Living life at a vivid frontier

Reflections on my first Olympic triathlon on the quest of a 12 hour Ironman and a 1500 lb combined powerlift.

That is not me. You can tell because of the wetsuit (see below).

Swim Bike Run. Squat Bench Deadlift

As I have mentioned a few times before, I am nursing a rather outrageous ambition. I want to be the first person I have ever heard of to pull a combined 1500 lbs at a drug-tested, USA Powerlifting-sanctioned competition in the same month that I complete a sub-12 hour Ironman.

Swim Bike Run. Squat Bench Deadlift. Welcome to the journey to Fifteen12, SB2RD.

I expect this goal will take many years to accomplish. As my eye exam today made abundantly clear because of how fuzzy, however, I am rapidly becoming an old man. The clock, as they say, is ticking.

I have been an amateur powerlifter for roughly ten years. That is the year I first benched, squatted, and deadlifted my body weight. Since then, I have put up some big numbers, landing me around 1100 pounds total. I fell in love with the sport and have learned an enormous amount about it and, from it, about myself. I am nowhere near the end of this journey.

But it’s also not complete. There are three pillars of health—strength, endurance, and mobility—and I had been playing at a frontier on only one. About a year ago, then, I decided to start to take seriously the need to focus on endurance. Because I do not know how to pursue goals in half measures, I decided that I would start hunting this particular white whale: 1500 lbs in a meet in the same month as a sub-12 hour Ironman. (I have also dramatically increased my mobility training to 30 minutes a day.)

On Saturday, I completed my first real effort on the triathlon endurance front. I have run two half marathons in the past year, but have not completed a triathlon since 2006, when I completed two sprints. The Olympic is a real undertaking: 1500m swim (nearly a mile), 40km bike (almost 25 miles), and a 10k run (about 6.2 miles).

My goal was not to die. I succeeded. Better than that, my splits were pretty strong relative to my training baseline, with a 3:44 finishing time. My next race is another Olympic triathlon on May 31. Absent catastrophe, there is no chance I will be above 3:44.

By far, however, the most valuable part of the experience was what I learned. Based on filling in the knowledge deficit from running the race, I feel quite sure I could repeat it tomorrow at 3:30 or better.

For today’s post, here are ten lessons I learned from this extraordinary experience.

1. I am a truly inefficient swimmer.

The swim was a clown car. My hips, feet, thighs, arms, head, eyeballs were all moving in different directions. I swam it in 48 mins, which was honestly only slightly longer than my training deserved. One key issue is that I zigged and zagged all day long. I bet I added a tenth of a mile or more with the constant corrections and confusion about the race path itself (more below).

My excuse is this: I am a terrible swimmer. The good news: because of my upper body fitness, I barrel-chested my way through, making it so that the first mile I ever swum (a year ago, which took 90 awful minutes) was twice the time from race day.

New swim goal by May 31: 30 mins, through laser-like focus on endurance and swim technique.

2. I have never seen so many $10,000 bikes in my life.

North Carolinian triathletes do not play when it comes to triathlon. Like many communities, they also enforce unspoken norms with blistering dispatch. My informal sense was that the nicer the TT bike the grumpier the person in the transition area before the race. I did see a few sweet little off-the-shelf mountain bikes that made me wonder what exactly was the plan there. (I learned later that they were part of the relay teams, who just seemed in general like they were better adjusted at life’s complexities than these Olympic triathletes.)

I rode my Roubaix SL8 Comp. I love this bike. I’ll keep a Roubaix forever given these long rides and the Gran Fondos I have planned. But I am also an unreformed gear head, so I have already been thinking thoughts about what comes next. A nicer Roubaix? An aggressive Tarmac? The TT like everyone else?

My deal with myself is that no new bikes will enter our garage until I hit my racing weight (175, 9% body fat) AND I can hit an Olympic in 2:30. But when those occur, I’m almost definitely getting something new.

Goal: get to 9% and 2:30, because Pedro wants but of course does not need a new toy.

3. You should test your wetsuit before use.

Because sometimes the XL Unisex from Dick’s Sporting Goods on the website is in fact an XL Lady’s wetsuit that will not fit over your broad powerlifting shoulders and will require you to swim in your exposed trisuit in 68 degree water, which facts you will learn 15 minutes before race time which in turn will lead you to miss the pre-race course overview which may put you on the long and wrong side of the buoys on the way back and have you miss the not-well-labeled turnaround on the run (which was 2 laps??), all the while filling you with a short but serious sense of existential doubt about the entire purpose of this enterprise.

Or so I have heard on good authority.

Goal: solve some wetsuit problems and test them in water ahead of time.

4. Carb loading is very important and very hard to do.

Wow do I lack an appetite for complex carbs. Ten years of powerlifting means I can put down a 50g whey protein shake in less than a minute and eat elk steak in copious quantities with joy and relish. Brown rice, broccoli, and sweet potato, on the other hand, always seemed like a diet meant to promote fasting.

I paid for this, though. I didn’t quite bonk on the race itself, but I slowed down enormously on the run. My theory was that I train so often in ketosis that I would be okay in a big deficit. And I was far from fasted or glycogen depleted. I ate plenty in the days before, in full calorie surplus (but too much protein and fat). My calories on race day were two pop tarts 90 minutes before start (good), an electrolyte drink and granola bar on the bike (drink was great, granola bar was nasty), and gummies on the run (sweet nectar of the gods). 1,000 calories in, about 3,000 calories out. An hour post-race I could barely lift my feet in the grocery store where I bought my lunch. (That banana, whole milk, and Nutty Buddy I ate will live on in memory as the best meal I have ever had).

Future plan: get comfy with sweet potatoes and force more calories on the bike. Also more brick exercises.

5. No high like the cycling high.

The swim was, in a word, miserable, for the reasons already described. The run felt like stirring cement. Both of these I’ll fix.

The bike, however, was an absolute thrill. I had been training at about 14 mph on 25 mile rides. Slow, in other words. I averaged 16 mph on the ride in the race, but that doesn’t quite tell the story. My power meter showed that I was gaining power and gaining speed with each five-mile lap until I was just flying, including on climbs. I loved it. I am doing a century Gran Fondo in North Carolina in August and can’t wait.

My current theory is that my squatting and deadlifting legs meant that I was just much better able to take advantage of the few cross-pollinations from power lifting that occur with triathlons, but it might also be a testament to how bad I am at swimming and running that my objectively slow but relatively blistering bike pace made the experience feel majestic.

Goal: get incredibly comfortable at much longer rides.

6. I am a Picasso, and my body composition is my canvas.

I was among the largest people at the event, at 230 lbs before the race all carbed up and a whopping 225 the day after. My body fat percentage is about 25%. To get these SB2RD goals, I am going to have to add 15 lbs of muscle in places that are mostly not that relevant to high performance in triathlon while cutting dramatically the very body fat that gives me leverage on the deadlift.

It’s brutal. It’s also the only way forward. I think the single biggest barrier to a sub 2:30 Olympic and a sub 12:00 Ironman is my body fat percentage. This is going to be the hardest of the journey.

Goal for May 31: while minimizing muscle loss, cut as hard as I can, hopefully to 200-210 by race day.

7. It pays to study the race course

My wetsuit snafu caused me to miss the course description. I didn’t anticipate some of the funky choices, like where we would swim relative to buoys and that the run would be out 1.5 miles, back again, then out that same loop, then back again (I do hope that’s the last out-and-back-out-and-back race I ever run—that is psychologically brutal to be that close to the finish line with 3 miles still to run). As a result, I ran a full .25 miles past the turnaround point until a volunteer sprinted after me to correct me. I’d be in Mississippi by now if she hadn’t.

I see now how important it is to get smart about the race course ahead of time, to understand the elevation changes, the course turnarounds, the aid stations, etc.

Goal: walk, bike, or drive the course the day before. Or at least attend the pre-race briefing!

8. Download a checklist

The only piece of gear I bought after the race was a Tri bag that had a pre-printed checklist because, as it happens, I forgot some key items. A hat for the run (I did have sunblock, which was clutch); a second pair of socks; some pre-swim flipflops; a better towel.

Let’s not talk about the wetsuit.

When Nikki and I prepare for a family roadtrip, she prints out a spreadsheet that she has populated over the years that covers everything from backup toilet paper in case of a roadside emergency to extra playing cards. She has that system down pat. I, on the other hand, roll out before a major international trip and pack 5 mins before leaving.

I have to my shame sometimes joked about hiring movers when we go overnight somewhere, but am now prepared to eat crow and say that her way is better when it comes to triathlons.

Goal: make a list, check it twice.

9. I missed the music

USA Triathlon rules prohibit headphones of any kind. I did not train this way and did not prefer it on the race day. The silence led me to some very meditative places, which I liked, but the hours in transit are not few. Almost four hours this time, eventually 12 hours (and much more; I’m sure my first Ironman will be nothing close to 12). Can’t change this but I wonder about it. I wanted that emotional connection to my boys that music provides. It’s the language of my soul. I felt like I was operating at a profound disadvantage.

Goal: become less lonely with my own thoughts.

10. Living at a vivid frontier.

I am basking in the glow of that race, the challenges very much at the center of that glow.

Two years ago, my professional life took a turn I did not expect. It wasn’t a positive one. In the aftermath, I spent an awful lot of time looking at what I regarded as the bad behavior of others to make meaning out of the entire debacle.

I learned some things from that reactive process, but nothing very helpful. In my quest for Platonic truth, I skipped over a pragmatic truth. I needed something at that stage to orient me to a world of unsettled professional responsibilities that was new to me in ways that I had simply not anticipated.

Many months later, I arrived at different conclusions. I asked myself the questions that are as important as they are ancient: what is the point of me? What are my responsibilities to myself, to my kin, to my body, to my mind? The hard experience professionally led me to start begging questions. I could no longer be satisfied with the assumptions that had supported my sense of self for many many years.

In A Confession, Leo Tolstoy undertakes a similar process of exploration and it almost leads to his suicide. Reading him during this same period left me certain that where he and I shared some orientation to cosmic uncertainties answered by religious commitments, I find the questions he asked and I was then asking to be the most important of all. (Little wonder that I am and remain so devoted to pure Socraticism in my pedagogical strategies; Socrates is about as far from Tolstoy as two people can be.)

I have come to tentative conclusions about the point of me. The highest and best expression of myself is as Conti-Brown, husband to Nikki and father to our four wonderful children. Also as a Latter-day Saint, a commitment to kin and to cosmos that brings me great meaning.

My purpose is also as a slow, lumbering, and very bulky triathlete. Or a strong but not elite very fast powerlifter.

More completely, the purpose of me is to live my life at a vivid frontier. I want to feel deeply. I want to push things. From the Greeks again, I want Sisyphus, not Prometheus. I want to push and push again, even in the face of unrelenting tedium, still pushing to discover what it is that I can do. I don’t want to passively watch as the eagles of life eat my liver for the remainder of my tedious, monotonous days.

That vivid frontier means a lot of things to me. This blog is a decision that flowed directly from that self-examination. Among much else, it means that I will keep pressing on my goals as a powerlifter and triathlete.

I put chances at success at less than 10%. But even that’s part of the vivid thrill. This Olympic triathlon on Saturday was me reaching my base camp; the 1500 lb powerlift + 12-hour Ironman is my Everest. I have never glimpsed anything so intimidating and so beautiful.