Embrace the Suck Page 13

  Just as I was about to stop to catch my breath, the trail bent to the left and then dipped straight down a ski slope. The relief I felt was fleeting, for no sooner did my lungs stop searing from the effort of the climb than my quads started to buckle from the exertion of controlling myself and my load on the slick descent. I used one hand to stabilize the bag that lay draped over my shoulder and the other to wave in the air to balance myself. It worked, and after about five minutes I was able to drop the bag, grab a cup of water, and catch up to Anne, who looked at me as if she was, not mad at me, but really, really disappointed.

  “How are you doing?” she asked.

  I told her I felt pretty good.

  “You’re not supposed to feel good,” she said, smiling but intense, her voice rising the way it does when she really, really means something. “It’s a race. It’s supposed to hurt.”

  I wish I could say this was the first time I had heard this from her, but when, some fifteen years before, she saw a photo of me crossing the finish line of the 1998 New York City Marathon with my arms spread wide like an airplane and a big smile on my face as the clock flashed 4:13.28, she had simply shook her head and said, “If you were smiling at the finish line, you didn’t run hard enough.” To prove her point, she showed me a picture of herself taken at the same finish line a few years before, her eyes vacant, her face a death mask of pain, her time forty-five minutes faster than mine. She had told me the same thing at the CRASH-B Sprints, an indoor rowing competition I had scored a Plimptonesque assignment to cover. She watched me race, and when I finished, in a personal-best time for a 2,000-meter row, she shook her head and said, “You could have gone faster. You’re too conservative.”

  The first few times she said this to me, in the early days of our marriage, it pissed me off. I had never run a marathon, and was happy merely to have finished one. And when I had completed the CRASH-Bs 2000, I had lain in a heap on the gym floor for five minutes trying to find the strength to sit up. I certainly felt as if I had gone hard enough. But here was my wife telling me I was a slacker. Had I added another bad voice to the chorus?

  But as the marriage went on, and I listened to Anne describe her own workouts, I realized she wasn’t telling me anything she didn’t tell herself. When she’d come home from a run, I’d ask her how it was. “It was awful,” she’d say. “I don’t know what’s happening. I’m so slow.” This was usually said while she had a bag of frozen peas on both knees in an effort to reduce the swelling of her redlined effort. Or “I didn’t push hard enough today.” Anne had the same desire to always be at the front that I had. But she also had an ability that I didn’t have. Even after having three kids in less than two years and holding down a full-time job, Anne could go to state-level triathlons and finish in the top three in her age group. She was hard on herself, and it bore results.

  Now all that came rushing back in the rain at Camelback Mountain. “Thanks, coach!” I said, headed back up the slope, wondering un-idle thoughts about marriage and running and running with your spouse. There was no switchback to this trail. It blasted straight up the hill, following a ski lift line. There was no running; at times, there was no walking, the trail so steep we were forced to all-fours to bear-crawl our way up. People from later waves were passing us, and I could tell Anne was getting more and more pissed. But she didn’t leave her man behind.

  At long last we reached a wide trail that traversed the summit of the mountain. Sweet relief, I thought as we paused at a water station and I shook my legs, hoping to get some blood back into them. I looked across the traverse and saw what must have been five steel barricades, all about chest high. The only way over them was a vault. I’m glad the course photographers seemed to have been scared off by the rain that now fell steadily. After such a long slog up, there was no spring, no vault, left in me, and however I threw myself over the barricades in what must have looked like a halfhearted attempt to hump them, it would not have made a pretty picture. But we got over them. There waiting for us was the rest of Team Annex. They had waited.

  But they could smell the barn, and so the descent of the mountain, which for sanity’s and ankles’ sake should have followed the switchbacks, instead ran right down the fall line, the straightest, steepest, scariest way down. It was now my turn to wait for Anne, whose bad knees and fear of falling (she hates skiing, diving, and mountain biking) forced her to rein herself in. I was only too glad to return the favor, the rest coming as a blessing. We could see the finish line, hear the manic voice of the announcer as he read out finishers’ names and hometowns. It will be fun to finish, I thought. Two hours of this stuff is enough.

  But we weren’t headed to the finish line. Not just yet. The trail I thought headed there instead veered off to a small pond near the base lodge. There were ropes strung from a dock on one side to a dock on the other, suspended about four feet above the water. We were to grab the rope with our hands, lock our ankles around it, and pull ourselves across. Ropes, water, whatever, I thought. I got this. I did. So did Anne. Not so many of the other competitors, who seemed to be freaking out at the thought of getting wet and dropping from the ropes like ripe pears into the murky pond. Feeling smug for the first time all day, I hauled out on the other side and did my best to sound encouraging and help the fallen up onto the dock. I was slow, but I could stay wet.

  Finally, finally, finally, we reached the last obstacle: Camelback Beach’s Lazy River. Instead of rafts or noodles to ease us down the flume, we were to wade right in and walk through the water, maybe three hundred yards or so. I decided it would be faster to swim, and soon some of my teammates were swimming. Rather than a lazy breaststroke or crawl down the Lazy River, they took turns doing the far more taxing butterfly. Because, you know, the last two hours weren’t hard enough.

  But we all came in the same way we started: together. They had waited for me. I’m sure it killed them, but nobody said anything to me.

  “Here comes TEAAAAAMM ANNNNNEXXXX!” the finish line announcer screamed like a tattooed Ed McMahon to the six or so people gathered around the finish line. The rain was a major buzzkill, and the party the organizers had promised for the finish line was a bust. I gave my beer ticket to Anne, who pounded down a Bud Lite like it was Gatorade. I stripped off my shoes and socks and let my pruned toes breathe. I sat on a wooden chair under an overhang and watched the rain fall and a few of my teammates suck down beer. I was amazed that with zero specific training for an event like this, save for the Pit, I was able to just jump in and do it. Sure it wasn’t fast, but I completed it. CrossFit had prepared me pretty well, I thought, even if I did need to figure out a way to run faster over distance. I was pretty happy. The happiness didn’t fade a bit when I remembered what faced me over the next eight days: Murph, and a 3.5-mile ocean swim.

  Still, it felt good to sit. It was an hour’s drive to get home, and I knew that all the time sitting would only make me stiffer, but I didn’t care. I had done well in the Pit, worked hard on the hill, and now could think about a relaxing Saturday night on the couch, the night of cheat day, eating pizza and drinking a bottle of good red wine. The Annex ladies emerged from the bathroom. Not a trace of mud or fatigue to be seen and their hair looked great. They had to run, they said. They had to get home. There was a school benefit that night. “Bye!” And off they danced.

  When we got home, I unfolded myself, slowly, from the car, chased ibuprofen with a beer, took a long, hot shower, and settled into the couch. It was bliss. The next day I was sore as hell, sore all over, too sore to even consider a workout, which is really saying something because when you work a full-time job, the Sunday workout is sacrosanct. It is the way to be sure you get in at least one workout that week. I stretched and used the foam roller, lazily, in front of the TV. On Monday, sufficiently recovered to work out, I lifted easily and did a short (4:56) workout of jump rope and moving a barbell from the ground to over my head. I was surprised at how good it felt, as if my blood vessels and muscles were rusty pipes and the ex
ercise was hot water flushing them out. I took Tuesday off from everything, going so far as to take cabs the mile between Penn Station and my office, despite the beautiful weather. On Wednesday I swam in a pool for thirty minutes, and on Thursday ran some 400s as part of a WOD.

  I felt as ready as I was going to be for Murph.

  Friday morning was cool and showery. A group of eight of us gathered for the 5:30 WOD, and nobody looked too happy, above and beyond the sheer shittiness of getting up at 5 a.m. to do this to ourselves. (Except for Gephart, a freakishly strong and optimistic guy with a shaved head that glistened when he sweat. He was strapping on a weight vest with the same glee the Hanson Brothers put on the foil.) We had all done Murph before, and knew what was ahead of us. It was a flat-out beatdown. But unlike most of the other Hero WODs, we now had a two-degrees-of-separation relationship with the man for whom the workout was named. Before we began, I told the guys what Mark Divine and Instructor Brad, the guy with the David Byrne glasses, had told us at the 20X, about how they knew Murph, and how his sacrifice—exposing himself to certain death in order to save his comrades—was an act of valor few people can conceive of. This was why the WOD was almost a sacrament to these guys. And why Divine would accept nothing less than everything an athlete had when he was doing Murph. “I’m not saying I’ll beat any of you guys,” I told the group. “I’ll probably be last. But I will be going as hard as I can.”

  The mood in the room changed. Everyone stood a little taller. Those of us doing the WOD with the additional load of a twenty-pound weight vest—body armor—cinched the straps a little bit tighter. We all bumped fists before the clock started, something we never do, and gave each other a nod.

  Running a mile with a weight vest on, and trying to do it with some semblance of speed, is probably the hardest thing I’ve done at CrossFit. Every time I do it, I’m reminded of the saying a bicycle company engineer once told me when I asked why light gear was so expensive: “Light, strong, cheap. Pick two.” The CrossFit equivalent is light, strong, and fast. CrossFit had made me strong, and lighter when measured by body fat. But I was by no means faster, especially right now. I was DFL in the run, behind even notorious plodder Big Man Jerry, who liked running as much as he liked pull-ups.

  It didn’t matter. I was putting out, as best I could. I used a strap to help with the pull-ups, but I chipped away, 10 at a time, followed by 20 push-ups and 30 air squats. Ten cycles of that. Steve Gephart was miles ahead of me, as was Leo, as they executed butterfly pull-ups a gymnast would envy. For my part, I did the 30 squats unbroken each time, and did the 20 push-ups as hand release, harder than normal push-ups, but like at the 20X, a nod to the fact that I was using a band on the pull-ups. By the time I was on my seventh set, Gephart and Leo were out the door, running their miles as Jerry and I kept at it. The floor was an ocean of commingled sweat. The vest dug into my shoulders and sides. Now the others were finished, slapping hands and talking about how much it sucked.

  A year ago, I would have been pissed off. At them, and at myself. Now, I was psyched for them, happy they could go so fast. And proud of myself for not stopping.

  Finally, I was running the last mile. Running might be kind of a strong word to describe my determined plod. I was hell-bent on not walking, not one step, even on the annoyingly slight grade up to the railroad bridge, then the slight descent to the sign at Passaic River Park, our half-mile marker, the turnaround point. I slapped the sign and turned around. Five more minutes or so to go. I went back up the rise, under the train tracks and had, at last, a view of River Road as it fell away home, to the Annex. I saw a couple of other guys ahead of me in the distance, but I also saw a lone figure on the other side of the road, running toward me. I figured it was someone out for a run, not one of the Annex guys.

  But then the figure got closer. It was Gephart, running back up the road. “Dude, you’re nuts,” I huffed when he got within range. “You need more PT?”

  “No, man. I came out to help you back in.” Gephart stopped and pivoted, taking up a position on my left shoulder, matching my pace exactly and talking, an easy, nonstop rap designed to take my mind off the effort and the pain of the final six hundred yards or so. No hand on the back, like Paul, but it was just as welcome, and effective, and made my eyes well with tears. As we got closer to the Annex, the guys who had already finished came out and yelled at me to bring it in. Usually, given the time constraints we all face in the morning, the unspoken rule is that you can leave as soon as you’re done in order to help get the kids out the door or catch the train. But not today. They waited and yelled until I brought it all the way in, sixty-five minutes, dead last but a personal record. Then we took a picture. In it, we’re all smiling. We look tired, and our Tshirts and hair are drenched. But we look happy. Honestly, openly happy at what we were just able to do.

  We got up early Saturday to fly to St. John, and each movement I made that day required a supreme effort of will and produced a flood of regret. “What the fuck was I thinking, scheduling all this stuff so close together?” I said to Anne as I shifted in the narrow airplane seat, trying to find a comfortable position. She had done Murph the day before, too, at a later class, after swimming three thousand yards. She wasn’t sore. Sleepy, but not sore. Holding a newspaper at arm’s length to read produced spasms and cramps in my arms. Picking luggage off the carousel at the airport in St. Thomas was agony. It wasn’t that I was sore as much as that my muscles felt completely and utterly depleted, which made movement almost impossible. Not even the warm air and sunshine of St. John, my favorite place on earth, made me feel better. My walk up and down the stairs that led to our hotel room must have looked like physical sketch comedy.

  We came to St. John every Memorial Day weekend to join in the Beach-to-Beach Power Swim, a fund-raiser for the national park that comprises about 90 percent of the island. Its presence is the reason the island is so special—a relatively undeveloped speck in the Caribbean, with no airport or deepwater port to allow cruise ship visits, which unleash hordes on neighboring St. Croix and St. Thomas. The swim itself is a rarity in open-water races, a point-to-point jaunt starting at Maho Bay and headed south along the island’s west shore. If you want to swim about one mile, you can stop at Cinnamon Bay; if you want to swim about 2.25 miles, you can stop at Trunk Bay. And if you want to go 3.5 miles, you get out at Hawks Nest Beach.

  This year, the kids were going to join us. We had made their participation in the trip provisional on the fact that they would all do the one-mile swim; they could use fins if they wanted to, as would I. I wanted them to know they could swim this far, to feel comfortable in the water and to see its beauties. Catherine and Christine, eleven-year-old identical twins, were regulars on our summer pool’s swim team. They could handle a mile easily if they just stopped talking and swam. Luke, thirteen, could also handle it, but was more likely to get nervous in the deep water we were going to traverse. The race was very well organized, with tons of kayakers and powerboats along the route, which was marked by giant orange buoys. The plan was for me and Anne to buddy-swim the three of them to Cinnamon, make sure they got out okay, then the two of us would continue on to Hawks Nest.

  That was the plan. And as we stood ankle-deep in the soft warm water at Maho, the sun just peaking over the hills behind us and schools of tiny fish bumping against our feet, I knew with certainty that the plan would work. I knew the kids would be fine, even if they didn’t know it at that moment. I knew that I’d loosen up and enjoy the swim, and that I was fit enough to do this, to finish the triple crown, and to wear my participant Tshirts with pride.

  Most of the people I know, especially very fit ones, are paralyzed by water in general and swimming in particular. It’s both understandable and lamentable. Understandable because most adults don’t spend enough time in the water to develop the degree of comfort they need to push their limits the way they can on dry land. Put too much weight on a bar and fail at an overhead squat and all you have to do is bail out by dropping th
e bar. Get a cramp while running a marathon and you can sit on the curb and massage it away. But swallow a bunch of seawater a mile from shore and you need to be able to tread water until you are able to cough it back up and get your shit together. That’s a skill that takes some practice. The key is training yourself to not panic. One of the reasons more than 90 percent of deaths that occur during triathlons happen during swims, I’m convinced, is that people panic when they hit the water because they’re just not comfortable enough in it, and the panic leads to heart attacks. Plus, when you enter a pond or the ocean, you’re entering a wilderness. Who knows what lurks in that murky water? That freaks out people. I choose not to think about it. I feel sorry for them because I have known a peace and joy in the water that I find hard to duplicate while dry. I wish everyone could experience it.

  My buoyancy helps. Part of the reason I like the water is that the spare tire that has long held me back on land like some sort of anchor actually works to my advantage by affording me a degree of floatiness that other, leaner athletes lack. Olympic swimmers have an average body fat percentage (6–12 percent for men) that’s 4 percentage points higher than distance runners (2–8). Whether the extra bit of subdermal fat—and let’s be clear here, nobody would call Michael Phelps fat—helps the person swim or whether the relatively cool water in which they spend so much training time holds back fat depletion is still up for debate, but I can tell you for sure that my friend Loren, an All-American runner, is an ace thrasher in the pool, and Chris, who can routinely ride and run me into the ground, takes an awfully long time to complete the swimming leg of a triathlon.

  There’s another dirty little secret at play here. Most people approach swimming as if it were running or cycling, and think that the key to getting faster is to swim more. But their strokes suck. When they swim more, all they do is reinforce bad form and their muscles remember doing something wrong. Better to approach it as if it were a golf swing, or a power snatch. Get some coaching, learn and reinforce good form, and all of a sudden you’ll feel more comfortable because you’re breathing easier, so you spend more time in the water, get more comfortable … and the circle completes itself.