This wasn’t how I imagined my 20th Ironman finish would go. It wasn’t really planned, but back in April I found an email from Ironman in my inbox — just as I was taking the first sip of a delicious mezcalita with friends at a new Mexican place in the Mauna Lani resort — stating that I had been selected in the Hawaii resident drawing for a slot at the 2024 Ironman World Championship. I debated whether a mezcalita was actually in order now that I was in training for Kona, but the mezcalita won that evening.

I did, however, start bumping up my training volume, which already wasn’t nothing since I was training for the early June Hawaii 70.3 (“Honu”) race and had already completed the Lavaman Olympic-distance triathlon. But to put things into perspective, my last full Ironman was in 2017 (the lost Covid years notwithstanding), and seven years is a pretty long gap to retain ultra-distance fitness. The years pass quickly, though, as you get older, so in my mind I was still an Ironman, and that belief would be put to the test on race day.

Fast forward to race day, and my support team (my two great friends Greg and Mikey) and I headed down to the pier. Two things were different this time:

1. The race was men only, due to Ironman’s having split the championship between Kona and Nice, France, with the men and women alternating between the venues every year – at least for now. This would definitely give the race a different character.
2. Since I now live full time on the island, many of my local friends knew I was doing the race, so I really felt their collective spirit behind me.

The staging for the swim start was very well organized, and my M60-64 wave was the fourth one, starting at 6:50 am, 25 minutes behind the pros. With only 150 or so of us, it was a very civilized start compared to my other four Kona experiences, so that was a plus.

What was a minus were the jellyfish. They come on a lunar cycle but apparently are only in Kailua Bay when there’s a current from the south, which we definitely had (I could tell from the 500y splits on my Garmin). Anyway, I got stung three or four times — arms, legs and face — but luckily I’m not particularly reactive to them, so aside from minor discomfort everything was good. I finished the swim in around 1:20 and change, feeling ok.

The bike was a different story. Normally one of my strong suits, I felt out of sorts — my power was quite low for the heart rate I was running (like 50 watts low). I decided to be patient with it, as it could be a vestige of the swim, so I focused on getting fluids and calories back in and hoping it would all come good.

The thing is, it didn’t. As I got to 40 miles (the descent to Kawaihae), I was getting closer to my house — the entrance to my community is about the 44-mile mark — and I decided I was going to stop there for a reset and figure out my plan. The quitting option was definitely on the table, as I was in a very negative frame of mind.

My wife Jeanne and friends Bob, Kirsten and Amelie were down at the entrance, and I stopped and told them I was going up to the house. We had some brief conversation where they tried to convince me to keep going, but like I said, I needed the reset. I rode up the pretty steep hill to the house and started assessing — well, after petting the dogs. I even turned on the broadcast to watch the pros on the bike, took a bathroom break and decided I was going back out. To make it a real reset, though, I changed into new, dry kit and into different bike shoes and helmet, since my previous ones had been bothering me a little.

The plan from there was of course to re-enter the race course where I had left it (no other choice when there’s one entrance to the community), ride to Hawi and back and then make a determination whether I was going home or riding back to Kona.

If you followed the race-day tracker, you already know what the answer was: I was riding back to Kona. And I was going to do the run — basically, in for a penny, in for a pound. I took my time, stopping at aid stations to get all my fluids and calories, and was in no particular hurry — thanks to my 47-minute stop at home, no matter what I did, I was staring a personal worst in the face, but a PW is better than a DNF. I had too many people pulling for me, and while I cared about my time, no one else really did. But finishing is binary: you do, or you don’t. There is no try.

I knew the run would be a slog, and it was. I had been having pain in my right knee in training, which really limited my running volume, and add to that a body that hadn’t really shown up for the race, and you have a management challenge. I started off by running the mile or so in between aid stations and then walking the aid stations, and that worked ok through mile 7 or 8, then the leg cramps started. I found that I could walk at around 15-minute pace, and so I started doing the math and knew that I could walk the entire rest of it and still finish long before the cutoff, but I didn’t want to make my friends wait that long for me, so I decided to try one minute of running followed by one minute of walking — that worked well, and I found I could hold 11:30-12:00 pace that way, so that became my plan for the rest of the race.

I had never run so much of the Ironman in the dark before. We were all like ghosts out there, and it was sometimes hard to see when I was coming up on someone if they weren’t wearing a glow stick. But the cool thing was the temperature — it was actually pleasant. My legs were getting increasingly unhappy, but the miles were ticking by, and with a mile or so to go I decided it was time to run it in, and I managed to muster up a sprint for the last quarter mile down Ali’i Drive.

Ironman #20 and Kona #5 was in the books. 14:24:17 is more than two and a half hours slower than my previously slowest Kona race, but it was no easier than any other Ironman I’ve done. Subtract the 47 minutes at home, and it’s still my slowest by a lot. Why finish when your body isn’t cooperating, the house is there and the dogs are cute and cuddly? The answer for me was because nothing worth having is easy, and also because it’s a blessing to have the capability to do this event, even if it’s an off day, so I had to honor that. I’m glad I did.