Ironman Swag
A few times in the last year, as I’ve been on my way to the train station to work or at the airport, I’ve had people come up to me to ask me about my standard Ironman World Championship swag backpack, which is well-made and makes me happy to carry.
“Are you an Ironman?”
“Have you done many Ironmans?”
“Did you do the World Championship?”
People ask different questions, but it’s always nice to have a random conversation with a stranger about the reality that I used to do Ironman competitions.
Some people ask because they are athletes themselves and have either done Ironman or are hoping to do Ironman. I give a few brief tips like reminding them that when you do an Ironman, you HAVE to eat the whole time, which means you have to go slow enough for your body to digest those calories. And every Ironman I’ve done, I’ve seen people puking by the side of the road because they’ve overestimated how fast they can go while still digesting calories.
I have A LOT of Ironman stories that I try not to bore my usual friends with retelling, since they’ve heard them all already in real time. But strangers are a whole new audience for the stories about the guy who broke his shoulder on that long downhill in St. George, got bandaged up, promised the EMT’s he would NOT run a single step of the marathon, and finished the race with his entire upper body bandaged. Or the guy wandering the sandy beach in the middle of the afternoon so badly dehydrated that he’d forgotten that he had already done the swim and he kept saying, “I have to start the Ironman.” Or the time “Big Sexy” dropped out of the St. George race he was expected to dominate and my kids, who were volunteers on the run course, were so disappointed they didn’t get to give him water or any aid.
But these days, it’s a little different. The woman who chatted me up most recently at the train station said, “how old are you,” and I told her. She waved a hand at me, “still so young, as young as my daughter,” so when she mentioned my obvious limp and that I might not be able to race anymore, she assured me that I had LOTS of years left.
I admit, it’s one of the few times in my life that I feel like I’m a cool person. My kids used to think I was awesome, but as adults, they mostly don’t. They see too many of my flaws these days. Which is fine. That’s the truth. But it’s nice when random people see me and admire what I used to be able to do and tell me that I should be proud of myself. I’m working on being proud of myself. I find I am very, very critical. About lots of things, myself included. I was critical of Mormonism and then ex-Mormonism until I stopped caring very much about those things. Now that critical analytic part of me is turned to other things, but always, always myself.