“Okay,” I said, mentally wiping away the cold water Welch had figuratively just thrown in my face.
“You’d be nuts to try.” Welch smiled. “But it’s possible.”
He wasn’t worried about my mental strength, he remarked. I had that in spades. It was clear to him from the documentary that I had hit my body’s limit on the morning of my Kilimanjaro summit attempt.
“You were bonking bad, mate,” he said. There was that smile again.
Yet I still managed to get up, he pointed out, and push through to get to the top. He told me that most triathletes who bonk at a race are carried out on stretchers.
Preparing for Ironman would demand much more than mental strength. There was nutrition, conditioning, strength training, proper technique, and an enormous commitment of time and energy and focus to consider. The more we spoke, the more answers I got about how many months of all-consuming training would be required. And the more answers I got, the more I wanted to do the Ironman—and I wanted Greg Welch to coach me. He was everything you could wish for in a coach: smart, honest, strategic, ice cool but intense, humble yet confident.
He asked how much experience I had as a swimmer, a runner, and a cyclist. He asked even more questions about my cerebral palsy and, unlike before Kilimanjaro, I did not skirt the answers. I wanted to come to the race prepared for every inch of ocean and road, and if I was going to do this, then I needed to be honest about my limitations.
Welch absorbed everything I said—no judgments, just “Oh, yeah . . . That makes sense . . . Yeah.” An hour later when we left the restaurant, Greg followed me to my car. I could tell he was checking out how I walked, how my legs buckled and my knees knocked. I made no effort to mask my gait. Those days were over for me.
“If I have any other questions, do you mind if I call you?” I asked.
“Sure,” Greg said. He paused briefly before adding, “One more thing, though. You had better be damn sure this is something you want to do, mate, because it will take a commitment beyond anything it took to climb the mountain.”
“I’ll think on it,” I said, then shook his hand and thanked him. Driving home, I knew for sure I was going to do it. Now I needed to convince Welch to train me.
Before reaching out to him again, I spoke to my new boss, Chris Underwood, CEO of Young’s Market, a major spirits and wine distributor. Earlier that year I had made the tough decision to leave the Ducks when Chris offered me the opportunity to create from scratch a marketing platform for Young’s. Further, the folks at Young’s were big supporters of my foundation work. They had sponsored my Kilimanjaro climb, and Chris promised to give me the time I needed for the Kona Ironman; he was all for it.
With his support, I reached out to Welch a few days later. I had prepared a whole pitch on why he should train me.
“I need to do this, but there’s no chance I can do it on my own,” I began.
Little did I know he had already decided to take me on after first watching the documentary and then meeting me for lunch. Since his retirement from competition, Welch had undergone almost a dozen heart procedures in his battle against ventricular tachycardia. A pacemaker-like device now sent jolts of electricity to his heart whenever it was needed to counter an abnormal rhythm. He knew what it was to struggle against a body that would simply not cooperate. As for his coyness at our lunch about how willing he was to help me with my Ironman ambition—he just wanted to make sure I really wanted it. He was devious that way.
Before I could continue with my pitch, Welch said, “I’ll coach you.”
9
Swim. Bike. Run.
The Oakley headquarters looked like a cross between a spaceship and a medieval fortress. Passing through its cathedral-sized steel entrance was both inspiring and intimidating. At reception I asked for Greg Welch and waited for him in one of the fighter-pilot ejection seats in the lobby. He came out to meet me, then led me down a corridor of dark mysterious rooms into his office.
“So, we’re really going to do this?” he asked.
“Yep.”
“You’re crazy.” He laughed.
“Yep.”
“I’m busy. Okay, mate?” Welchy (as I quickly came to call him) started. “I’ll write you out a schedule every week, but you need to follow it. I can’t teach you how to work out, the proper way to run or swim, or how to ride a bike. You need to figure that out on your own, get the right people. You need to join a swim program. You need a trainer. I’ll coach, but I can’t be there every second to wipe your bum. You have to become your own coach, your own doctor, and your own nutritionist. I’m here to set the guidelines, but you have to know everything yourself. Okay?”
I nodded, and he continued.
“We will work you up in stages. If you got a job in a bank, you wouldn’t start as the big manager, right, mate? No. You’d start as a bank teller, and you’d climb the ladder from there.”
The first part of my training, Welchy explained, would simply be to get my body and muscles familiar with the three disciplines (swimming, running, biking) and to see how they handled the pressure. If there was something I couldn’t do because of my cerebral palsy, he wanted to know right away.
“Don’t mistake tired or lazy for inability,” he said. “Because I know the difference.” He gave me a look and another laugh.
On his computer, he showed me a training schedule he had drawn up for my first week.
“S is for swim,” he explained, really getting down to the basics. “B is bike. R is run. W is for weights, meaning core and plyometrics.”
There were a lot of workouts, two to three a day, but it all seemed to make sense, and it seemed very doable. Then he punched through a list of notes he’d made brainstorming.
First: Consistency was everything. I couldn’t do the same quantity of training that a normal person could do. I had basically been walking around with the equivalent of an injury my whole life, so we had to go for a slow, steady build, allowing time for my muscles to recover.
Second: My posture was terrible. I needed custom orthotics for my shoes and a bike suited to the way I held my body. For equipment, Welchy needed my sizes (shoe, shirt, waist, and height) and ten copies of my documentary to set me up with sponsors and to get the best gear (free of charge).
Third: Nutrition would be key. A major part of succeeding in any endurance event is figuring out the right combination of calories to keep you energized throughout the race, but at Kona getting the nutrition right was essential. This was survival of the toughest, and unless I had fuel in my tank, I was going to be lost. In Kona, perspiration was an issue. I’d be losing nutrients and minerals by the bucket. Everybody was different, but given the spasticity of my muscles, I would be burning through fuel faster than most. We had to experiment to figure out what food regimen would work best for me during the race.
Fourth: An able-bodied person might train for a year in preparation for Kona. I was going to need two years. This meant that my big race would be in October 2012. As it was now early February 2011, I had twenty months of intensive, all-consuming training ahead of me. It would make my prep work for Kilimanjaro seem like a hike up an anthill. I’m sure Welchy heard me swallow hard at this point.
Fifth: Since I took much longer to heal than a typical athlete, we simply had to avoid injuries. Full stop. If I was hurting, he needed to know why and how much.
Sixth: I had to do races. Welchy wanted me in everything from a sprint-distance triathlon to a half Ironman to a full Ironman before Kona. (Another audible swallow from me.)
Seventh: I had chicken legs. We had to fight that muscle tightening and cramping big-time.
Eighth: We were going to build up my stomach and trunk. In swimming, a strong core would help keep my legs up so they could do their job. In biking, it would enable my legs to rotate optimally, supplying the maximum energy to my bike. And, while we were on the subject of the bike, because I had balance and equilibrium issues, I would start on a stationary bike for a few mo
nths, to keep the focus on building up the muscles I would need for the bike.
Finally, ninth: Since the run would be the hardest for me, we were going to focus on fast times for the swim and bike ride, so that I would have enough of a buffer to make it across those 26.2 miles within the time allowed.
For almost an hour, Welchy talked, fast, and I listened, occasionally breaking in with a short answer to a question or a nod of the head. Mostly, I absorbed the information, took hurried notes, and wondered in awe at how lucky I was to have Greg Welch as my Yoda. He clearly had done his research on cerebral palsy and was designing a program based on it. It was like night and day from my training for Kilimanjaro.
More than anything, I sensed that Welchy believed in me, that this Ironman mission of mine was actually possible. This was exactly what I needed.
That Saturday, a hulking black Oakley truck, one of those designed for off-road races, thundered into my driveway, and Dane Howell jumped down from the driver’s seat. His cargo was the LeMond RevMaster, a stationary bike that looked more like a lemon-colored tank. It took Dane’s enormous guns and my straining back—along with much cursing and grunting—to haul this ton of steel into my garage.
“Have fun with that,” Dane said laughing, before driving away.
Looking at this beast crouched between my car and my washing machine, knowing that Welchy wanted me on it at least three times a week for the next four months before advancing to a bike that actually moved, I knew it was going to be a long winter.
Later the same day, Welchy sent me my first week’s training schedule. There was a session of either swimming, cycling, running, or lifting weights every day—and often more than one each day. He had included short notes on what I should aim to do and how.
On Monday, February 14, 2011, Valentine’s Day, my Ironman training began. I weighed 218 pounds and was likely in the worst shape I had been in years.
“Let patience be your friend,” Welch wrote of the half-hour swim, which I was going to do at the local Newport Coast pool. “You will find that fatigue will set in quickly, so just do what you can. Don’t rush it.”
Swimming, I thought. No problemo. Thanks to Bompa, I was raised in the Pacific Ocean, flippers for feet and all that. With the Ironman, it would be my big strength. It was 6 A.M., dark, and frigid cold for southern California when I walked across the empty deck of the open-air pool in sweats and a hoodie. Steam rose over the heated water. There was nobody else foolish enough to be there that early in midwinter, but if I was going to make this Ironman schedule work and hold down a full-time job, there would be a lot of early mornings and late nights in my future, no matter the weather.
After shaking for a few moments at the edge of the pool, I hopped into the shallow end, an awkward maneuver at the best of times. The water was warm and felt good. I stretched and took a long pull on my sports drink before finally donning my goggles and pushing off. I glided a couple of body lengths, happy and comfortable in the water, before setting off. My freestyle stroke felt good and clean. The pool was 25 yards long, half that of an Olympic lap, so I was quickly at the wall. I liked the idea of performing a flip turn, but I knew it would throw off my equilibrium.
By the second lap, I was already tiring and breathing heavily. It was clear that I was swimming too fast and not taking enough breaths. Further, I was all over my lane, swimming damn near in a zigzag, and my stroke was far from smooth. Okay, settle down, I told myself. At the wall, I stopped, took off my goggles, had a drink, and then started again more slowly. After four more lengths of the pool, my shoulders were tiring, my neck was stiff, and there was no rhythm to my breaths. I had to stop again.
Swimming long straight miles was going to be a very different game from the quick bursts of strokes you needed to escape riptides in the ocean. As much as I loved being in the water, I hated following that little black line on the bottom of the pool, lap after lap. Twenty minutes into my “little splash around,” as Welchy called it, I was done, and I pulled myself out.
That same evening, after a long day at work, I hit the streets for my prescribed forty-five-minute walk—to get my legs to where they were “strong enough to sustain running” and to “enjoy the fresh air.” Almost from the start, I lacked the concentration required to keep my ankles from rolling to the inside. Near the end of the uphill climb to my house, my back was stiff and rigid. I almost tripped when the big toe of one foot caught the inside of my other shoe. By 9 P.M., I was out cold.
The next morning, I stepped into my garage, cracked the door open for some fresh air, and then climbed onto the RevMaster. It had been years since I had done any biking, evidenced by the fact that I didn’t even own a bike. My experience was limited to riding around with a gang of kids on BMXs. Forty-five minutes on the bike, those were my orders: “We need to alternate muscle groups to allow consistency throughout training and recovery. . . . Sit on that bloody thing for forty-five minutes. Wear a heart-rate monitor and record the numbers. Just an easy-to-medium effort, and try and get those legs moving at 70 RPMs.”
The RevMaster was old-school. No buzzers or bells or cool displays simulating hills, no electricity at all. It didn’t even have straps on its pedals. When I was getting started, my feet slipped off and I nearly cut up my shins. Not an auspicious beginning. Using the little mechanical hand dial, I cranked up the resistance on the wheels and started again. The handlebars were high and close to my chest, and five minutes into my warm-up I was growing uncomfortable. My lower back and hips tightened and cramped. Ten minutes in, the lower half of my body felt completely numb. I stood up to get the blood flowing, but there was not enough tension on the pedals and, again, I almost slipped off. This is not pretty, I thought. I adjusted the dial to increase the resistance. Fifteen minutes in, alternating between sitting and standing, I was already tired. Sweat poured off me and puddled at my feet. My back really began to sting, and my quads were telling me they wouldn’t be able to last much longer.
I tried to take a drink from my water bottle, but even on the stationary bike I nearly lost my balance. Facing the blank white garage door, no headphones, no TV, I struggled to continue, thinking of how much I hurt, how bored I already was, and how much torture it was going to be to ride this machine for the next four months. Easy-to-medium effort at 70 RPMs? No way, no how.
After forty-five minutes on that “bloody thing,” I climbed down, a shell of the man I had been getting into the saddle, my back crooked and the underside of my crotch rubbed raw. I staggered into the house to get ready for a day at the office.
Wednesday morning, day three of my Ironman training, and I was back at the pool, this time at the Aquatics Center at UC Irvine. They ran a master’s swimming program where noncollege (read: “old”) men and women like me could come out and hit the pool under the watchful guidance of student coaches. “Do the master’s,” Welchy wrote in his notes to my schedule. “Learn something new every day. Swimming is all technique. You may be the strongest man out there, but unless you have good technique, you’ll sink. And let’s not do that!”
On my arrival at 5:30 A.M., I was barely awake and pretty lethargic after two straight days of exercise. It was clear from my first splash around at the Newport pool that I needed some help. I approached one of the coaches, a young student named Brianna, and told her of my Ironman ambition—and the fact that I had cerebral palsy. Admitting this was no longer a big deal to me. Brianna pointed me to the far left lane, reserved for the slowest in the pool, and said she wanted to watch my stroke for a few laps.
Feeling under the microscope, I jumped into the pool without my goggles on, only to realize that it was too deep to stand. For the next minute, I put on a show of trying to don my goggles while staying afloat; eventually I ended up crooking one arm over the side while I did an awkward eggbeater kick to tread water. It wasn’t pretty, and I dared not look at Brianna for fear she was in hysterics.
Finally, I got started. Into my first lap, I realized that this pool was Olympic length
and that I was winded just getting to the far end. I wanted to stop, but pride is a dangerous thing. I turned around and did another length back to where Brianna was waiting for me. Hanging on the edge of the pool, goggles pushed up on my forehead, I gasped for breath like someone who had just swum fifty laps, not a meager one.
“You looked good at the start, but then you really fell apart,” Brianna said. “You’re dragging your legs like a rudder.”
I would have replied, but I didn’t have enough air.
“Let’s do a couple more laps and see what happens. Can you bilateral breathe?”
“Not sure,” I muttered.
Then I was off. The next two laps were even worse than the first one. I had trouble breathing on alternate sides, and I felt as if I were dragging a stone behind me in the water. By the time I finished, and I barely managed even that, my temples were thumping, a sure sign I was pushing it too hard.
On the pool deck, Brianna showed me how I was coming across my body with each stroke, multiplying the amount of work I needed to do to move through the water. She wanted me to keep my head down, level my body out, straighten my legs, reach ahead with my hands, and concentrate on keeping my feet from falling behind me. Everything she said was a consequence of having a strong upper body, but a weaker lower one.
“These are easy fixes. Do them, and you’ll be swimming great,” she said encouragingly. “Let’s see how you do over the next ten laps.”
Ten laps! I thought. They’ll have to carry me out of here if I try ten more laps. But I nodded and then set off. I focused on Brianna’s instructions, and she walked along on the deck with me as I made my way down the pool, reminding me of what to do. With my reshaped stroke there was much less effort, and for the next three or four laps it seemed I was gliding through the water. By the tenth, however, I was struggling hard again, so tired that it took all my attention to simply make it forward in the water, let alone worry about how I was doing it.
One More Step: My Story of Living with Cerebral Palsy, Climbing Kilimanjaro, and Surviving the Hardest Race on Earth Page 14
