Against the Odds

by John L. Pendergrass

  I need to keep a better eye on these boys.

  Race morning is cool and crisp with a perfect sunrise. Here in the desert things have a sharp-edged clarity, as if finely chiseled and scrubbed raw by the autumn sun. I wait until the last moment to plunge into the frigid Town Lake. After my collision during the practice swim, I’m a little gun shy. Another bump could reopen my tender forehead laceration. I jump in, swim a hundred yards to the starting line, and begin to tread water, awaiting the gun.

  Treading water in a wetsuit is easy, you just stand there. You can’t sink, the wetsuit is a personal flotation device, no movement is required. This is reassuring, there’s no way I can sink and drown before the start, that’s one less thing I have to worry about.

  The starting cannon sounds, and after a couple of hundred yards, the chill is gone. Not only that, the thrill is gone. There are 2,500 swimmers fighting for the same spot and there’s enough thrashing and bumping to warm any body of water. It’s what someone once called hand-to-foot combat.

  The course is straight down and straight back with a bridge at the beginning and at the turnaround. These bridges are simple landmarks to strive for, you see them from the very start. Every time you look up, the span appears tantalizingly close, but after a while it seems to recede rather than come nearer.

  The pushing and shoving goes on for the entire 2.4 miles but I finally climb out of the water at 1:32.

  There are dozens of wetsuit strippers waiting to lend a helping hand. The early sun feels warm and refreshing, and I’m soon off on the three loop bike course.

  With this many competitors and three loops, things are crowded the entire way. I am constantly passing and being overtaken, there’s a continuous in-and-out and back-and-forth flow of bikers.

  If you ever want to draft without trying to draft, IRONMAN® Arizona is the place to be. It’s impossible not to get tugged along for a few seconds as bikers come by in quick succession. I make a halfhearted, insincere effort to stay out of the slipstream.

  The bike course very quickly leaves the city of Tempe and heads into the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community (SRPMIC). After a few miles and a handful of turns you’re past Sun Devil stadium, through the seemingly endless rows of muffler shops, pizza restaurants, and strip malls, and into the desert.

  It’s a pleasant day and I’m feasting on a trove of chocolate chip cookies I’ve brought along. For me, when it comes to fluids, too much is better than too little, and as a result I’m having to make regular pit stops. Race officials have warned everyone to use the porta-toilet rather than relieving themselves au naturel. The problem is that there are only a few toilets at each aid station, and there are lines of athletes waiting to use them. I didn’t come to Arizona to wait in line to take a leak, I came to race.

  So, I use a clever ruse, a tactic so devious that no one else appears to have thought of it. Whenever the urge strikes me, I pull over to the side of the road (there are no trees in the desert), get off my bike, bend over and act like I’m working on my bike and go about my business. No waiting in line for me.

  It never ceases to amaze me, in an IRONMAN® Triathlon your concerns are whittled down to such a primitive basic level—moving your arms and legs, breathing, drinking, eating, urinating, staying cool. Life is stripped bare, reduced to the essentials. It’s a very simple calculation. If you can keep everything going for a thousand minutes or so, you’ll make it to the finish line.

  That’s enough time for the philosophical contemplation of bodily functions. I’m looking for Tony and Steve on the bike. I know that Tony started before me, hopefully Steve finished the swim and will soon be catching me. It’s always hard for me to pick out someone on the bike. Everyone wears a goofy-looking helmet and all bikes look remarkably similar. The colors are different but the shapes are the same, sometimes I can’t even tell if it’s a man or a woman coming from the opposite direction. Maybe it’s because they are going so fast or maybe it’s because my vision is on par with my heart and lungs.

  Around mile 100 Steve passes me on the bike and I discreetly grab onto his wheel for a mile or two. He glances back and yells, “Have you no shame?” humiliating me in front of some other cyclists, so I drop back. That’s the last time I’ll listen to his stories. Still, I’m into the second transition area a little ahead of schedule.

  The marathon course consists of three loops around Town Lake and adjacent parks. For me this is the most current episode of what I call the Journey to Hell. It’s the same as every previous race: intermittent running and walking, hour after hour of constant pain and suffering, hurting in a dozen different ways. The paths and roads are mostly concrete and my joints feel like someone removed the shock absorbers. I seem to get a big jolt with each step. This has got to be the advance guard of approaching arthritis.

  Yet for an IRONMAN® Triathlon, it’s not a bad day and I finish in 14:48, a Ponce de Leon performance in my book. The best I’ve done since Brazil.

  Tony and Steve managed 13:15 and 13:27 and we are all glad to survive the ordeal. It’s a happy day when everyone struggles home.

  The day after the race, Steve, Tony, and I head over to the race headquarters to pick up some gear we left behind. We encounter two long lines extending several blocks along the walkway. There are some tired looking bodies warming in the morning sun.

  One line is for those hardy souls waiting to register in person for next year’s race. By showing up onsite, these people will beat the online registration crunch that starts the following day. It’s the best way to secure a spot in the race. As we learned ourselves, computer registration can wreak havoc with the best-laid plans.

  The pent-up demand for IRONMAN races never ceases to amaze me. Many of these folks have driven long distances to stand in line to register for next year’s event. In good times and in bad times, the demand for IRONMAN continues to grow. Will there ever be enough IRONMAN Triathlons to satisfy the needs and desires of all the aspiring masochists in the world? How high will the entry fee go? Is $1,000 just around the corner?

  We all laugh at those people waiting patiently in line, ready to shell out hard-earned dollars to pursue their quixotic quest. It’s a fool’s errand and we’ll have none of it. We are all finishers.

  After chuckling at those strange people with misplaced priorities, we fall in like sheep in the other line. This is the line for those folks waiting to enter the IRONMAN® store.

  You can’t simply walk in and spend half a month’s rent on overpriced IRONMAN merchandise, you must first wait quietly, standing on legs that feel like concrete pillars. Then, a few at a time, you are allowed to enter the Promised Land, wander about, and give your credit card a true IRONMAN workout.

  The overseas races don’t have this kind of demand. IRONMAN kitsch has reached its highest level in the United States. It’s IRONMAN idolatry in its purest form.

  I’m ready to do my part to support the IRONMAN economy. I’ve got a closet full of gear but I damn sure don’t have enough. How many ways can you print the IRONMAN name and logo on a tee shirt? A lot more than you might think; a creative person could wear a different outfit every week of the year.

  I manage to grab the last bike jersey for Steve in his size. A few water bottles, a sticker, and a wonderful $15 coffee mug complete my purchase.

  All three of us are happy, content, and a few dollars poorer. The cash registers at the store are so overworked and hot that they’re about to explode.

  We all agree, we must come back to shop later in the day to make sure we didn’t overlook anything.

  Steve has to head home right after the race, but Tony and I have a couple of days to look around the Tempe area. I decide to visit the Desert Botanical Garden, just a couple of miles from our hotel. It’s an easy walk, a chance to loosen up the legs.

  The Desert Botanical Garden is a wonderful place to learn about desert flora and fauna. There are over twenty-thousand plants covering some fifty acres or so. This is a different world, unlike anything I’ve
ever seen.

  The Garden has several trails and exhibits that highlight different ecosystems. I particularly like the one that shows how Native Americans survived using the available plants for food, shelter, tools, and basket making.

  Quite honestly, these desert dwellers deserve a tip of the hat. The Sonoran Desert doesn’t look like much at first glance, it’s not the kind of place you would want to go on your honeymoon, yet there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye. The Native Americans put everything to good use and have perfected the art of making a lot out of a little.

  The following day I am able to drag Tony along to visit the Heard Museum, an extraordinary collection of Southwest Native American art. There are seemingly endless galleries of baskets, pottery, jewelry, clothing, and other objects. Barry Goldwater’s collection of Hopi Kachina dolls is prominently featured.

  There’s also a moving exhibit dealing with Indian boarding schools and the “Americanization” of Native Americans.

  For me, the Heard Museum is time well spent, but for Tony, I’m not so sure. He has got bigger things on his mind. He spends most of the day trying to figure out how to best display his new IRONMAN® memorabilia, plus he’s polishing his new race stories. Tony’s star is rising so fast that he has trouble hanging on to it. As for me, I need to get to work. Asia is the final stop on my six-continent journey.

  WHEN I was a young child, my playmates and I would sometimes dig with our shovels in the backyard of my grandfather’s home. It was a large lot with a couple of fruit trees, some trash cans, and a lot of open space, nothing that would ever qualify for Better Homes and Gardens, but we loved it. Pop never seemed to mind us poking about, he even encouraged us. He said that if we dug deep enough, we would eventually reach China.

  At age seven or eight that seemed like a feasible project. We figured that if we all chipped in and took turns, we should reach the Orient in just a few days. We were eager and ambitious, but we also had a good underlying reason to work away.

  In the 1950s, China was full of poor starving children who would have been delighted to eat any food that we left on our plates. At least that’s what all the adults at home and at school told us. We envisioned China as a handy place to dispose of things like liver, broccoli, and cauliflower. In our minds, these dishes didn’t belong on our plates, they belonged in the local landfill.

  Our group worked for several days but never got much deeper than a couple of feet in the ground. We soon lost interest, but we always regarded China as a mysterious and forbidden place.

  Today, things are different, but China still qualifies in my mind as a remote and exotic land, a place where the very old and the very new constantly clash. A country that focuses on its past in order to justify the present.

  Haikou is several stops from my home in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, but my bike and I survive. My body is compressed, congealed, dehydrated, and shrunk. This is pure ergonomic misery.

  The days before the race are the usual mixture of unpacking and assembling my bicycle, attending race briefings, taking a tour of the bike and run courses, and squeezing in a practice swim.

  Any IRONMAN® Triathlon is a major event. There are barely thirty or so in the entire world, and they all require large amounts of money, hundreds of volunteers, and countless hours of work to stage. It’s not something that your local civic club puts together on the spur of the moment.

  IRONMAN China is no exception, it’s one of very few IRONMAN Triathlons held in Asia. It’s also a wonderful opportunity for China, the top gold medal winner at the 2008 Olympics, to show off its athletic prowess, to once again impress the world.

  There’s just one problem: no one seems to have invited the Chinese, or maybe the IRONMAN race just isn’t on their map.

  China is inching toward a population of 1.5 billion, and many economists think that there are three hundred million people in the country with a lifestyle close to that of the United States. It’s a vast and varied nation with many prosperous consumers. Yet, very few of these people seem to have taken up the sport of triathlon. The 2010 IRONMAN® China has just a couple of dozen entrants from China.

  Why is this race such an endangered species in China? I’m sure there are many reasons. The Chinese are typically viewed as a shrewd and practical people who very much value balance and harmony. It’s not a nation given to silly excesses. If ever there was an event designed to derange, disturb, and destroy the normal rhythm of life, it’s the IRONMAN Triathlon. There’s no yin or yang in this race, just pain and suffering. Most Chinese find it hard to imagine that anyone of sound mind would do an IRONMAN Triathlon.

  Maybe this is what 5,000 years of civilization does for a country, or maybe the Chinese are just a little smarter than the rest of us.

  Comparatively speaking, the 2010 IRONMAN China is much less crowded than other races. Most races reach two thousand entrants, but only four hundred are registered for this race. There’s also an IRONMAN® 70.3® race being staged the same day, and a few more Chinese are entered in this event. Still, there are many more foreigners than Chinese.

  Overall there is a large group of Japanese and Australian competitors; these countries having strong triathlon communities. Many of the other competitors are Westerners living and working in Asia, every major U.S. company seems to be trying to do business in China. Plus there are a lot of people in the race like me, people who like to travel and use this as an excuse to hit the road.

  China is a long way from home and this race proves to be one too far for me. Travel broadens the mind, but it can also wreak havoc with the digestive tract. A bout of food poisoning with vomiting and diarrhea, plus intrepid jet lag set me up for the final blows of heat, humidity, and wind. In hindsight, I knew I was in for a bigger challenge than I anticipated.

  On race day morning, there’s none of the usual pre-dawn stillness. It’s dark, overcast, and very windy. The tents and flags in the transition area are whipping about madly. If you need to talk to your neighbor, you have to shout. It’s already 79 degrees and it’s not even daylight (I check my temperature gauge on my bicycle like a diabetic checks his glucose meter, hoping for good news). There are a lot of young Chinese girls in race tee-shirts wandering about, repeatedly saying, “Good morning.” I ask one where I can get some water, she replies, “Good morning.”

  The swim course is an unusual four loop route in the Nandu River, supposedly designed to minimize the current. In reality, one-half of the course is with the current and the other is against. A strong current on the swim is like a strong wind on the bike. The struggle into the wind or current is always difficult; the return journey is only slightly less of a problem.

  When I signed up for this race it was advertised as a point-to-point swim course with the current at your back, designed to produce “record swim times.” Everyone was assured in advance of a personal best in the swim leg. There was even a nice little map showing you entering the river upstream, swimming the entire way with the current, and exiting downstream. It looked more like a float trip down the Nandu than a long-distance swim.

  Unfortunately, this was not to be. On race day, there is no point-to-point course, no record time. Like much of the 2010 IRONMAN® China, things are vague, uncertain, and subject to change. At the race briefing a lot of questions go unanswered, uncertainty hovers about. There’s a permanent undercurrent of insecurity, nothing feels quite right.

  There are four loops and the young swimmers start early, while the old age groups go last. As a result, I spend my second and third laps being beaten and pummeled, treated like a floating punching bag. The Big Guys see no reason to swim around me, they simply go right over me, pushing my frail body to the bottom of the mighty Nandu.

  Despite battling the currents and my fellow competitors, I’m out of the water in a decent time, 1:37. I spend a good ten minutes trying to get out of my wetsuit while the group of young Chinese girls watch and giggle. Some say, “Good job,” while for others it’s still “Good morning.”

&nb
sp; Out on the bike, my temperature gauge reads ninety degrees and the headwind is horrible, it’s a boisterous breeze. What little energy I have is quickly sucked dry by the blowing inferno.

  Once we exit the city, the roads are new and modern with no traffic. Most of the route is on a sterile highway with just open fields, heat, and wind; it’s a visit to the devil’s furnace. Around thirty miles, the course exits the highway and climbs up and through a couple of old villages. The peasants are in the rice fields working while water buffalo wander about, dumping their calling cards in large piles. Avoiding buffalo dung becomes an important priority. Groups of Chinese cluster in the villages, the children cheer while the adults stare.

  This is a great experience; it’s like dropping back a century or two in time. Like all of China, the city and the countryside are different worlds. Still, the whole thing makes me a little uneasy. I’m riding a bicycle that costs more than many of these people make in five years, and it doesn’t seem appropriate or just. I’ve been to favelas in Brazil and townships in South Africa, and I had the same feeling in all those places. I try to learn from, and appreciate, less economically developed cultures; they take nothing for granted and do a lot with a little.

  Heading back into the city there’s not much of a tailwind; the wind is now coming from the side. The wind has been so strong; I’ve had to stay out of my aerobars for fear of being blown out of control. My gauge says 99 degrees and I’m well done, more than fully cooked. At every aid station, I stop and drink copiously and douse myself with water. The fluids are nauseatingly warm, like drinking from a hot tub. The Chinese are clever—they invented gunpowder, printing, and the compass, among other things—but they’ve never gotten the hang of making ice.

  The bike course is two loops and at the end of the first loop I stop. It’s an almost unconscious decision. There’s no negotiating, my body decides it’s time to quit, regardless of what my mind might think. I saw it all coming days ago.