10 Days Before Ironman, The ER Doc Says to Me

"Yes, Indeed, You Broke It" and a Partridge in a Pear Tree



Is it the universe's sense of humor, or simply mine?

After all of the kvetching and bitching and moaning and procrastinating and fussing and fretting and worrying about both the state of Lake Monona and my ability to swim in open water without giving myself respiratory distress, there comes this day of reckoning. D-Day. The day of deciding. Will she try Ironman Wisconsin? Will she put more than a toe in the water?

My coach sent me to Lake Monona to do a 10-minute swim. My swim teacher met me there with other ideas. I suited up and we went to the end of the pier. He jumped off. I decided to slide in, rather than jump in, and in turning to drop onto the end of the pier, slammed my foot into the metal post at the end of it. That hurt, but I got in and, after a little tenuous warming up, which was really cooling off, since I'd been baking in my wetsuit for 15 minutes, we started to swim. Mark would set a landmark goal for me, and each time, I would swim to it.
At some point he said, "Hey, your 10 minutes has passed." Indeed, more than 30 had.

I love Lake Monona. She was as I remembered her---green. Not creepy green, but zen mist green, alive green, cool green. Being in open water is like being in the womb of the planet, inside the Earth's core, inside the rhythm of the bigger tides that turn all of the water in all of us. I love that. I had a little discomfort here and there, but faced it down, with Mark's help. The swim out was in three or four segments; the swim back was continuous....we swam maybe a mile or a bit more, me taking it easy and Mark swimming with fins and paddles, occasionally swimming dolphin-ish, rising out of the water with a kind of ease and grace that is easy to read as joy when we see other mammals do it. I felt happy to be part of a school of swimmers, though it was just the two of us.

Mark says I am on line for a 1:30 Ironman swim. He says I can actually slow down, though I felt as though I were swimming excruciatingly slowly. How is it that everybody in the pool swims faster than me all the time, if I am able to swim a 1:30 comfortably? Can I believe him?

While we were swimming, I was thinking that it may simply be true that I am physically ready for this and not mentally yet prepared. How long might that take? 10 days? 10 minutes? another year? as long as it takes to get the thyroid dialed in?

So, when Mark and I stopped to chat in front of the windows in front of the Terrace, I said, "Dude, I think I broke that toe." When I got out of the water, I thought again "I think I broke that toe." I came home and in the shower, I tried to raise my right leg ---still sore from resistance running Tuesday---in order to clean the lake water out of the blisters left over from Saturday's marathon walk. So, I'm standing on my left leg, noticing it's hard to balance because of how much that little toe is complaining, and how absurd it is to try to be washing water from the swim out of blisters from the run while standing on a foot broken from clumsiness, and then I think, "Now, this is what I thought Ironman training was supposed to feel like. Finally."

So, after I throw gobs of antibiotic stuff on the blisters, gingerly put my shoes back on, go off to a haircut, and miss my core class, I decided maybe it would be good to know if the toe or more is, indeed, broken. I drive to urgent care, limp to the waiting room, and wonder why, on one of the most important nights in the history of the US, football is on the waiting room TVinstead of the Democratic Convention. But that's a different blog. Eventually the doc examines my foot, pronounces that I have hurt my toe, tells me that there's nothing to be done whether it's broken or not---I have told him my own diagnosis is "broken"--- but that how fast it will heal depends on whether it's broken or not. One scenario is 10 days; the other is four weeks. He asks me if I want an x-ray. Hey, I don't come to this spa for doctoring as good as I can give myself at home, so I say "x-ray." I limp down the hall, have them x-ray my foot, and wait. "Yep, you sure broke it," the good doc says.

"So," he asks, "were you planning on *winning* Ironman? 'Cause this could really get in the way of that. In fact," he says, "you aren't going to do too well. And it's really gonna hurt."

It could just be me, but do any of all y'all find it funny that on the way to facing down my Mononaphobia, on the way to discovering that all of that tethered swimming is transferable, on the way to having a swim that doesn't involve pulmonary edema, a nosebleed, or a vocal cord issue, on the way to discovering I could do a freaking IM swim in 1:30, I break my toe? Maybe I'm still giddy from not dying in the lake, but I've gotta think that whoever runs the show is laughing his/her/its ass off. And I am laughing right along.

And also getting a little p***ed. Which is probably a good thing.

I didn't run tonight, but I rowed instead. And now it's RICE and off to bed.

My Unconventional Ironman Training Techniques

First, it was the tethering of oneself to the diving blocks and swimming in place.

Then, there was scoring a week's pass to the only gym in town with a resistance pool for water walking and swimming upstream in that, on Friday night, around love birds and water walkers and various other obstacles appearing in the oval shaped pool with an island in the middle of it---kind of like Kona, except the island didn't have any spectators, and the spectators who were there were clearly curious why anyone but a masochistic lunatic would swim in this thing.

Tonight, it was walking 20 miles in the dark, just like I'll be doing in two weeks...if my feet recover by then.

Thyroid still making me tired, but I do what I can. I do what I can.

Seven Miles Before Breakfast

I did not want to run.

An object at rest stays at rest.

Still, an object in motion stays in motion, and I put in an hour and 20 before breakfast, on half a thyroid. Not fast, but finished.

Last night, I bagged the run because there seemed some small hope that I might actually sleep. For the first time in months, I slept deeply enough to have and remember a dream. Here it is:

I was with a group of friends at my aunt and uncle's house, and we were hanging around their pond. The pond had muck in it, so we didn't go in. Time passed and the pond cleared. We were happy and decided the water was clean and safe---only to discover that it was only clean and safe in a very small area, and that two-thirds of the pond was still contaminated with blue-green algae.

Ah, to sleep, perchance to dream? Me thinks insomnia has its advantages.

Have I mentioned Lake Monona is full of sewage? My run gave me time to ponder the question: how does one discern the difference between courage and stupidity? Is it brave to swim in Lake Monona, or just stupid? Pulling someone out of a burning car is brave, in part because of the potential gains and risks. Swimming in Lake Monona, well, begins to not look like pulling someone from a burning building but instead like covering yourself with kerosene and lighting a match. Brave? Stupid.

Of course, it won't be the only stupid thing I have ever done.

Dairyland Dare Ride Report 2008

Want to be impressed? Check out the elevation profile at the bottom of this .pdf:

http://www.dairylanddare.com/assets/DLD_CUE_2008.pdf


I'm happy to say that I finished the 100k---and that I loved this ride.

But for the patience and ministrations of riding companion Melissa, it likely would not have been so.

I arrived at Melissa's at 5 a.m, with a bike fresh off the trainer and suffering some weird form of wheel lock. Melissa, being an engineer, quickly diagnosed the problem and cured it. We were soon on our way to Dodgeville, watching the sun slowly emerge over a chilled Wisconsin landscape.

I continue to experiment with bizarre fueling strategies. This time: Bunky's pasta the night before, followed by a lot of Nutter Butter cookies. In the car on the way to Dodgeville, I ate half a bagel and some ham....my variation on Mark's recommended "sweet roll and three strips of bacon."

We arrived at Harris Park, changed clothes, assembled bikes, had the rockin' mechanics further repair mine, collected our great schwag, performed various ablutions, and got ourselves underway at about 7:10...40 minutes later than originally planned, thanks to my inertia. The descent out of Harris Park was delightful, but on the first hill I was wondering how I would knock out 200k. I tried to tell myself that the first half hour is always the hardest. Somewhere around then, a radical thought occurred to me: why the hell am I out here? My thyroid is on empty and I am dragging, dragging, dragging. Maybe I should rest. Funny how this hadn't really seemed a possibility until then. Then I realized that this would really probably be the last long ride before the IM taper. Thinking that gave me a new motivation to just get it done, this one last thing.

After the first few hills, I settled in and began to enjoy the scenery, which was gorgeous. Melissa and I were able to chat as the miles rolled by and had hit upon a topic so compelling by the time we reached Barneveld that I didn't realize we were actually on that hellacious climb into town until it was pretty much finished and we were approaching the first rest stop. The rest stop was well stocked and had a festive atmosphere. We enjoyed bananas and some peanut butter and a cookie or half and got on our way. Stage two was even more beautiful, and included one climb that I needed to walk--or thought I needed to walk. The elevation chart shows Roberts Road as actually becoming a wall, so I don't feel too bad about it. There was a water station at the top, and the folks gathered there were cordial---a bit unlike the HHH riders, who seemed to be in chronically bad moods. Between the Roberts water stop and the second real rest stop at Tower Hill, we began contemplating paring back to the 100k for various reasons, and decided to take it one rest stop at a time. When we arrived at Tower Park, we found another festive rest station. Melissa stretched and I failed to resist another cookie (okay, it became the cookie ride), and we both chatted up fellow riders. We took our time, and decided we were happy enough to go on.

From Tower Park to Pleasant View included some challenging climbs, including on a road with "School" in the title. It also included an incredible descent---Upper Wyoming Road, I believe---through a wooded valley. As we were flying down the hill, I found myself pelted by small objects. Animate? Inanimate? The gooey stuff smeared on my arms was suggestive. When we got to the bottom, I asked Melissa if she'd had a similar experience, but she'd avoided becoming a human windshield. Just as we were celebrating this fine moment, I screeched. STUNG again. Damn! Apparently, I picked up a free rider down that hill, and she was not happy to be caught in my Jersey. While my physical reaction was negligible this time (this is Sting 4 this summer), my emotional reaction was not negligible...as usual. So we were standing out in the middle of some road, me baring my back, Melissa reporting on the entomological features of the offender and the lack of swelling at the sting, and me having images of my demise in the middle of this lovely ride. I wish I could report that I did not act like a lunatic about this for the next hour, but such is not the case. We did, however, ride slowly to the Pleasant View (Pleasant Ridge? Pleasant Pinnacle? rest stop, which we shared nicely with a biker bar. It was amusing to realize that the climb was hard enough that it would have been impossible to tell if I was having a bee-related breathing issue, since I always have a breathing issue on the hills. Melissa was the consummate model of patience, which helped me sort out the difference between the biological impact of the sting and its emotional impact.

We got to the next rest, where, thanks to a ham operator who had come by, a medic person was ready to check me out. She reported that many people had been stung by bees that day, and that most were in the same place on the course, and that most people were doing okay. She hit the bite with an ammonia pen. She told me she does ski patrol at Devil's Head in the winter---admittedly not the site of a lot of bee action--but that her professional assessment was that I would live. Melissa stretched. I ate another cookie and chatted up a CVCer who had arrived. Somebody announced that the 200k course cut-off had come and gone. Oops. Good we'd been leaning toward the 100 already. We decided to peddle the remaining 9 miles back to Harris to put in our 100k. Someone warned us about a horrible climb into Dodgeville.

Between Rest 3 and Dodgeville, there were several climbs, and I kept playing leapfrog with a 50-something Dutch woman visiting her sister in the states and riding a borrowed commuter bike. She was great! We climbed and descended, climbed and descended, and finally climbed a rather challenging hill that made me wonder what was left. I stopped at the top and had a hit of gel, thinking that the killer hill that was coming was going to be damned impressive after this one. Descended into the valley, made a turn, and discovered that we were riding the last little climb up to Harris Park. Who knew? One good gel spent only on the finish photo.

Our average pace: 12.something/mile. Don't believe whatever you see as our official pace---we stop for bee stings. We were both pleased enough about persevering that we bought DD jerseys to commemorate the adventure, then enjoyed the post-ride meal, which was good recovery food.

I did more climbing on this ride than on any other, and liked it more. All I can figure is that the temps were better. And maybe the cookies did their job. Oh, yeah, and that training effect.

This week on the Headhunter list, someone said we should stop running in the morning and do it instead at night, when we are exhausted, because that's how it will be at Ironman. So, that's the plan for tonight...long slow run way past my bedtime.

Oh, the idea about resting the thyroid? No such luck. 14 hours on the plan this week, so I'm going to keep slogging through as much as it will let me.

Ironman: The Horror Film

There are moments when you wonder why anybody would do an Ironman race, aside from having been kicked in the head too many times at the shorter distances.

This week, somebody told me the story of the guy who had his jaw broken during the swim and was so far from kayak support that he had to swim to shore directly.

This week, somebody told me about the year so many people had diarrhea in the swim that by two hours into the bike the ER's were full of people who were full of bacteria that came from, well, swimming in a sewer.

This week, I heard about the guy whose intestines lost it 90 miles into the bike because his cytomax was stale.

This follows the story of the woman who blew up during the swim because she'd taken too many enduralytes, the story of the woman who was first crashed into and then run over on the bike (actually the same woman!), the story of the woman who was pushed under and held down while some other big male swimmer swam over her, making it possible for a whole school of other swimmers to swim over her and difficult for her to surface, the story of the woman who landed in an ER 10 days after the event with a bacterial overgrowth in her gut traced to, yep, Lake Monona.

Holy cow.

I am a social scientist. I understand that people talk about the stuff that's salient because it's salient---remarkable, mortifying, unusual. Maybe people tell me these stories as object lessons (e.g., don't take electrolytes before the swim if you don't know what they'll do...).

As of Sunday, I don't want to hear it. I only want to hear stories about people who did the damned thing without landing in an ER, without sustaining injuries, without have fist-to-cuffs with other swimmers or accidents with other bikers. I only want to hear stories of people being kind to each other on the course, inspiring each other on the course, helping each other out on the course.

You got a story like that? Send it my way.

Oh, and: I'm working up a concept for an alternative event. What's that, you say? It's IronFran...an event closer to the roots of the original race than IM as we know it, and one that you can do on your mountain bike in cargo shorts...if you so choose. Are you tough enough to be an IronFran?

Midtown Road

There's a hill on the ironman Wisconsin course with which I have a history. In some ways, it doesn't look like much...it doesn't have the distance of Old Sauk Pass or the steepness of Timber Lane. Nonetheless, Midtown Road kicks my tail.

That is, it used to.

Tonight I dragged my sorry, thyroid-depleted self out to Midtown. I parked the car in the ditch and did hill repeats on Midtown Road. 12 of them. In less than an hour. It was late, because this is when I seem to have the most juju, so I was out there with the deer and the bugs and the dusky-drivers...and with a gorgeous sunset and a beautiful view of what must be Blue Mound off in the distance.

12 hill repeats on Midtown may not be enough at this point. With more synthroid on board, I might have been able to do 15. But I am proud of myself for fighting back a little, for going on when the tank is empty, and for making it up Midtown a dozen times, with no walking involved.

It seems I do better when I can study a hill, get to know it, understand it a little, work with the hill, make it less scary. I told my coach I was going to go make friends with Midtown. "Friends?" he said "Attack the hill." I understand that this might be one way of getting at it, but in my thyroid-depleted malaise, I don't even feel much like attacking dinner, let alone attacking any hill. No, I prefer loving the hill up, literally, trying to befriend it, trying to appreciate the hill as a part of the pathway to a height from which I have a heckuva view.


For those less romantically inclined: I have now staged the hill....it's a short one...only three-tenths of a mile...but it definitely has stages, and each one can be navigated differently. I now have a strategy for each stage, and on my last couple repeats, I was finishing the final stage at a blazing 7 mph. It may not sounds like much to you, gentle reader, but that was faster than the first time up, faster than the times I've walked that hill,
and I was able to breathe and continue at the top, which was the ultimate goal.

The jury, composed of a couple of coaches and docs, is still out on the question of should I do IM WI, but I am continuing the training as though I am. This weekend: Dairyland Dare. Between now and then? Swim and run, swim and run.

The Body Wins: Tri and Thyroid: The Wisconsin Ironman Thyroid Supplement

I have spent much of my life as a social constructionist. I have believed that "that which we take as real is real in its consequences," that reality is a social product, that how we make sense of even corporeal reality---like race, sex, gender, sexuality--shapes and creates that reality.

My thyroid is teaching me that this is, in some measure, bullfeathers.

The last few weeks have been difficult. I have been trying to do what I am supposed to do, according to my training plan, but my tail has been dragging and my attitude has been poor. Sleep has been difficult and strange when it comes, and my ability to fulfill my ambitions of rising early, getting on the bike or the pool, and starting my day with movement have been all but impossible to fulfill. I have been able to train late in the day, but have been disappointed with my paces, even with hard effort. I have had some good days, but have continued to be concerned that although I now believe I can do these distances, I am not fast enough to do them by the cut-offs. Two weeks ago, after bailing out of HellBrick, I sat in my car and wept with frustration after a friend asked "How did it go?" I hadn't had the juju to finish, I hadn't been able to keep up, and I hadn't been able to get as far up Blue Mound as I had at Horribly Hilly two months ago. And I am not a person who believes that is worth crying over. Honestly. But there I was, inconsolable and asking, "What am I not getting here?'' Is it dropping the weight, eating differently, training differently, different equipment (this I have ruled out, since I own the DIVA!), or just attitude? I have worked on all of these things, and still can't ride the bike like the other kids. What am I not getting?

Thyroid supplement.

I should have known.

It's a little organ, but it seems to run the show. I had a phase like this in the winter, where I would burst into tears on the spin bike or the elliptical after 45 minutes or so, even though the only time I felt good was on the bike or the elliptical. Labs showed that my thyroid was out-of-control. I'd had this corrected and things improved. My last labs, back in June, were where they should be. Yesterday, concerned about my attitude and energy, I asked for a CBC and a thyroid panel, expecting the former to be suspicious and the thyroid actually to be fine. Wrong-O, MaryLou. Out of whack again.

The good news: I have an explanation, and something can be done about it. The bad news: it's going to take four weeks.

The question becomes: what will be the impact of training hard on a half-functioning thyroid when the levels return to normal, when 'training hard" on a half-thyroid is nothing like training hard well?

I used to think that the thyroid was only about having a little slower metabolism and a tendency toward dry skin. I have learned over the years that it gets the credit for a whole host of other things: energy, mood, attitude, memory, libido, sleep, hair, cholesterol, even. Still, IM training has brought my appreciation to a whole new level, and given me a new set of signs and symptoms to watch for. If I see myself having a meltdown after a ride (I love riding, so should not be crying!), I need to say to myself: "Hey, have you had your thyroid checked?"

Beyond this, I have learned two new and interesting things about the thyroid recently:

1) The wild fluctuations in mine could be a result of using generic medication to treat it. It turns out that the generics are made by multiple companies, and that the local pharmacy buys its supplies month to month from the lowest bidder, so that the generic I have this month may be made by a different manufacturer than the one I had in June...and they are all slightly different...and slight differences make a big difference to the thyroid. So--as of today, I will insist on the brand name stuff, as an endocrinologist recently advised me to do.

2) When I am "over supplemented" by medical standards, I feel like what I imagine thyroid-normal people,feel like in their regular lives: energetic, optimistic, happy. Being slightly over-supplemented brings its own risks, however---for example, of bringing on a heart attack. It's a fine line to walk. I was "over supplemented" slightly by medical standards for the first time last fall, and I felt fine, fab, functional. It brings up real quality of life issues. I've always been big on not doing risky things, but in this moment, I'm beginning to lean toward taking the risks associated with running very close to that line, once I get back there, because it allows me to run at all.

It is hard to accept this thing as a disability, but it clearly is one. Having knowledge of it, what I do with it---including defining it as a disability--- is my choice, obviously, but it would appear that the joke in some ways is on me: the body ultimately wins.

Will she try Ironman Wisconsin? Stay tuned.

Four Weeks and Counting

Four weeks from now, if all goes well, if I'm lucky, if the weather is good, I'll be somewhere on the Ironcourse, hearing that, with two hours to go, there is time for me to get to the finish.

As we approach this momentous date, I've been reflecting on all of the experiences I would not have had without Ironman training. For example, without IM training, I would not have:

1) Swum for an hour tethered to a starting block at the fitness center pool, going absolutely nowhere fast. Well, in my case, going absolutely nowhere slow.

2) Served as a case manager for a drunken goose next to Lake Monona.

3) Run up the elipse at the Monona Terrace under cover of darkness in only shorts and a sports bra.

4) Listened to more than one person say, "YOU are going to run a marathon? I can't believe that."

5) Eaten ham.

6) Led a bunch of undergraduates on a trail run through the Arb.

7) Swum in Lake Wingra.

8) Bailed out of Hell Brick and hitched a ride for me and my bike home with stranger guys in a Jeep.

9) Eaten Salted Nut Rolls by the case.

10) Demand extra fast service from the wetsuit repair people because, "dude, I have an Ironman in four and a half weeks."

It's true: Ironman training takes you to places you've never dared go before, even if those places are 10 feet out from the diving block for hours at a time.