The Ironman DNF

I’ve competed in fourteen Ironman competitions (2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike, 26.2 mile run). I chose to not finish one in 2020, a few days after I found out about the divorce. But in 2022, I signed up for the St. George Ironman because it was in Utah and also because it had been made into the 2021 Ironman World Championships (after Hawaii shut down in the fall of 2021) and I was dead certain it was the only chance I’d ever have to do the Worlds. It wasn’t Kona, the iconic site of the usual championships, but it was as close as I was ever going to get.

I trained for months for this race, and I was confident I could finish it, even though the conditions were windy and hot, and it was so bad as I was going up the final hill that I didn’t see a single competitor on their bike. They were all on the side of the road, walking—or lying down waiting for an ambulance. I heard more than one ambulance going up that hill that late afternoon as sweat dripped down my hands, making it hard to hold on as I stood on my pedals and tried to make it to the top.

But I did it, and at that point, I was sure I was going to be able to finish. I ran for one minute every five minutes until about mile fifteen, when I started walking because I couldn’t see that it was going to make any difference to me if I finished twenty or thirty minutes later. I was still going to make the seventeen-hour cut off. Or so I thought. At mile twenty, a race official stopped me as I looked around, confused, at the deserted aid station. She demanded that I give up my timing chip and I did it without thinking. She was a race official. She knew what the rules were. She said that they’d changed the cutoff time because we got into the swim early. I was too confused to argue with her.

Two women who were pulled off course behind me, however, were not too confused. They insisted that Ironman couldn’t change the cutoff time, and besides, we weren’t at mile 17.9, which the race official said we were. We’d done an out and back and were now past mile 20. It didn’t matter that these women cried and begged her to let them finish their only change at a World Championship. Eventually, they just took off without their timing chips and the race official called their numbers and names in and said they were going to be stopped and might face expulsion from any future Ironman competitions. I got into the SAG vehicle, texted my brother and kids that I’d been pulled off course, and headed to the finish line.

After such a long, hard day, I was really sad and cried when I got back to bed, in pain and without a finisher’s medal. The day felt like confirmation that my life was over and that I wasn’t good enough for any of the things I’d imagined in my future. In the morning, my brother insisted that if he’d been there, he could have talked the race official out of her stupidity, but what did it matter now? The next day, there were rumblings about the group of us older women and men who had been pulled off the course unfairly getting together to talk to Ironman to demand compensation. I didn’t think much would come of it. I tried to believe that I wasn’t at fault, that I deserved to call myself a finisher.

And then, two weeks later, I got an actual phone call from the head of Ironman, offering me a chance to race the 2022 World Championships in Kona, Hawaii (or any other Ironman race I wanted to do) for free. I had no idea how I’d pay for it, but I said yes and started making plans. A friend on Twitter suggested gently that I could ask for help with a GoFundMe. So I set one up, not thinking much would come of it. But friends immediately started donating, so quickly that in the first twenty-four hours GoFundMe apparently took notice and called the local TV stations. One of them asked to send a reporter and cameraperson over and tell the story on that night’s news. I agreed, and soon was explaining, in front of my wall of race medals, what had happened, and why I was asking for help. My GoFunMe was fully funded within a couple of days, and I was on my way!

Fast forward to October of 2022 and I was in Kona with my older sister and a friend who was also going through difficulties with a late life divorce. They cheered me on all day, then came to pick me up late at night as I crossed the finish line. My friend made a video of her shouting at me and I posted it to another friend who said, “I hope everyone has a friend like that in their life.” It was one of the most spiritual experiences of my life to cross that finish line. I was at the very end of the race, with Ironman’s first Down syndrome finisher and another competitor who had found out he had a heart condition and had to keep his heart rate under 100 the entire race. The race itself was incredible, but the night before, when I wrote the names of all those who had supported me on my body in Sharpie, I carried with me the support of friends and the knowledge that I was an Ironman world champion.