Outlier?

A few days ago on Facebook, I shared an article about recovery. Someone chimed in that it didn't mention one of the obvious factors in recovery--one's age. I took that to be a given, in that it's widely recognized that as one ages, the ability to recover from hard workouts diminishes somewhat. To which I added, but if one practices good recoverability, then as one ages, the impact of aging alone can be significantly mitigated.

And then I was called an outlier. I didn't take that as a compliment or insult--just something to ponder. I took the comment to mean the second of the definitions below:

out·li·er (outlr)
n.
1. One whose domicile lies at an appreciable distance from his or her place of business.
2. A value far from most others in a set of data: "Outliers make statistical analyses difficult" (Harvey Motulsky).
3. Geology A portion of stratified rock separated from a main formation by erosion.

I don't now nor have I ever considered myself an outlier athletically. I didn't come from "good" parents (good in the sense of being gifted athletically or genetically), I didn't deliberately engage in sports (unless you count riding a bike maybe 2 miles to an outdoor pool in the summer and flopping around for an hour or so) until my 20's (and even then it was just rollerskating), and I didn't begin serious training until I was the ripe old age of 42. All I have done is make choices and seized opportunities that improve my ability to train hard and recover from it.

I will now tell the complete story of how I got to where I am today in triathlon. This may bore the hell out of you, but I enjoy writing about it and have never really gotten the entire thing together at once, so here goes.

Oh, sure I'm damn lucky that I get to work out of my house. It wasn't always that way. I was a workaholic in my 20's and early 30's, regularly putting in 60-80 hours per week. I got married at the age of 29 and saw my hours spent working out decline to a pitiful amount--near zero. I found that that made me an unhappy person, although I thought it made my marriage better, because I worked tirelessly at it to try and be the perfect wife. You can't be the perfect anything unless you are being true to yourself, and I wasn't. I began a slow return to "working out," (which is what I had considered my exercise in my 20's to be--it was certainly not training), while continuing to pile on the hours at work.

I became happier with myself. I got divorced. I began a new job in the software industry, and there was a gradual acceptance of doing the computer/phone thing from home a few days per week. And if you were good at managing yourself this way (and I was) and being productive, you were able to spend progressively more and more time working out of home, until well now, where it's more the norm than the exception for many people in the industry to work from home full time.

So sure, I'm lucky that I get to work out of my house, but the opportunity to do so only came after I'd worked myself into the ground for many years. So I earned it, and then I began using it to my advantage. And I rediscovered the joy I get in movement, and it just escalated from there. From 1997-1999, I was only running and lifting (and a little miscellaneous "cardio"), maybe 8-10 hours a week, which is still a lot for most people, but it was manageable, and I wasn't yet working at home full time.

Then I got bit by the triathlon bug. Or, should I say, the opportunity presented itself. I had run 2 marathons with Team in Training, and my local group was starting up a triathlon program, and I was asked to be a mentor. ME! What the fuck, right? I knew NOTHING about triathlon and figured I had better start reading up, and so I did. I bought books, I found all the best websites from which to glean information, bought a decent road bike (which is now in the loving hands of my massage therapist), took some swim lessons (Cindy can attest those were good times indeed!) and pronounced myself a triathlete. A crappy triathlete, but at least I had some of the best gear around (not my bike yet, though).

Meanwhile, in April 1999, a dude in Kona had suggested that I would do an Ironman someday. Here's the back of my then business card that I made him write it down on:


Here I was practicing being a crappy triathlete (and I did suck) and this idea was now rolling around in my head. I announced at a summer track workout in 1999 (preparing for my second marathon, the Chicago marathon) that I was going to do an Ironman. I sure got some interesting looks. I wasn't exactly svelte at the time, and I didn't (and still don't) run very fast, either. So it was, at the time, a rather bold statement. But anyone who knows me, knows that when I decide to do something, I do it. I usually need to make myself a plan, and in my head, the plan was to do my first Ironman in 2004 or 2005.

As fate would have it, though, a person (let's call him Steve) suggested that I register for Ironman Lake Placid in 2001, and like an idiot, I did. So, OK, I was ahead of my plan, but I rationalized that I wasn't getting any younger (I was 43 in 2001), and what the hell, why not?

I got a coach (whose first triathlon was an Ironman, by the way, even though he told me right off the bat that I had no business doing an Ironman so soon), and he put the hurt to me real bad. I was able to do the training, but it was still a huge leap for me to go from 8-10 hours of training per week to an average of almost 14 per week. Along the way, I osmosed whatever I could about training and recovery, and thus began my quest to figure out how I could keep training at or above this level and feel better while doing it. As beat up as I was that first Ironman season (and I was told a few years ago by someone I admire that she could see just how beat up I was back then), I really did enjoy the training. I was still lifting, which I loved, and running, which I was coming to enjoy more and more, and I had always like swimming and biking, and I enjoyed the process of trying to get better at all of it. And also improve my race time, duh.

It took me a few years to get comfortable with the fact that it would be better for me (and my left knee which has no ACL anymore) to drop some weight in order to protect my running health mostly, but also maybe improve my race time. And then the lights went on about stretching and massage, and well, an athlete (such as it was) was born. It is no coincidence that I had an Ironman PR in 2004 that stood up until 2009, when I finally cracked it. Between 2005 and 2009, my life was a hell of sorts, with my Mom's declining health and then death, my Dad's death and then the whole executor thing which finally ended this past February.

I am rereading a book that I finally got back from a person I lent it to like 8 years ago called Long Distance: A Year of Living Strenuously. I can see myself in the book, as sometime around 2003 or 2004, I had decided I wanted to see what it would be like for me to really explore my athletic capabilities, despite a full time job and regular life. The author's Dad dies while he is on his quest for personal athletic excellence. Was it a premonition that I had read it back then before I went through the same thing myself? Who can know.

It is a wonderful book, and there are so many statements in the book that resonate so much with me, like:

• "In the end, endurance sports are a test of yourself against yourself; they require nobody else, and sometimes they can hardly tolerate anyone else."
• When Rob Sleamaker is watching the author reach for some chips to go with guacamole he says, "You know, we all like chips. But they have an awful lot of fat in them." And in that moment was born The Man Who Reads the Sides of Every Can.

And so it was the year 2004 where I got into Ironman Hawaii via lottery and was already registered for Ironman Canada that I made the conscious decision to go for it. I had no designs of qualifying for Kona or anything--I just wanted to see what I could make of myself athletically.

So maybe it was making that choice is what people think makes me an outlier? Well, if so, fuck it. Anyone can make the choice, and I don't want to hear any excuses like I'm married, I have kids, I don't work at home. I am not who I am by chance--it's by choice. I've worked damn hard in my career and athletically, and yes, I have sacrificed some things along the way, but in the end, I don't consider my life any better or worse than anyone around me. It's the life I chose, and that's what I like most about it.

Since then, I've discovered a bunch of things about myself, been through a bunch of life crap, and now here I sit being able to say that, for a person my age, I tend to recover quite well from heavy training. Outlier? Nah, I just work my fucking ass off.