IN JANUARY 2008, after eight years of self-employment, I accepted an offer to go to work for Competitor Group, a newly formed endurance sports media and events conglomerate based in San Diego. I confess that I did so not because I wanted the job but because life at home with Nataki had been so intense for so long that I regarded the prospect of spending eight hours a day trapped alone inside a cubicle as a kind of freedom. Having tried and failed to kill myself (and having no intention of trying again), I leapt at this less-absolute means of escape, renting out the house in Oakdale and moving with Nataki back to America’s Finest City.
They say you can’t outrun your problems, and we certainly didn’t. One morning not long after we took up residence in a swanky new midrise in Little Italy, Nataki told me she’d felt something come out of her head during the night.
“I think God healed me,” she said.
Here we go, I thought. Sure enough, convinced that this time would be different, Nataki went off her medication. Five weeks later, I received a call at work from the manager of our building, who informed me that Nataki had deliberately pulled a fire alarm for no reason and been taken to a psychiatric hospital by first responders.
Nataki was compliant with doctor’s orders thereafter, but to little effect. Her disease seemed to have its own rhythm, an emotional ebb and flow that was as unalterable as the tide and that the drugs could not stop but could only contain—and only to a point.
To escape the notoriety we had acquired in the swanky midrise, Nataki and I moved to a condominium located nearer Competitor’s Mira Mesa headquarters on the heels of her release from her fourth hospitalization. There Nataki began to complain of mysterious bite marks on her forearms, marks I could not see. I knew then that another crisis was coming, and it came soon, on a springlike afternoon in the middle of March. I was seated in the oversize upholstered chair that had come with our prized chenille sofa, reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest, when a shadow fell on me, and I looked up to find Nataki looming over me, looking displeased. As she commenced to charge me with practicing witchcraft on her, I became acutely conscious of how the chair’s cozy wraparound design sort of entraps its occupant. I suggested to Nataki that she take one of her antianxiety pills. She leapt on top of me and throttled me with both hands. I freed myself with no small difficulty and bolted for the door, shoeless as always.
I was down the stairs and halfway across the parking lot before I noticed that Queenie was scampering at my feet, smiling happily, thinking daddy was playing. Still running, I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and thumbed a too-familiar three-digit number. I was crouching behind a hedge near the front gate when Nataki came roaring by behind the wheel of Glamour Puss. I ducked even lower as she screeched out onto the main road without so much as pausing to look for crossing traffic.
The cops arrived. I gave them a description of Nataki’s car, and they put out an all-points bulletin. Not until the authorities left did I recognize the quandary I was in: sock-footed, keyless, sans wallet, and almost certainly locked out of my home. I led Queenie back to the apartment and tried the door. Nataki had indeed locked it, whether out of responsibility or spite I couldn’t guess. Night had fallen, and the temperature was dropping. The property’s management office had closed for the day, and there was nobody I could call for help. Since moving back to San Diego I had been singularly antisocial, keeping my coworkers and training buddies at arm’s length, reticent to expose others to the nightmare we were living.
There was a lounge in the resident community center that stayed open until ten o’clock. I went there and lay down on a sofa with Queenie and buried us under oversize pillows for warmth. At ten sharp, a baby-faced security officer in a rumpled uniform entered. Seeing me, he froze, his eyes crossing in an effort to classify the situation I presented. With as few words as possible, I explained my fix and asked him to let me stay where I was until the morning. He said he could not and then, very kindly, he kicked me out into the dark.
I had one last idea. Using words in lieu of a leash, I walked Queenie back toward the apartment and waded through a thick layer of groundcover that carpeted the space between the back of our building and the one next to it. Our apartment was on the second floor. It had a small balcony with an iron balustrade that we accessed through a sliding glass door, which was usually kept unlocked. When I reached the apartment beneath ours, I climbed on top of a three-foot plaster wall enclosing its porch. Reaching up, I was just able to grip the base of a rail in each hand.
Now what? If not for the balustrade, my strategy would have been to pull myself aloft by the arms and then swing a leg up to gain purchase on the floor of the balcony with my shin. Lacking this option, I would have to somehow get over the railing with no help from my lower extremities.
I took a deep breath and looked down. Queenie sat directly below, almost completely swallowed up in vegetation, watching me with worried eyes, aware now that this was no game. I squeezed the rails and hauled my body upward, the edge of the balcony digging into my forearms as my elbows flexed. When my head reached the level of my hands, I let go of the rail with my left hand and slammed the back of my upper arm down on the balcony floor between rails, transferring some of the load to other muscles.
The final step would decide everything. If it succeeded, I would at least get a chance to find out if the sliding door was open. If it failed, I would fall ten feet onto my back and squash my dog.
Putting all my weight on my left triceps, I let go of the rail with my right hand and shot the arm overhead. The very tips of my fingers found the top rail, gripping it fiercely. When I had a decent hold, I dangled briefly from my right hand before launching its mate up to join it. Quivering with fatigue, I then performed a second chin-up, got an elbow over the top rail, and dragged the rest of my body over, inch by inch. I dropped like a jellyfish onto the hard floor of the balcony, were I lay supine, heart thumping, until I was sufficiently recovered to get up and see about the door. It was unlocked.
Meanwhile Nataki was driving through the night (so much for the APB) to Tayna’s place up north in Antioch, where the two sisters had attended high school and Tayna had since returned to work as a bus driver. I reached Nataki there by phone in the morning. She asked me to box up some of her clothes and other necessaries and ship them to her.
“When are you coming back?” I asked.
“Why do you care?” she said. “You’ll be happier without me. You can hike and bike and jump all day. I won’t get in your way no more.”
I protested, but the truth of the matter was that a piece of me—a rather large piece—rejoiced at the prospect of time apart from Nataki. The past six years of shared struggle felt as if they had aged me sixty years. And the thought of exercising all day appealed to me very much. I had been mostly injury-free in the past year and was racing well as a result. But I was about to turn thirty-eight, and I felt a sense of urgency. If there was ever a time to commit fully to the pursuit of the race I believed was in me but hadn’t yet come out of me, it was now.
That phone call—the first of dozens in what would become a nine-month separation—ended with my hanging up on Nataki. I now had the power to silence her recriminations, and I didn’t mind using it. The next day’s call didn’t go much better. But, over the next several weeks, Nataki began to sound more and more like herself, a trend that was helped along by the attentions of a new psychiatrist—a rare African American woman in the field—who had an office not far from Tayna’s place. Yet even as our communications improved, we remained in no hurry to reconnect. We both needed a break.
Where I had hoped to find relief, however, I found only emptiness. The thing I always forgot in my fantasies of escape was that Nataki and I were still a beautiful match on our good days, and we had experienced many good days in the half-dozen years since she’d gotten sick, enjoying the soul-feeding perks of any healthy long-term romance: an easy intimacy, a quirky private language, and a vast repertoire of inside jokes. A hand placed gently on the other’s cheek in bed at night meant “Roll over, you’re snoring”—no need to speak the actual words. A small scratching motion made with hooked fingers, accompanied by an openmouthed, almost-silent feline hiss, expressed mild annoyance, a playful gesture that usually succeeded in dispelling the very emotion it communicated. Nataki named my one and only dance move, a goofy two-step I adapted to everything from slow jams to head bangers, The Person. I teased her about her many malapropisms (gracamole, Pissbird, flamingo dancers). Nataki’s sudden absence from my life served as a painful reminder that she was more than worth all the travail. Alone, I sank into a pathetic bachelorhood, dining on unhealthy prepared meals purchased from the neighborhood supermarket, drinking a six-pack of strong beer every night, and sometimes making it through an entire weekend without uttering a single word to another human being face-to-face.
Less than a month after Nataki left, I flew east to take a second whack at my first Boston Marathon. Having finally surpassed my friend Bernie’s marathon time the previous fall, I now had my sights set on my friend T.J.’s best mark of 2:38:18. In February, I set a new personal record in the half marathon, notching a time that, according to the various online calculators, indicated this new goal was well within my reach.
Marathons are run on the road, however, not on calculators. They do not reward potential but demand execution—and, let’s face it, a little luck. In Boston my luck ran out the moment the starting pistol cracked, when the runner behind me clipped my left heel with his toe, taking the shoe clean off. Judging it unwise to run 26.2 miles with one shoe, I stopped and bent over to fix the “flat tire,” making a target of my butt for the thousands of runners bearing down on me. Knocked around like a piñata at a keg party, I was forced in the end to step off the road to reshoe.
Things went south from there. Thigh pain is inescapable in the Boston Marathon, as in any marathon that features a lot of downhill running, but I felt the first twinge at twelve miles—way too early. By sixteen miles, where my family (Mom and Dad, Josh and his wife, Jennifer, and good old Dori) stood huddling in a bone-chilling wind, I was already slowing, bitterly resigned to another disaster. Spotting me, my brother bolted from the sidelines for a quick check-in. Although he was running little himself at the time, Josh had enough running experience to know by the grim set of my features and the stiffness of my gait that I was coming apart.
“How’s it going?” he asked anyway.
“Terrible,” I said.
“Why? What happened?”
“Why?” I snapped. “Because I suck at running marathons!”
I considered quitting then and there, but, impelled by a combination of pride and self-spite, I chose instead to embrace the full catastrophe. Through the hills of Newton and into Boston proper my will engaged in a hopeless stare-down with my suffering, the pain in my legs intensifying steadily until, at twenty-three miles, I resorted to the familiar soft-quit of walking. Head down, I wished myself invisible to the thousands of hollering Bostonians on either side of me as I hobbled along Commonwealth Avenue wrapped against a cold drizzle in a flimsy space blanket I’d grabbed at an aid station.
After thirty minutes of this purgatory, I came to Cleveland Circle, the very spot where, twenty-six years before, I had become a runner, breaking from the curb with my brothers to pilot our father to the finish line. Having learned from past meltdowns that I can always jog the last mile, I looked for an appropriate place to toss away my heat sheet, making accidental eye contact with a posse of beer-swilling college guys attired in Red Sox merchandise—backward-worn cap on one, fleece hoodie on another, game jersey on a third. They appeared to be having the time of their lives, belching and laughing and picking out individual runners to support with half-mocking encouragement. Now it was my turn in the spotlight.
“Come on, Number 1233!” they bellowed. “Run! You can do it!”
With a rueful shake of the head, knowing how this was going to look, I cast aside the metallic cape and began to trot. The college guys went berserk, roaring and high-fiving as rapturously as they might have done if the Sox won the World Series with a two-out walk-off grand-slam homer. I laughed in spite of myself and went on to finish the marathon in a time I could have beaten wearing hiking boots on any other day.
I returned to California with a sore left heel and a monkey on my back. The sore heel made it inadvisable for me to rush to remove the monkey, but I did so anyway, starting the Orange County Marathon just thirteen days after Boston. I say “started” because I didn’t finish. Within ten miles, my foot issue had become a full-blown case of plantar fasciitis. Lucky for me, the racecourse passed by my hotel at the halfway point, where the yummy brunch smell that emanated from the building when I got there sealed my decision to bail out.
This latest athletic fiasco not only compounded my monkey problem but also set back my early preparations for Ironman Arizona, which was six months away and was itself an attempt to rid myself of a monkey I had acquired in my first Ironman, where I missed out on a World Championship qualifying slot by twenty-three seconds after suffering through a tragicomic series of setbacks beginning with a calf muscle cramp that stopped me dead in the water two minutes into the ten-hour race. The whole point of the second act of my life as an endurance athlete was to avenge the first, but it seemed that each attempt I made to redeem past failures gave me something new to deliver myself from, like one of those kitchen disasters where you keep adding extra ingredients to save a bad dish and only make it worse.
Having done no swimming or cycling in the lead-up to Boston, I threw myself into these activities and took a break from running to let my injured heel recuperate. After two weeks, however, the foot was still painful to walk on. Desperate to resume running before I lost any more fitness, I tried jogging on a treadmill set at an incline. This measure yielded the desired effect of taking pressure off my heel—and the undesired effect of transferring that pressure to my Achilles tendon, which developed a small but debilitating tear that throbbed even as I lay in bed at night.
Ordered by a sports medicine specialist to extend my break from running at least four more weeks, I doubled down on cycling, riding six days a week, one hundred miles every Saturday. The result was that I got really good at riding a bike. By midsummer my regular training partners simply couldn’t keep up with me, nor could the many strangers who challenged me out on the roads, young men (always) who flew into a panic when I overtook them and scrambled to return the favor. I tortured these young men for sport, slowly cranking up the heat of my tempo until they boiled alive like the frogs in that old fable.
In the second week of August, I got a rare chance to ride with an athlete who was my match and more on a bicycle: Eneko Llanos, a thirty-three-year-old pro triathlete from Spain who had taken second place in the previous year’s Ironman World Championship. It was to be a five-and-a-half-hour rolling interview for a profile of Eneko that I was penning for Triathlete, which Competitor Group now owned.
We met early on a Technicolor Sunday morning at Nytro, a triathlon store located in the beachside city of Encinitas. From there we cruised northward along the Pacific Coast Highway, sunshine dancing on the gray-blue chop of the Pacific Ocean to our left. At Oceanside, we cut east on a bike path that at length dumped us onto Mission Avenue, near the salon where Nataki once worked. We then pressed farther inland until we hit Old Highway 395 and turned north, making it all the way to Escondido before at last reversing course.
Eneko had requested a flat route, but it is almost impossible to ride for five and a half hours in San Diego County without encountering a few serious hills. And so it was that, at sixty-seven miles, we hit a real quad-buster, a ramp-like slope ascending for 2.5 miles at a gradient of 6 to 7 percent. A few minutes into the climb, my companion fell silent. With sidelong glances I noted additional signs of exertional discomfort: hunched posture, clenched fingers, a fixedly downcast head position. After several more minutes, Eneko spoke.
“Is that where we turn?” he asked, gesturing toward a flat intersecting road branching off to the right.
“Yes,” I said.
“Good,” he said.
My chest swelled with pride. I would have killed for a witness. Did you hear that? I just made the reigning Ironman runner-up suffer on a hill climb! With a single word, Eneko had released in me a feeling of achievement that surpassed anything I had experienced in an actual race. But wait—wasn’t this rather pathetic? Taking a mental step back, I saw my pride for what it was: empty vanity. Eneko’s nod to my cycling chops was fool’s gold, attractive but lacking real value. Ego strokes from elite athletes were not the rewards I sought and never had been. Beating my friends’ race times, achieving coveted qualifying standards—these were no more than signposts toward the true goal. Only now that I had attained such a reward did I see how little they meant if they came easily, leaving me the same person I was before.
As Eneko and I made that right turn, it struck me that what I really wanted was to conquer hard. I wanted a race experience that was as tough and as painful as any of my many failures but that, for once, did not end in failure. Only this would redeem my first and greatest failure—the one I had carried inside as an unhealed psychic wound since I was seventeen years old. In a dim way, I had perceived the deeper nature of the completion I sought from the very moment I decided, on that long flight home from St. Maarten with Nataki, to become an athlete again. But like an insect mistaking light for warmth, I had allowed myself to be distracted from the core mission by the bright, shiny objects of recognition and ranking, overlooking the basic fact that it was myself I needed to impress, that doing better in sport was not an end but a means to the end of being better as a man. I had no clue what my race of redemption would look like, but I knew for damn sure it hadn’t happened yet and was confident I would know it for what it was when it did happen—if it ever did.
The perspective shift that occurred during my bike ride with Eneko Llanos was still setting in when my boss asked me to attend and report on the Interbike bicycle industry expo in Las Vegas in the third week of September. As chance would have it, this event coincided with Nataki’s and my eighth wedding anniversary. Feeling the time had come for us to test our readiness for a return to marital normalcy, I proposed to Nataki that we meet up in Sin City to mark the occasion, and she agreed.
I found Nataki waiting for her suitcase at baggage carousel 2 at McCarron International Airport, having just arrived on a ninety-minute flight from Oakland. Whichever brain cell of mine stored the memory of my very first encounter with her outside T.G.I. Friday’s was set faintly aglow as we greeted each other after our longest separation since that moment.
“You’re so skinny!” Nataki said.
“So are you!” I said, gratefully, my embarrassment annihilated by Nataki’s typical lack thereof.
Ironman training had removed the last two or three pounds of expendable weight from my body. Jenny Craig (Tayna’s idea), meanwhile, had stripped away the usual ten pounds of “medicine weight” Nataki had gained after her most recent mental health timeout, restoring her old modeling figure, or nearabout.
“I just got a text message from Teisha,” Nataki said, looking at her phone. “She said her brother found tickets for $245.”
Teisha, the woman responsible for that first encounter outside T.G.I. Friday’s, now lived in Vegas, as did her younger brother, Tony. When Nataki told Teisha we were coming to town and mentioned that we were interested in seeing Floyd Mayweather’s highly anticipated return to the boxing ring against Juan Manuel Márquez, Teisha tipped her that Tony, a man of connections, might be able to cadge a pair of seats at the MGM Grand for less than the four figures they were going for online.
“Is that $245 apiece?” I asked.
“I think so,” Nataki said.
“Tell her we’ll take them,” I said.
Celebrating eight years of wedded bliss by watching two men chase each other around a cage was Nataki’s idea, not mine. Boxing was the only sport that ever made any sense to her, and she’d been attracted to the spectacle of major title bouts since Mike Tyson’s reign as heavyweight champ in the late 1980s. Such avidity for the “sweet science” of pugilism had always struck me as a funny inconsistency in a personality that was otherwise pacifistic in the extreme. (Nataki once expressed reluctance to purchase a Bullet brand blender on account of its name.) But every personality has its inconsistencies.
After collecting Nataki’s suitcase, we picked up our rental car and drove to the nearest Wells Fargo, where I deposited $490 into Tony’s checking account before heading on to the Wynn, a place of happy memories for us. As we unpacked, I extracted Mr. Pajamas from my carry-on bag and propped him up against a bed pillow. It took a minute for Nataki to notice him, and when she did she stared so long I began to worry I’d made a mistake, but then she stepped forward into my arms, pressing her cheek to my shoulder. Eventually my hands began to wander.
“I’m on my you-know-what,” Nataki said.
“Naturally,” I said, deflated.
The scene at the MGM Grand was everything we’d hoped for and more, a caricature of our preconceived image. The crowd’s predominant female type was bubble breasted, expensively coifed, minidressed, and stiletto heeled. Every third man we saw resembled some celebrity, and indeed many really were the person they looked like: Kid Rock, Tyrese, P. Diddy, Mike Tyson in the flesh. The fight seemed almost an afterthought, Mayweather winning easily in his usual unexciting, defensive style, disappointing the largely pro-Marquez crowd.
The following day, Nataki and I drove twenty miles north to visit Teisha in the apartment she shared with her nine-year-old daughter, Aryanna, and her five-month-old son, Torres. To my delight, Arilou (as everyone calls her) behaved as though it had been three days, not three years, since she’d last seen us. Entrusting a soft little hand to me, she guided me to the community fitness room so I could squeeze in a run (I was now running a bit) while her mom and my wife caught up, gabbling happily about life in the third grade and being a big sister.
Later we went out for Mexican food at a bustling family restaurant in the neighborhood. As we attacked a nacho appetizer, Nataki began to recount one of our favorite Arilou stories from a few years back, when we used to see each other more often. Teisha and her daughter were visiting our home in Oakdale, and it was lunchtime. Assuming Arilou was like other five-year-olds, Nataki started to make a sandwich for her, asking a series of questions about what she wanted on it.
“I’ll never forget it,” Teisha laughed, taking over. “Nataki, you came rushing out of the kitchen like you’d been booted, and you said to me, all serious, ‘Arilou says she can make her own sandwich.’”
Arilou squealed with delight and buried her face in a throw pillow in feigned embarrassment.
“Do you remember that?” I asked.
“No!” she said.
“But it sounds like you, doesn’t it?”
At that moment I wanted a daughter just like Arilou, and I said as much to Nataki as we drove back toward the Strip at dusk.
“Teisha is blessed,” she said simply.
In the morning, the calendar having flipped to the 21st of September overnight, Nataki and I breakfasted in our hotel room.
“Happy anniversary,” I said, raising a glass of orange juice.
Within an hour we were on our way to the airport, where Nataki would catch a flight back to Oakland while I transferred to a cheaper, employer-approved hotel and prepared for Interbike. On the way we discussed our immediate future, agreeing that a little more time apart wouldn’t hurt. I’d get my Ironman out of the way, she’d continue working with her new doctor, and we’d effect a permanent reunion around the holidays, perhaps.
Then my phone rang. I saw my brother Josh’s number and knew instantly what the call was about.
“What’s the good word?” I said.
“Jennifer’s at the hospital,” he said. “It looks like this is it.”
Josh and Jennifer’s first child, Caleb, would be born before the sun set. I was overjoyed by the news, not only because my brother’s happiness was my happiness but also because Jennifer had suffered through a difficult pregnancy. Lurking underneath my joy, however, was a seed of envy.
“Are you glad we never had children?” I asked Nataki after relaying the news.
My use of the word “never” was premature, in one sense, as Nataki was still only thirty-four years old. But not in the sense that mattered.
“Yes,” Nataki said quickly. “Aren’t you?”
“Well,” I said, focusing my thoughts, “on the one hand I grant that it would have been dreadful for a child to have been caught up in all of this. But on the other hand, I think you would have been a wonderful mother. And everyone says we would have made beautiful children together. I always picture a girl.”
Nataki’s initial reason for not wanting kids, as expressed on our first date, was self-focused. Having seen what Tayna’s body went through in pregnancy and childbirth, she wanted nothing to do with it. A lot had happened since then.
“But what if she came out like me?” Nataki asked, her voice thickening.
How many times can a man’s heart break for a woman?
On October 10, six weeks before Ironman Arizona, I raced a half Ironman in the hills north of Santa Clarita. Aptly named Magic Mountain Man, the race featured a punishing bike course that packed 5,500 feet of climbing into fifty-six miles. It was my first triathlon in six years, and I could hardly contain my excitement. Though still hobbled somewhat by my left Achilles tendon, I felt my running legs beginning to come back, and I thirsted for the opportunity to do against real competition what I had been doing to the cyclists of San Diego County all summer.
The day before the race, I pulled my wetsuit out of storage, left Queenie with a dog sitter, and drove three hours north to the race site, arriving in plenty of time to tour the bike route. I laughed out loud as the Meep Meep strained its way up a seven-mile, 1,700-foot ascent that commenced (sadistically, it seemed, as though the race director rather than plate tectonics had put it there) straight out of the swim-bike transition area. After checking in to the host hotel and attending an athlete meeting, I grabbed dinner at a nearby Red Lobster, limiting my booze intake to two pints of Samuel Adams. I had my game face on.
Early the next morning, I ate a banana and a PowerBar and choked down a bottle of Boost before heading over to Castaic Lake, where predawn darkness and a fifty-one-degree chill created an atmosphere of foreboding. At the start line I positioned myself rather optimistically in the first row of racers. Moments before the starting horn sounded, I felt a tap on my shoulder. Spinning around, I saw an olive-skinned beauty smiling at me. I smiled in return, vaguely expecting some form of flattery.
“Do you want me to zip you up the rest of the way?” she asked.
It seemed the zipper of my wetsuit had gotten caught in the fabric of the triathlon racing suit I wore underneath. My smile dropped and my face warmed, as if Kim Kardashian had caught me with my fly open. My kindly helper fixed the snag and I shuddered away a second premonition of doom.
The start of the race was the usual liquid melee. I swallowed water, got kicked in the head, suffered a mild panic attack, and forgot all the technique cues I’d been practicing in the pool as the field of three hundred-plus funneled toward the first turn buoy. But things spread out eventually, and on the way back to shore I found myself quite alone. What’s more, when I lifted my head for sighting I detected no splashing ahead, and it occurred to me then that I might actually be leading the race. I reached the shallows, stood up, and scampered toward the bike racks, and still not a single other racer was visible before me. It was true! I was in first place! Either that or—
“And now we’re getting into the heart of the field,” said the race announcer over a PA system.
Eleven other athletes were already on their bikes, minutes up the road. I had washed ashore at the front of a pack of guppies.
Prior to the race, I clipped my bike shoes into the pedals like the pros do. I had not actually rehearsed a barefoot bike mount in training, however, and I paid dearly for my lack of preparation at the transition exit, where amused spectators watched me struggle like a 1930s pratfall comic against the laws of bicycle physics (Law #5: A pedal with an empty shoe attached will always come to rest shoe side down), losing even more time to the stronger swimmers.
I felt a perverse sense of relief as I started the seven-mile climb. Like that weird kid in Mrs. Johnson’s third-grade class who celebrated the cancellation of recess, enjoying what everyone else hated, I bounded merrily up the mountain, passing seven gasping competitors within the first few miles, each of them turning to me with a just-shoot-me expression as I whistled by. Near the top of the climb I reeled in an eighth cyclist, this one neither gasping nor wearing a just-shoot-me expression, his two-digit race number (12) indicating he was a pro. Seeing me appear on his left side, he accelerated violently, as though his very manhood depended on not letting me by. Wary of getting caught up in a pissing match with fifty miles of cycling left to do, I dropped back, waited for the inevitable sag in Number 12’s tempo, then stood on the pedals and made a decisive pass.
My reward for summiting the mountain was a white-knuckled plunge down the other side at forty-five miles per hour. Number 12 managed fifty and was back ahead of me at the bottom. The course then turned onto a desolate stretch of highway leading to a turnaround point seven miles away. Two massive hills stood between me and that point, and I was delighted to have to climb them twice in each direction. Number 12 was not so delighted. I shook him off once and for all on the first of these climbs and shifted my focus to the road ahead, wondering how many other opponents remained in front of me.
This question was answered near the turnaround, where a pair of police motorcycles cruised by me, lights flashing. Tucked in behind them was the race leader, riding flat-backed on a gleaming white Look 576. Two more athletes—both also wearing two-digit pro numbers—came past before I reached the turnaround. I was in fourth place.
On the second lap, the frontrunner and I met each other again, somewhat farther from the turnaround, confirming that he was riding faster than me, but I’d gained ground on the other two. Finding plenty of strength left in my legs, I rode the final climb one gear higher than I had the previous time, hoping to claw my way into second place before I reached the run, where the goal was more modest: survival.
The bike leg concluded with a bobsled ride down the seven-mile hill I had climbed two hours before. As I coasted into the transition area, I withdrew my feet from the shoes and executed a respectable pro-style flying dismount. A volunteer directed me to the spot where my running gear awaited. Those first few strides on pre-fatigued legs are always shocking, but on this occasion I felt not only the usual wading-through-slop sensation but also a keen consciousness that my longest run in the past six months was 10 miles, or 3.1 miles less than I was now attempting after the hardest bike ride I had ever done.
“Pray for me!” I called out as I plodded past a knot of spectators standing just outside the transition area’s fenced perimeter.
Although I hadn’t checked out the run course, I knew from the prerace meeting that it was a simple out-and-back, mostly straight with a couple of turns, along an exposed bike path on the Santa Clara River. I chose a conservative pace, both out of consideration for my injury and my recent paucity of run training and because I felt large and bumbling, like the 206-pound me who sometimes jogged home from bars late at night in those early days in San Francisco. Over the next several miles, my discomforts multiplied, symptoms of dehydration, hyperthermia, and glycogen depletion joining my original complaints.
With less than three miles to go, old Number 12 caught and passed me, relegating me to fifth place. I hooked my eyes on his back and imagined him towing me to the finish line. We came to a bridge and began to tramp toward the far side, but halfway across my challenger suddenly stopped and wheeled around.
“I think we missed a turn,” he said.
“We’re okay,” I said, stopping also. “Look, there’s an arrow.” I pointed at a chalk arrow on the sidewalk ahead.
“No, this is an out-and-back,” Number 12 insisted, already beginning to retrace his steps.
I put my trust in the arrow and pressed forward, studying my surroundings, looking for specific features I had seen on the way out, finding none. And then I realized what Number 12 had meant. On an out-and-back course, as athletes near the front of the race, we should have been meeting lots of slower racers head-on. And indeed we had been—until we hadn’t. I stopped a second time to consider my options.
Already I had run twelve miles, give or take, at the fastest pace I felt I could sustain for 13.1 miles. In technical terms, this left me about a mile away from being toast. If my wrong turn had occurred where I now suspected it had, my present location was approximately two-and-a-half miles from the finish line, a distance that would surely turn me to burnt toast if I attempted it now.
Squinting ahead in the direction I’d been going, I spied what appeared to be a cluster of chain stores and restaurants. I began to walk toward them, and after ten or twelve minutes I came to a Carl’s Jr., inside which I encountered a teenage girl sweeping a rag across table tops while flirting in a mixture of English and Spanish with a pair of young male loiterers. Her nametag identified her as Sabrina.
“Excuse me,” I said.
Sabrina eyed me warily, as she had every right to do. I wore a skintight racing suit that left little to the imagination and an ankle-strapped timing chip that looked a lot like those house-arrest devices.
“Is that your boyfriend over there?” I asked her, gesturing toward the boy to whom she’d been giving the most attention, who wore a Kobe Bryant jersey and knee-length shorts.
Sabrina followed my finger.
“Yeah?” she said, the rising tone of her answer flipping it around into a question of her own: And what’s it to you?
“Tell him I’ll give him fifty bucks if he drives me back to my hotel. I was doing a triathlon,” I said, flipping my race number, “and I got lost. I’m too tired to walk.”
Sabrina held a quick conference in Spanish with her boyfriend, who then approached.
“I’m Juan,” he said, giving me his right hand. “Where do you need to go?”
For the first time I noticed the braces on his teeth. He was seventeen, eighteen at the most. I followed Juan outside to a tricked-out 2006 Ford Mustang with aftermarket rims and paint. During the short drive to the hotel we talked about triathlons and muscle cars, nothing in between.
“Wait here,” I told him at the hotel entrance. “I’ll bring the money down.”
Something appeared to be wrong with my right knee, which refused to unbend as I struggled to climb out of the low-slung vehicle. I took a cautious first step and collapsed against the Mustang’s open door, an eruption of pain causing the injured joint (injured when? how?) to buckle.
“You okay, man?” Juan said.
A week later, the knee still hurt so much that I couldn’t even ride my bike in its lowest gear. Enough was enough. I withdrew from Ironman Arizona, the fourth Ironman I had signed up for and failed to start because of injury.
To keep fit while I couldn’t cycle, I ran every day, despite the touch-and-go state of my left Achilles tendon. Each run, predictably, was a little more painful than the last, and after a week I had no choice but to stop.
To keep fit while I couldn’t cycle or run, I swam every day. This worked out okay until the muscles around my right shoulder blade began to give me trouble. Having no other exercise options to fall back on, I continued to visit the pool each morning until I could no longer lift my right arm overhead, at which point I had no choice but to give up swimming (and weights).
For the next two weeks, I was completely unable to exercise, unless you count walking Queenie, which I don’t. During this period, because my showers had always come after workouts, I frequently forgot to bathe.