Taylor House Century

                                                               

Many things scare me. Anxiety has taken over my life instead of depression. It nips at my heels constantly. I worry about money,about where I am going to live, if I will ever meet anyone that I can spend time with. I worry about an upcoming ironman race with scenarios of failure that run in my head. This bike ride, with 5,700 feet of climbing at 7,200 feet of altitude was a blip in my stress, but daunting none the less.In a normal year, I would not have attempted this ride, but this is not a normal year. A hilly ride at altitude was good training for the race. This Century plunges from 7,200 feet to 4,700 feet in twenty miles, then climbs again. The climb is about twenty-two miles of moderate to steep hills. The total length is ninety-five miles. It is harder to breathe at 7,000 feet.. I think that only the foolhardy or hardcore would want to do this tough a route. My previous bike rides in Flagstaff had been exhausting and they weren’t this much climbing or mileage.

The ironman I am doing is at about 6,000-7,000 feet of altitude with a bike of 5,200 feet of elevation gain according to the race website. This amount of elevation gain had grown, according to rumor, to a much higher amount of anywhere to 6,000 to 10,000 feet. Who knows what it really is? Probably something that I can’t do.

I never used to worry about elevation gain until I got a Garmin watch with GPS.. Now it is a crazy obsession. Rides I used to do weren’t good enough to survive a hilly ironman. I had to torment myself by riding more and more hills, and it was never enough.

This event was a charity ride. No timing, which suited me because I am slow as hell. People were there just to ride, not race, so it was low key. No tiresome “I am such hot stuff” athletes that I see at triathlons. At packet pick- up, I ran into someone that I knew from the Arizona Bicycle Club that I hadn’t seen in years. He is in his eighties, so I had not been sure if he was still alive. Another person recognized me from a bicycle group that I hadn’t ridden with in years. It was fun to see old friends again.

The start of the ride wound through the city of Flagstaff. I was apprehensive because of the altitude, but we started on a downhill, so it didn’t seem too hard. After fifteen miles, it was uphill and continued on Highway 89. The sixty-five mile route turned off to Sunset Crater. The ninety-five mile route continued up Highway 89. At this point I was alone and a little uneasy about it. The downhill was fifteen miles. I could see the flatlands before the Grand Canyon in the distance. It was worth all the hassle of traveling to Flagstaff. To coast on a bike at twenty-five miles per hour is close to flying–a sense of freedom and being unbound from the earth.

Highway 89 eventually ends at the Grand Canyon. I hoped that I would not miss the turn off to Wupatki National Monument and end up on a road to nowhere. After a long time, I turned off into the park road and had to take pictures of the Wupatki National Monument sign. I stopped at the aid station and continued on the desolate park road free of cars and bike riders. I was still descending and would pay the price for this eventually. A twenty mile ascent awaited at some point.

The road wound past Indian ruins-Nalakihu, Wutpaki and Citadel pueblos. The green rolling grassland hills were edged with the pink of the distant Grand Canyon. It would make a nice painting. I felt a sense of the age of the place and of the people that lived here a thousand years ago. One Indian ruin was right on the road with stone walls. I couldn’t resist stopping to take more pictures.

After the visitor’s center, the road was straighter and more monotonous and began to ascend. At fifty-six miles, I had a time of 3:35. That went to hell. I was lucky to have a cloudy day. The clouds kept the temperature down. It’s hotter down at 4,800 feet, which is why they had a cut off point at the first aid station.

The sun came out at noon and beat down on me. I felt good most of the time despite the difficulty of the climb, but I was hot. I was careful to drink enough water and take salt tablets because it was easy to get dehydrated. Dehydration on a bike would be ugly, with fatigue and dizzy spells The sun feels worse at high altitude.

At mile sixty, the twenty-two mile ascent began. It was deceptively easy at first. The road was straight and I was bored. I had left the ruins behind and there wasn’t much to look at and climbing was a grind-- endless and annoying.

At the top it was steeper and the Ponderosa pines were back. An aid station was located at the Painted Desert Vista Overlook and they had brownies, which picked me up. I was fairly tired by now. I took pictures of distant pink Painted Desert, ate and went on my way. It was now part of the sixty-five mile route, which would have been challenging with the ups and downs of the terrain.

The next section of the road went through the bizarre landscape of conical volcanos. The ground had dark sand, like some Hawaiian beach. The stark black and orange gravel slopes were dotted with trees. I passed by lava fields on the side of the road that looked as if someone had dumped tons of buckled asphalt boulders onto acres of land.

I caught up to some road bike riders from Phoenix. They were too fast to keep up with, but they kept stopping so I caught up to them in the last twenty-five miles.


The last aid station was a stop to re-supply my water. I chatted with the road bike group a little. The turn off to highway went back into town. The sag van bike shop guy pulled beside me and asked me if I was alright and I told him that I was okay. Quitting wasn’t an option at this point but it was nice to know that someone was watching out for us. The road was tedious---more traffic and less to look at. The finish couldn’t come soon enough and my legs ached with the constant effort of forcing the pedals against the whims of gravity.

The lowest point was at mile eighty-three when I thought I was done climbing and found out yet another long hill had to be ascended. A sense of despair forced me to stop and eat something in order to re-gain some energy. The road bike group passed by and finally I rode the rest of the way with them because getting out the map to see where to go was too much effort. They had slowed down at this point and were welcome distraction. Light rain came down close to the finish, but it was warm and felt good.

At the end, they still had food left---score one for the race organizers. I hate not having food when I am one the last stragglers in. It adds insult to injury. I should have made an effort to be more social with the road bike group, but I was too tired. It was too much effort to walk back to my car, take off my bike shoes and put my bike in the car, so I ate first. I needed a nap.

I felt lucky to be able to ride a bike in a unique area with Indian ruins and volcanos. My anxiety had been pushed back or maybe I was just to tired to worry. After seven hours, I had arrived back where I started from on the ride, but the relentless plodding on the bike had brought me to a different place.



Feeling Good?

Once in a while I read self-help books. This is a by-product of the low self-esteem caused by the trauma of divorce. I grasp at anything that would help me feel better. Most of the time the books have some suggestion that I can use in limited amounts. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, for example, talks about living in the moment and not dwelling in the past or worrying about the future. This is a difficult concept to practice. My attempts at meditation make me twitchy and restless. It’s not always easy to follow when random thoughts bombard my mind late at night. Is the pool filter that starts to run at four a.m. going to blow up? Did I forget to pay a bill? Am I going to be homeless someday because my daughter insists on going to an incredibly expensive college?


Feeling Good by David Burns is one of the best books that I have read. It discusses that crap that you tell yourself that you are convinced must be absolutely true. It makes you depressed. Therapists call it cognitive distortions. I always thought that what I tell myself was true. That it is not is quite a different perspective. I think the author really nails the stupidity of what people tell themselves.

A number of types of cognitive distortion exist, but one in particular that I am guilty of is overgeneralization. If something happens, then it will always happen. If someone dumps me, then I will always be alone. If I am unhappy now, then I will always be unhappy. This kind of assumption feeds a feeling of hopelessness.

If I couldn’t do something in the past, then I won’t be able to do it in the future. The past doesn’t dictate the present or the future-- or at least I try to convince myself of that.

Another overgeneralization is thinking everyone else is better than me. They are more together, more loved, more talented, work harder, have more friends. This is not true and only a delusion in my mind because people are never what they appear to be. The thought pops up automatically, like an evil mind visitor. I wonder if I am the only one that thinks this way. This kind of thinking is rampant in competition like racing. If someone is faster than me, then they are better than me as a person. Since I am slow in racing, then I must be a bad person.

Results don’t dictate who I am, or least I try to tell myself that.

The prime example of this is swimming. I am always last. I can train all I want and take lessons, but I will never be fast or even average. The only people slower than me are beginners who surpass me in a couple of months or really old people who flail around the lanes with bizarre arm strokes. Even some of them are swim faster than I do. I want to be average or at least not on the bottom of the curve. I beat myself up for being so bad, but it doesn’t get me anywhere.

Maybe if I stop being negative, I would swim better or at least feel better about it.

Positivity is an alien thought that doesn’t come naturally for me. I am never an optimist. People are supposed to have an optimist bias and expect that things will turn out better than they actually do. People underestimate the chances of death, divorce and general disaster. Some theorize that we are born this way. Not me. I always tend to expect the worst, and to keep my sanity, I try to block this expectation. This is the cognitive distortion of Mental Filter that a person filters out positive aspects of a situation and only sees negative ones.

If a person didn’t underestimate the chances of bad thing happening, they would lose their minds. Life would become darker and much more anxiety provoking than it already is. It’s bad enough dealing with daily events. Positive thoughts are a self-defense mechanism. The future can’t be predicted anyway. If I think the best will happen and the worst does, at least I am not worrying about it until the catastrophe occurs.

Too bad I don’t actually do this.

If I am doing an Ironman, I am already setting up what bad things will happen before they even do. I will miss the swim cut off, or if I don’t, I will get a flat tire on the bike course and miss the bike cut. If the water is cold I will end up in the medical tent for hypothermia. It has happened before, so it will happen again.

It is hard to understand why these habitual negative thoughts occur. Fear is a good base to launch them. They worm their way into my brain and stay there. Maybe it is something that started in childhood when a parent berated me for some forgotten misbehavior? The mind persistently plays the same thing over and over. Most people don’t even question what they tell themselves. The voice that berates me isn’t challenged. It tells I suck and I agree.

Feeling Good suggests that the answer to the depression and low self-esteem that this self-talk causes is to have a person write down what they are saying to themselves and make rational arguments against the negative perceptions. Writing them down makes you more aware of what is swirling around in your head. If I get lost, which I frequently do and tell myself that I am incompetent because I can’t read a map and don’t have a GPS, then I write this thought down. I always manage to find my way eventually, so I must have some competence as a human being. Maybe.

I am intrigued by the suggestion that what I tell myself might not be true, This could possibly be an entirely new way of thinking-- new neural pathways instead of the old rutted ones. I am tired of my old thoughts, but they will try to persist, like my slow swimming. Even slow swimmers get somewhere eventually.

I have a new favorite triathlon pro-Tyler Stewart, winner of the 2009 Ironman Couer d'Alene. I read her race report at xtri.com. Normally race reports from pros bore the hell out of me-how wonderful their race went, how wonderful their sponsors are, blah, blah, blah.

Tyler Stewart, however, has overcome a number of obstacles to become an ironman winner. In 2008 in the Hawaii ironman, her bike seat came off and she had to stand while riding on her bike for an hour until she fixed it. Consequently her legs were fried for the run.

She decided to do Ironman Arizona six weeks later, but was sick during that time. During the race, she was seeing spots and blacking out. She spent several hours convulsing in the medical tent with no idea what was wrong with her. It turned out that she was prescibed a dangerous amount of medicine for a routine thyroid condition. She spents month recovering and had to fight fatigue and pain to get back into shape.

In 2009, after a rough swim in Couer d'Alene, she smashed the bike course and ran fast enough to beat second place by nine minutes.

What really impressed me in that after winning the race, she went back to the finish line at 11 p.m. to watch the last racers come in. She stated:" ...I realized, as I do each time I am lucky enough to make it to the final hour of an Ironman, that I am not the real Ironman. It is those people who are out there all day, challenging themselves with every step, with every bit of inspiration that brought them to the start line. They are the winners in my mind and I am so happy to be a part of something, a sport, that is a goal for so many to accomplish in their lifetimes. Anyone that even attempts an Ironman should be proud of themselves."

As a probable 16 1/2-17 hour ironman finisher(I hope) and and Ironman Arizona 2008 DNFer, I was impressed by the humility and generousity of this sentiment. I don't have the talent nor training of a pro. I probably have less talent than most of the age groupers racing an ironman. In the end it is not going to matter. The real win is overcoming the challenges of fatigue and pain and preseversing through the darkness and fear, whomever your are.

Introduction.

I have created this blog because I have been reading other people's blogs for years and I figured that if other people could blather about their life, so could I. I am a Facebook fan, but it's hard to write a race report in their word constraints. You finish describing the swim portion and there is no more space.

My journey to finish an ironman started in 2007with training for Ironman Arizona. Unfortunately, the day of Ironman Arizona in April rolled around and the weather decided to be hot. REALLY HOT. Being a slow swimmer and a slow cyclist, I didn't have enough time make the bike cut-off. The twenty mile an hour winds and the 95 degree temperature didn't help either. I spent time in the medical tent trying to recover from heat exhaustion and watching the misery of the other athletes.

If I thought that not finishing an ironman after all the training, expense and time was devastating, it was nothing compared with being dumped by my husband of 32 years. In August of 2008 he announced that he was moving out. Being in denial about his behavior for the last two years, I was totally blindsided. My world fell apart and I have been trying to put it back together ever since. I thought it was the worst thing I had ever experienced.

Triathlon training is one of the things that keeps me grounded. I can't control people around me, but I can control how I train. My coach recommended working on speed and doing shorter races. I found out I could get faster- faster than I thought possible. I learned to tolerate the pain of racing at one's physical limits. It was a blast.

I signed up for the November 2009 Ironman Arizona because I still badly want to finish an ironman, to experience the joy of the finish line. I am willing to risk failure to finish again because the payoff is priceless.

As far as the divorce goes, I found that therapists, a support group and talking to other people that have gone through divorce has helped a lot. I haven't really recovered, but I am better off than I was. Connecting with people has been theraputic. Blogging is hopefully another way of doing that.