The Arena, Part 1: Mile 85

The Perseverance Playbook | Ed. 49

In April of 1910 Theodore Roosevelt stood at the Sorbonne in Paris and delivered a long speech he called “Citizenship in a Republic.” Most of it is rarely quoted, but one passage has landed on everything from posters to coasters. It’s about the man in the arena:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds…

That line has become perhaps the most quoted argument in American public life for the value of trying. TR did not write it for athletes. He wrote it for citizens. But it lands in any arena, in any field, in any moment when you have stepped past the comfortable seats and onto the floor.

In July of 2022 I quoted a different TR line in a short LinkedIn post about a hospital bed in Idaho. I said I had been in the arena. I said I was back on the race circuit. I posted a photo and left out almost everything that mattered about the year between.

This is a story about that year in three parts. Mile 85 is part 1.

Mile 85

On June 27, 2021, at mile 85 of the bike course at Ironman Coeur d’Alene, my legs stopped working.

I had been slowing for a while and I knew it. The thermometer was climbing past anything I had ever trained in. The salt was crusting white on my face and arms. I rolled into the aid station and figured I would stand off the bike for a few seconds, take fluids, stretch out my quads, and ride the last 25 or so miles at a very easy pace into transition.

I dismounted. And I could not remount. My legs were locked in tetany. I was helped to the ground and slammed three Gatorades back to back. They made no difference.

When EMS rolled up I was running a low-grade fever. They loaded me into an ambulance that, as the universe would have it that day, was staffed by EMTs rather than paramedics. They were amazing people but had no supplies to start an IV, even if I offered to start it on myself. As luck would have it they also had no ice and no air conditioning. Somewhere on the road to the nearest rural Idaho ER I borrowed an EMT’s phone and called Melody. I do not remember the exact words I said. I do remember that I was marginally conscious, that I told her where to meet me, and that I scared her. I scared a lot of people that day.

The labs eventually showed a sodium in the 120s and heat stress edging toward heat stroke. Nothing a few liters of saline and an air-conditioned bay could not undo. I was back at the hotel before the last finishers crossed the line.

The hard part came the next morning.

How I Got There

The trip was supposed to be the family vacation of the decade. I had turned 40 that spring. Melody, our three kids, and I planned the whole arc around the race. Fly into Spokane. Drive to Coeur d’Alene to race an Ironman I’d always wanted to race. Push east through Montana, sleep under canvas at Yellowstone, and finish in Jackson Hole.

I had been chasing a chance to race at the Ironman World Championships in Kona, HI since 2003. By 2021 the plan was simple. Get fit. Race smart. Punch a ticket to Kona. Then the heat dome arrived. Between June 25 and June 30, 2021, the Pacific Northwest broke all-time temperature records by margins meteorologists are still writing papers about. The NWS office in Spokane warned the public the event could rival “some of the longest lasting and extreme heat waves in the recorded history of the Inland Northwest.” Race day in Coeur d’Alene topped out around 101 degrees ambient. After the finish line, reporters clocked a pavement temperature of 133 degrees. A perfect medium-rare.

My TrainingPeaks file from race day shows a CTL of 100 and an ATL of 171. In English: maximally fit and maximally cooked, heading into a day that any coach would have told me to ease back and double or triple my hydration and salination plan. But I did not have a coach. I had a training plan, a year of doing the work, and the kind of confidence that fitness creates in a person who has not yet learned how thin the margin really is between ready and roasted.

The plan should have changed. More salt, more water, and pounds of ice down the shirt. Lower power on the bike. An honest conversation with myself about whether the goal should still be Kona or the goal should now be a finish. I made none of those adjustments. I treated it like the race I had trained for. It was not.

Sam Long won that day in 8:07:40, a course record on the hottest day in the event’s history. Of the 2,085 athletes who started, 1,535 finished. A 26.4% DNF rate in a sport where mid-single digits is normal. I was one of the 550 who did not. The Ironman did not become impossible. It became impossible for me.

The Breakfast

The morning after the race I walked down to breakfast, waved at the team across the room, and walked back out. Almost everyone in there had punched their Kona ticket the day before. The one other DNFer had punched his at a race earlier that spring. The only person in that room without a Kona ticket was me.

This was not the embarrassment of a bad day at work. This was the gut-deep shame of having let down my wife, my kids, the entire racing team, and the dream I had been chasing for eighteen years. It was the first time in my adult life I had so monumentally failed at something I had said out loud, in public, in front of my family, that I was going to do.

The arena is not a metaphor when you are sitting in it. It is a doorway in Idaho you cannot bring yourself to walk through. It is the gentleness of the people who love you when you cannot stand yourself. It is the look in your own eyes in the bathroom mirror.

I did not yet know what the next nine months would look like. That’s for Part 2.

Playbook

Three things I have made peace with from that day, and that I have carried into every challenging growth opportunity since.

1. Fitness is not race readiness.

A CTL of 100 and an ATL of 171 is both a fit and a fried athlete. The fitness column makes you feel ready. The fatigue column tells the truth. If you are deep in the red on the day of a race, no amount of paper preparation will protect you when a variable goes sideways. In a build, in a turnaround, in a quarter that ends in front of the board, the freshness number is the number that makes the difference between staying just above the water line and drowning.

2. The plan was a hypothesis I treated like a vow.

I had written my hydration strategy before I had ever felt 132-degree pavement. When the world handed me data my plan could not absorb, I executed the plan anyway. Anyone who has watched a patient break the algorithm, or a strategy meet a market that has already moved past it, knows this same feeling. The discipline is not in unflinching loyalty to the protocol. The discipline is honesty about whether the protocol still fits the world in front of you.

3. The cost is never only yours.

I scared Melody. I scared my kids. The friends tracking me online watched my dot stop moving on the GPS and could not reach me for hours. The same is true of the leader who works one more late week and tells himself the family will understand. Of the clinician who picks up the extra shift hoping the kids won’t notice. Every goal that puts you in the arena puts the people who love you in the stands. That is part of the calculation, not a footnote.

Your Turn

What number on your dashboard is telling you the truth that the headline number will not?

What plan are you about to execute that was written before the conditions in front of you actually existed?

Who’s watching the GPS dot in your race today, and have they signed up for the route you are running?

Next week in Part 2, the nine months I did not write about in 2022. A mind-numbing marathon. Golf clubs. Boxing gloves. And the morning I finally admitted that nothing else was going to feel like racing triathlon does.

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