through the team outfits worn, the body paint displayed or the decals on the back windows of the vehicles in the parking lot. Here athletes wear M-dot tattoos as if they were gang tattoos identifying them as members of an elite group, those who had trained for and completed an Ironman race.

Ironman has simply become synonymous with endurance. Ironman is the new marathon. But marathon wasn’t a brand, it was a race, a distance that needed to be covered, and in its simplicity, covering 26.2 miles was considered a marathon and anyone who covered that measured distance was considered a marathoner. In triathlon, it is perceived to be very different. Ironman is not just a term to describe those who have completed a multi-sport event consisting of a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike and a 26.2-mile run. Instead it apparently only applies to those who actually paid hundreds of dollars to enter, race and complete an official WTC Ironman race. Even then according to folks like Charlie Yu,  you really aren’t an Ironman until you finish Kona.

With Ironman becoming the new marathon, more and more people are signing up and attempting this feat. This also means that it has become nearly impossible to guarantee your entry into this race unless you physically live in a town where the races are held or are wealthy enough to pay the costs necessary to travel to and attend the race in the prior year. By doing this you earn the right to wake up at 5am the day after the race and get in line with the hundreds of others who also want to make sure they have an opportunity to register for the following year’s race. Forget online registration.  For this year’s race, Ironman Lake Placid sold out in mere minutes, and as far as we can tell, Ironman Wisconsin never even had any slots to offer online because so many people registered in person on the morning following the race. The line on Monday morning at 7:00am serpentined throughout the hallways of the convention center with many hopeful registrants spilling outside into the cold rain. Some current year participants, completed their race, showered and then slept on the hallway floors of the convention center so that they wouldn’t be locked out of competing in the following year. Does anyone else see something wrong with this? Ironman has become a must-do activity to check off of the outdoor enthusiast’s checklist for their life. Which of course begs the question, what does it mean to be an Ironman?

Is it enough to have persevered the experience of training for six months or more to be able to complete the 140.6-mile course under the cut-off times? Or is it the M-Dot tattoo, or is it the ability to call yourself an Ironman? And if it’s the latter, then why does the commercial event itself dictate the completion of this goal rather than completing the distance as it does for a marathon?

Predictably, an underground swell has been created against the high cost of this opportunity as well as the notion that to be an Ironman one needs to have completed a sanctioned WTC Ironman race. Websites such as 140dot6.com have popped up to promote underground triathlons and other endurance events. This website launched the day before Ironman Madison in September of last year and already the site has 144 members. Brett Blanker, one of the site’s co-founders, hippie podfather and host of Zen and the Art of Triathlon has completed two separate self supported Ironman races in the past three years. After he completed his first “official” Ironman race at Wisconsin this year, he claimed that IM-Moo, while challenging, was significantly easier than completing the same distance on his own, with no aid stations, bottle exchanges, special needs bags, wetsuit strippers or thousands of fans cheering him on every step of the way. Another frequent contributor to TriScoop.com, CindyJo has come out strongly against even training in groups, stating that Ironman is a race that you do alone, by yourself to test your own limits and capabilities. If you are going to race alone, then get used to it by training alone. Ironman was originally about you against the elements. And yet, for some reason, the triathlon society, or at least some members of it, seem to place the value on the brand more than the experience. Somebody, please tell me why this is so.

Don’t get me wrong, I do think there is something special and different about jumping into the water for a mass start of a 10+ hour race with 2,500 of your closest friends. The mental stress of an official Ironman race is undeniable. But the mental side of completing that same distance on your own, when nobody is around to watch if you decided to take a nap on the side of the road, or cut the distance short, or finish up tomorrow, may be even stronger. I do believe that certain events should be left untarnished. For example, I believe that the Boston Marathon should not offer charity slots and only those that qualify should participate. Similarly, I believe that the Ironman World Championships should be for Ironman World Champions. But in the end, Ironman and marathoner should be terms used to describe those who have achieved their accomplishments and these terms should not be used exclusively to tie these accomplishments to whether or not you have contributed to the economic benefit of a race organizer. As far as I’m concerned, if you put in the 140.6-mile distance and want to call yourself an Ironman, get painted with an M-dot tattoo, or place a 140.6 sticker on your rear window, who am I to say you shouldn’t?

As always, race with purpose.

Cheers

This weekend was the first serious training weekend of the season for me with a 45-mile time trial on Saturday, followed by a 17-mile run at Rockefeller Park on Sunday. No bricks yet, still too early and I’m still focused on building the foundation to tolerate the increased volume and intensity that this training demands.Cindy gave me “the speech” that apparently included the double blind results of a survey of our friends and family members who apparently all agree that I look like a coked-out-old druggie at 175lbs and much younger and healthier at 200lbs. She said “I hope you aren’t planning on dropping all of that weight like you did back in 2004.” Followed by, “Others are reading your blog and I know that’s what you…..” and she didn’t even finish the sentence. I could tell she was struggling how to incorporate all of the advice that her friends must have told her about how to approach me on this subject, especially in only my second week off of chocolate. Insert motive for domestic murder-suicide here. Yeah, sure it’s easier to stay with my natural weight, which at only 10 hours of training a week can probably hover around 200 pounds. Ten hours a week?, you’re thinking? Lord forbid that I ever have a serious injury where I have to stop working out for an extended period of time.

Claire Standish: What’s your name?
John Bender: What’s yours?
Claire Standish: Claire.
John Bender: Claire?
Claire Standish: Claire. It’s a family name.
John Bender: Oh, it’s a fat girl’s name.
Claire Standish: Oh, thank you.
John Bender: You’re welcome.
Claire Standish: I’m not fat.
John Bender: Well not at present, but I can see you really pushing maximum density. See I’m not sure if you know this, but there are two kinds of fat people: there’s fat people that were born to be fat, and there’s fat people that were once thin but became fat… so when you look at ‘em you can sorta see that thin person inside.

This week, I’m in the gawkies, you know that funny period where you’ve made adjustments that you know should be working but your body is fighting you, because quite frankly, it likes the chocolate and sugar more than you do. Daily, my weight fluctuates anywhere between 194 and 200 at any point during each day, on the same scale. Hey maybe that’s a reason not to check so often, but at this point, it’s kind of like a game, “Hey, what if I cycle for an hour, how much water will I lose? What if I starve myself? What if I hold as much fluid in my bladder for as long as I can? How much does a bowl movement actually weigh? Insert scenes of Matthew Modine in a sauna wearing a sweat suit in the movie Vision Quest.

I know what you’re thinking, “What if you get sick?” See, now I’ve already thought about that years ago and you already have to know where I’m going with this one. Coming off of a virus, we always look great! When I started as a trainer back in college, I took genetics for the sole reason of trying to see if I could come up with a way to create a virus that only affected women from the hips down. Seriously, you know I’m right. I’d be a gazziolionaire if I had figured out that one. I even went around asking women if they would be cool puking and feeling violently ill for a full week if it meant that they’d lose pounds around their core, hips and thighs and unanimously they all answered “YES!”

Getting back to me, carrying my ass up 2,000 feet of climbing like I did today is sure a heck of a lot easier at 175 pounds, and based on my calculations will account for a full two hours of difference in my Ironman finishing times. Two hours!

So like most conversations Cindy and I have, I nodded my head understandingly and she went and reorganized something in frustration. Hmm, I’ll have to think about how to handle this one to get down to competition weight while still maintaining balance in the Abingdon house.

Moving on: This weekend I got to meet up with a few members of the Westchester Cycle Club Triathlon group. Mostly made up of women, this group was not light on enthusiasm, nor was it light on ADHD. When asked about nutrition, my first recommendation was going to be a Cytomax-ritalin cocktail. This group makes TriScoop look focused – hey look there’s a bird, shiny object, shiny object. All kidding aside, they are really a great group of people who are mostly first or second year triathletes, and in the short amount of time we had, we got to know each other’s backgrounds and see if there were any common threads that would possibly create an environment where they could train together to increase their enjoyment of the sport and feed their co-dependencies. Cind-Jo would be reeling right now. “You race alone, so train alone!”

A few like Carolyn, Johnny and Jill were really sweet and definitely like deer in the headlights and reminded me that I can get a little intense sometimes. Essentially, as I was providing a few of the basics, Johnny furiously scribbled down every word, Jill tried to understand what the hell I was talking about and Carolyn sat patiently trying to figure out when anyone would stop talking long enough so she could ask a question. Javier, sitting next to me, rolled his eyes, waiting to ask the only question he cared about, “Does anyone in this group actually want to get together to train, or are we simply going to be another tri-group that gets together to talk about triathlon?” In short, the session was a little like the video at the top of this entry. Notice Lance’s calm exterior as he requests “Hey Kevin, you mind showing this nice customer how to kill the coward within?” You have to love that.

Lance: “You want to feed the warrior?”

Customer: “Hunh?”

Lance: “Feed the warrior twenty pounds! Feed the warrior by training the body to respond to the mind.”

Customer: “Yeah, I was just thinking of maybe getting into a little light cardio.”

Lance: “Hey Kevin, you mind showing this nice customer how to kill the coward within?”

To the WCC Triathletes looking to complete and not compete, the reality is probably somewhere in between the two.

Cheers.

Coach Adam accelerates to finish the 2008 Boston build-up 10K

Reversing the trend of recent years, I finished my first diagnostic race of the year, the Boston Build-up 10K in 42:32, a 6:51 min/mile pace. While I’m still almost a full minute off of my targeted running pace, I’m pretty encouraged given two factors. The first is that the prior two years I’ve run this hilly 10K course in times of 43:23 and 45:08 in 2006 and 2007 respectively, and the second is that I ran this race at 196 lbs, so using the pace to weight indicator, It’s not a horrible result.

The other thing I’m pleased with this morning is that I did not consume any refined sugar last night before going to sleep. To provide a little bit of context, I’m a total sugar addict, and specifically chocolate makes me absolutely crazy. I’ve had periods where I have not eaten chocolate for years because of how it affects me both physically and mentally. With all of the stuff I went through with Wally, I’ve been completely binging from Halloween through the new year, so going to sleep with the shakes, while not fun, was a pretty positive activity for me. Of course it doesn’t make me a very fun person to be around right now but that’s temporary and it’ll be well worth it. I have 20 pounds to drop to effectively compete in July and September and changing my nutritional habits and behaviors is critical.

Back to the Build-up, I was extremely pleased to see that our Race with Purpose athletes were close to the top of their games following the holiday break finishing in a fairly tight little group near the front of the field. As usual, Josh was the first to finish and got a little bit of a wake-up call that he needs to increase his volume and consistency to start preparing for Boston in April. That is going to be one heck of a race and I’m looking forward helping those folks succeed there as they have everywhere else.

Tom Storey resisted every terrific reason not to show up and race, including having raced a 50K the day before and put in a terrific performance of his own, finishing closely behind me. Way to go, Tom!

Lastly, I was so excited to meet Cara from In Transit Duo, a terrific podcast and website hosted by two triathletes from Arkansas and Connecticut. In Transit Duo provides a look at the triathlete lifestyle from the women’s point of view. It also focuses on the travel aspects of multi-sport racing and provides really valuable take-a-ways for the listener. Cara came up to me after the race and introduced herself. She also took a picture of a bunch of RwPers which was really sweet because we didn’t have a camera of our own. Cara and I have met virtually through TriScoop and given that we live about 90 minutes from each other, I’m hopeful we’ll find times to connect and train or race together this season.

I think that’s it for now; the next Build-up will be in two weeks in Ridgefield, CT. It’s my favorite race of the series and includes an out and back course with a steep climb going into the turn around that really will give me a sense as to how strong my legs are and if all of the cycling I’ve been doing has helped my leg strength and power. My plan is to actually ride my trainer for 60-90 minutes prior to the start of the race which means I’ll be racing pre-fatigued but isn’t that what Ironman is all about?

Cheers