Always someone crazier
FRIDAY, AUGUST 19, 2016
There is always someone crazier.
No, not Donald Trump. I am talking about my fellow athletes.
Like many before me, when I started running races up to 10K distance, I said that would be it, nothing longer.
Yeah, sure. A few years later, with the encouragement of fellow runners, I was running marathons. But that was going to be it, nothing longer, the marathon distance was crazy enough.
About the same time I started competing in triathlons. I liked the different sports within a sport, adding biking and swimming, and the more complex challenge. But I had no yen to go longer than Olympic distance (0.9 mile swim, 24.8 mile bike, 10K run). That was plenty of challenge!
Yes, you know what happened. In 1996 my triathlete peers sucked me into Ironman training, and after doing some races longer than Olympic distance in Muncie, IN, and Springfield, IL, I stepped up to Ironman distance (2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike, 26.2 mile run) a couple of years later.
More recently, ultra runners have been working on me. "You will love running an ultra. It's a real supportive community. The running's different, you don't have to push it." But still, at this point, I am not pulled in. My type A racing brain tells me that I will train too hard and try to really race an ultra over the 31 or 50 or 100 miles, leading to injury. And the reason I stopped doing Ironman races seven years ago is that after 13 years of Ironman training including seven-hour workouts I was burned out. Not to say that I won't get back to Ironman sometime, but at this point my mind just is not ready to take on the training runs much less races of 6-8-12-24 hours.
I have come to recognize that there is always someone crazier in my sports. A bunch of my friends are "way out there."
Take my long-time Ironman buddy from British Columbia, Tony. (He's the guy waving his arms after we'd chalked the road up Richter Pass with motivational messages for us and and other fellow Tri Deads competing in Ironman Canada.) Several years ago he did a pool swim to raise money for an orphanage. Not just any old pool swim, mind you, but a 26.2 mile pool swim. How spectacular that Tony raised a lot of charity dollars, because 17 hours of swimming in a pool certainly was way beyond ordinary! Here's a stroke-by-stroke recount of his swim saga.
Then there is Leslie, another Ironman buddy, from Colorado. Leslie is way, way over the top in distance racing. Her long-time goal has been to finish the deca-Ironman, 10 Ironman distance triathlons in 10 days. In 2014, racing in Italy, she completed seven Ironman races on successive days, setting the U.S. women's record! Here's her blog report if you want to read about crazy!
Here in Annapolis I am getting to know Matt. Seems like a very bright, talented and perfectly sensible guy. But Matt is, as we say in the world of running, "a streaker." In his case, he has run every day for 31 years! Here's the Streak Runners International/United States Running Streak Association "Streak Registry": Read about Matt on pages 2 and 28.
When people call my head-over-heels long-term engagement with running and triathlon crazy, I tell them about the likes of Tony and Leslie and Matt.
So if I do wind up running an ultra some day, just remember, I might be crazy...but there's always someone crazier.
