It's December 22, 20 days post-Ironman. And yes, I am drinking egg nog while writing this. Finding and purchasing the egg nog gave me almost as much sense of accomplishment as finishing the race. In short, it's been a great month! The race in Western Australia a few weeks ago was my third and Nate's fourth Ironman. We found the journey leading up to this race to be a particularly challenging. For Nate, the biggest challenge is sheer lack of time with such a demanding job that requires a lot of travel. For me, it was adjusting to being a Mom of two, and breastfeeding through 5 months of training. Together, it was always a balancing act to manage everything.
Shortly after Monroe was born, we were sitting outside of Isla's ballet class and I was having a tough day. The kind lots of new moms have - no sleep, a jealous toddler learning to use the potty (but mostly peeing on all her clothes and then crying about it), and a baby who needed to eat every two hours. I was tired and frustrated and venting to Nate about it. He listened and thought for a while and then replied, "You know what you need to do? Register for an Ironman to give yourself something to focus on and teach the kids about goals and discipline." I must admit, in my exhausted state, having not even been cleared for light working out post-baby yet, I was a bit pissed at his suggestion. But I think Nate knew exactly what he was doing...he planted a seed. He knew I would let it swirl around in my brain for a couple months and would eventually commit to this plan. You know, just like the movie, "Inception"...but way less dramatic.
Fast forward a couple months: After some debate on a race location, Nate registered for the race in Western Australia. If you can't already tell from our various social media and blog posts, we can pretty much find any reason to jump on a plane back to Australia. Our now 3+ years of living abroad can generally be summed up as "19 months in Australia and the remainder of the time living just a short 9 hour commute from Australia." Once Nate registered, I only needed about two weeks to mentally commit and I officially signed up shortly after that.
Training in Hong Kong was certainly interesting. Given the cost of space in the city, no standard gyms have pools (and they cost the amount of a second mortgage to join anyway) so I opted for a public pool. The public pool was quite an experience! Like most things in the city, the pool was always swarming with people and insanely hot. It was also one of the most severe cultural immersions since moving as I was the only non-Chinese, non-senior citizen at the pool all but one time I was there. This made confrontations in the ONE lane pretty amusing as 12 people all in one lane swam all over each other. Okay, so maybe it was just me sloppily ploughing over the top of the many 80+ year old men swimming VERY WIDE breast stroke. Some days, I opted for the pool at my apartment, which is lovely to sit at, but it’s about a 17 meter long pool, so you mostly just do flip turns on either wall back and forth and back and forth and don’t even need to do much swimming. Its basically like training in a Holiday Inn Express indoor pool. I usually ended up doing about 25 flip turns in 10 minutes, deciding the situation was a touch ridiculous, and sitting by the pool half-asleep drinking coffee instead since the kids kept me awake all night. I mean, falling asleep in the pool just seemed irresponsible and dangerous, after all. You are probably thinking, “What the heck?! This doesn’t sound like real training!” If you think my swim training was bad, let’s just say Nate did less...much much less...and only in the “flip turn apartment pool.” His athletic ability and confidence always amaze me despite pretty minimal actual training.
As for the bike training, there are very minimal safe places to bike in the city, and they take a lot of travel to get there. We didn’t have the luxury of lots of time, so all biking was done on indoor bikes, sometimes even on he hilarious “elderly people stationary bikes” with extra wide seats because that was the only one at our apartment gym for a while. I politely begged our apartment complex to purchase a spin bike, and was extremely grateful when they did. I asked about the status of the new bike so often they they finally pulled me aside one morning and said the bike had arrived, but they didn’t have space or legal clearance yet to put it in the gym, so when I needed to bike, a staff member would take me down to the basement where I could use it. The management staff referred to it as the “Mrs. Zahm bicycle” for the three months I was escorted to the bike’s secret basement location.
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| One of our Saturday morning runs |
handle the difficult parts of the bike and the swim, despite falling a bit short on training.
For the trip itself, we were stoked to go back to Perth and even more stoked that there would be no time zone change to adjust to with the kids. We almost always stay in AirBnB houses now and rented one near the race site in Busselton, a town best known for a beautiful jetty and epic sunsets over the Indian Ocean. We packed our rented Kia Carnaval (hands down the best name for a minivan I’ve ever heard) and headed south two hours to our house. The following day was a flurry of race prep and gear purchasing, which, of course is half the reason anyone does these things in the first place!
Sleeping the night before the race is tough. I had finally fallen asleep around midnight and was woken up by Isla who I tossed into our bed with us. Ten minutes later, she whispers, “Mom, I have to go pee.” Ugh. Took her to pee, then I reckon I fell back asleep by 1am, then the alarm
went off at 4am and it was time to see how much we could tolerate eating with knots in our stomachs. I did better with this than in previous race prep and downed two hard boiled eggs, some yogurt, coffee, a muffin and banana. Half of training and prep is all about eating after all. Practicing seeing how much you can eat before a long work out is a fascinating exercise that I don't recommend! Nate and I put on each other’s race number tattoos in silence in the bathroom so we didn’t wake the kids. It was a special moment together, not talking, but both with lots of nervous excited energy bouncing all around inside. We hadn't trained together much, so it was nice to have these special moments together, especially in the early morning hours right before the race.
A couple hours later, the gun went off and we ran into the chilly water together. We actually have different strengths in this race distance but decided ahead of time to stay together for the whole thing this time. Finishing the swim portion of the race is exhilarating as you are now 1/3 done with the race sport-wise. (Note, you are actually only done with 1.7% of the race distance-wise!) We were also quite pleased that there were no shark sightings this year. (Last year, they had to pull everyone out of the water urgently when a tiger shark was nearby!)
After jumping in the water at 7am, we were done swimming before 8:30, and we started biking. The bike went exactly as we had planned out. We kept a consistent pace from start to finish and completed the 112 miles in about 7 hours. One comical moment came 20 miles into the race when a large poisonous snake was sitting on a small bridge on the racecourse and a volunteer had to be stationed near the bridge to warn all cyclists about the snake. Oh Australia!
A race of this distance requires heaps of mental games and tricking your brain / body into thinking you are "very close" over and over and over. On the third hour of biking, Nate and I had a full pump-up conversation with each other about how we were nailing our pace and that we were almost at the halfway point, which basically means you are almost done. We laughed at needing to go for just a "bit of a jog" after just a "little bit more biking." Our spirits stayed high with the exception of miles 90-105 where we both just hit a dark patch physically and mentally. We have learned how to push through these and keep perspective. We did this mostly by continuously lying to ourselves about how much distance / time was left. Getting off the bike is one of the best feelings in the world, despite all the, um, ass chafing that may have occurred...
Even with practice and a lot of planning, we have both made a few mistakes with things like gear and nutrition. My repeated mistake is not putting enough prevention into wetsuit burn on my neck, and have repeatedly ended up with a yucky raw scab on the back of my neck. (Next time, I'll be trying a taping strategy!) Nate's first mistake in the race was when he reached into one of two large vats of sunscreen and rubbed it all over his arms prior to the bike. His error was that one vat was sunscreen, but the one he used contained Vaseline. It worked like tanning oil and his wrists sizzled into what looked like puffy red lobsters. We laughed about this for the first 20 minutes of the run and I was really looking forward to a few more hours side by side, chatting and enjoying having a buddy as we pushed through to the end. The giggly light chat didn't last long however as Nate's GI system had other plans.
The first 10 miles of the run were hot, but went very smoothly. Then, Nate got quite. Very quiet. Then he informed me that his stomach was not doing well. Then, he went to the bathroom for the first time...then a second time...then told me his stomach was cramping so badly that he needed to walk. This is very unlike Nate. We both know this just happens sometimes - when you work out for 8-10 hours straight without normal amounts of digestion actually happening, occasionally your body just revolts. Nate's body revolted. We did a lot more walking than planned. We finished a little later than planned, but nothing was ultimately that big a deal...By Nate's eighth poop in a race course porta-pot he may have disagreed with that statement though!
I had to bite my tough to not laugh a little bit here and there, but Nate was in such bad shape, he kept yelling at me in a way much like women in labor do in the movies (not in real life of course...I would never do that). At one point, I was like, "Hey Babe, I grabbed you a few pretzels in case you want them," to which he shot back, "Why? STOP IT! Those are awful." An hour later he came out of the bathroom and I reached out to offer him a piece of watermelon saying, "Don't get mad, but I thought you might want a piece of..." and before I could finish, he yelled, "AH! Don't show me that, don't EVER show me that! Now I'm going to puke I think!" Don't get me wrong - I felt really bad for him and he must have just felt awful, but I was holding back a some laughter at the drama and was making mental notes to make fun of him later. Two days later I did. And he laughed a lot too.
My biggest ailment didn't actually occur until after the race. I had a lot of toe blisters. Two of them rubbed against each other the day following the race, and, well, exploded. 24 hours later, my toe was throbbing and I looked down to notice a line underneath my skin going from my toe, all the way up my foot and past my ankle. There's nothing like a quick, urgent trip to the doctor right before a flight! The conversation with the doctor was pretty amusing:
Doctor: Oh my, yes, that is a serious infection. We need to get a jolt of anti-biotics in you! Now, do you have kids?
Me: Yes
Doctor: Ah, that's going to be hard. How old?
Me: 3 and 1.
Doctor: (Cringing) Ugh, okay. That's going to be VERY hard. And you fly home tomorrow?
Me: Tonight actually.
Doctor: Oh, that's not good...well, is it at least a short flight? Where is it?
Me: Hong Kong, it's about 8 hours.
Doctor: Shit. Sorry. Your foot is definitely going to swell up on the plane.
Watching his reactions to every question that I clearly had the wrong answer to was comical. He gave me double the normal dose of antibiotics, which he told me would make me sick. It did. My turn for some stomach issues. He then took a marker and drew a line across my leg and explained if the infection had traveled up that far by the time we landed, I needed to go straight to the hospital for an IV. There was a Kmart next to the doctor's office so while I was getting the run down on how much the next 24 hours might suck, Nate and the kids were having the time of their lives picking out sparkly pants and a ton of party decorations for the following week when Monroe would officially turn one. Nate ran into the parking lot yelling, "You wouldn't believe this, Ashley. Everything was like A DOLLAR! And that's an Australian dollar, so it's really like 75 cents! It was unbelievable!" We've lived in Hong Kong long enough that these types of rare special experiences now blow our minds. I am actually fearful of what is going to happen when we move back to the US and just go absolutely bananas on amazon prime and at Target.
I'm happy to report I did not need IV antibiotics when we landed. My toes looked absolutely disgusting for a few weeks, as did my neck and Nate's sunburn, but we otherwise bounced back to normal pretty fast. In between Nate's stomach issues my toe infection, we did squeeze in some time to tour around Margaret River wineries and also to push the limits of how much extra crap from Kmart can actually fit in a travel bike bag! What else did we learn / validate from this experience? A couple things:
1. His GI issues aside, Nate can finish an Ironman without ever biking more than two hours or swimming more than 45 minutes in the six previous months. I'm not sure if he's an athletic wizard or just out of his damn mind. Either way, I love him...Even when he screams at me for showing him a piece of watermelon.
2. It's always important to define one's own success. For this race and the months leading up to it, we discussed that our success this time would not be finishing in record time. This time, it was pushing the limits of what we could put on our plates (kids/life/work/training) and then executing a time management strategy. Or, as Nate describes this process, "winning at life." The next race may bring a different set or priorities or a different outcome. (One can only hope that there's less pooping and more running though.)
Completing this journey together was a perfect way to end the year. As 2019 approaches, we are enthusiastic about what a new year will bring (or, more to the point, what we will bring on ourselves). Whatever lies ahead, in whatever country, we are always incredibly grateful to feel the love and support of friends and family around the globe. Happy New Year!
