2023: the year of expansion

If 2022 was the year of discovery, 2023 was the year of expansion.

The YouTube channel was my idea, and so was the name, Racing Through Midlife. Michelle decided she'd edit the videos and get them ready to publish, and I'd do most of the filming and most of the talking, because she's shy on camera. We went into the new year with a resolve to complete a whole bunch of races, really up our game, and see if we could take the fitness to the next level.

The spring

We had races scheduled in January, February, March, and April of every variety: 10Ks, the 10-miler in Kailua, half marathons on the windward side and the Hapalua, the King's Runner 10K. We planned on the metric century on the North Shore in April and signed up for the Honolulu Triathlon in May, two weeks before the IRONMAN 70.3 on the Big Island on June 3. Everything that winter and spring was geared toward that race.

I'd enlisted two friends, one in his mid-forties and one in his late thirties, who signed up pretty much immediately after I told them, because they weren't going to let this old man take all the glory for himself. We decided to do as much of our training together on the weekends as we could. During the week Michelle and I did our own running, biking, and swimming on our own schedule, and on the weekends we'd all get together for rides, swims, and runs.

The truth is we had no idea what level of training a 70.3 was going to take. The marathon was one thing. It's running, and it's 26 miles, and you build up to it: you run 10, you run 13, you run 15, you run 18, and then you go do the 26. There's a natural progression. But with a 70.3 you swim 1.2 miles, then bike 56, then run a half marathon, and you're out there somewhere between six and a half and seven and a half hours. Nothing in your past tells you how your body is going to react to that much exertion for that long. So we did the best we could.

The salt

My friend Michael and I learned about salt on one of those training days, a 50-mile bike followed by a 10-mile run. We were running down Kalanianaole Highway and both of us hit the wall at about eight miles, two miles from his house, completely exhausted, when we came across a public park with a restroom. There was a woman sitting there who looked like she'd been out running, and she said, "Hey, you guys look like you could use some salt." We said yes, please. She broke out salt tablets and we each took one, and within five minutes all the energy came rushing back and I felt like Superman. We ran the last two miles to Michael's house and felt great.

Ever since then, salt tablets and sodium-heavy electrolyte drinks have been part of our training and our racing, because the amount of salt you lose sweating for a couple of hours out here is immense, and you have to put it back to keep going. I'm glad we learned that before we got to the Big Island.

The dress rehearsal, and Murph

In May we did the Honolulu Triathlon, which is Olympic distance: a 1,500-meter swim, a 25-mile bike, and a 10K run. You're out there almost three hours, you get to practice all three events, and it's a good warm-up two weeks out from a half Ironman. It isn't really indicative of how hard a half Ironman is, though. I heard somebody say that a half Ironman is twice the distance of an Olympic and four times as hard, and a full Ironman is four times as hard as the half, just because of how long you're out there pushing your body.

The Sunday before the race we ran the Hibiscus Half again, easy for me and a PR for Michelle. On Monday, Memorial Day, we did Murph at the gym: a mile run, 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 300 air squats, and another mile. You're supposed to wear a 20-pound vest, and since the half Ironman was that Saturday we skipped the vest. We still did Murph five days out from a major event, which in retrospect probably wasn't a good idea.

Honu

We flew to the Big Island nervous, apprehensive, and not knowing how Saturday was going to go. We picked up our bags and bike numbers and got everything ready. My friend Ed, his girlfriend, Michelle, and I stayed in a condo in Kona, and Mike, his wife, and his kids stayed at a resort near the start. Race morning we were up at 2:30 for the 45-minute drive out to Waikoloa.

It was a beautiful morning, and the water for the swim was spectacular, like swimming through an aquarium. I came out of the water in about 48 minutes, took about nine minutes in transition, and got on my road bike, a Felt F60 from 2004 that I'd bought as a younger man just getting into cycling and triathlon, trying it once or twice, and not really liking it. Here I was, twenty-some years later, riding it 56 miles up to Hawi and back, and it is not a light bike. The bike took me nearly three and a half hours, so by the time I came into the second transition it was 11 or 11:30 in the morning, and in early June out in those lava fields it is Africa hot.

I lathered up with sunscreen and started the half marathon, which is a two-loop course through the golf course at the Fairmont Orchid and out into an area called Hell's Kitchen, a paved road through the lava, a long out-and-back you do twice. The crazy thing about Honu is that before your second loop you run right past the finish line. You're watching people turn down the chute to finish and you have to go out and do another six miles. You have to reach deep at that point and keep your body moving, because you're dying in that heat. Ice water over your head at every aid station, keep drinking, keep taking electrolytes, keep eating the gels. I came in at 6 hours and 48 minutes and thought I was going to die. It was so hot, so brutal, and so exhausting that I said there was no way in hell I was ever doing anything like that again.

Afterward the three of us stood around saying it was crazy, it was ridiculous, why did we ever do that, and at the same time feeling the exhilaration of having done something really big. Ed signed up for the next year right away. Michael and I said no.

The summer, and two bikes

We kept racing through the summer. We did the Na Wahine sprint again at the end of July and signed up for the BioAstin readiness series again, starting with the 15K in August. Then I had the crazy idea to sign up for the Dick Evans Memorial Road Race, 112 miles around the island, that same August.

By then I'd bought two bikes. I got a 2006 Cervelo P3, a triathlon bike, from a friend, and I picked up a Specialized Tarmac SL6 road bike off Facebook Marketplace. The bike is a huge portion of these triathlons, and the bike is what broke me at Honu. It made the run so hard to get into that it took me 2 hours and 15 minutes, and I decided that if I was ever going to consider one again I needed to get a lot stronger on the bike.

Around the time I signed up for Dick Evans, Michelle started saying, "If you get us a room at the Fairmont Orchid, right next to the start, I'd be willing to do it." It had been two months since Honu and I'd already forgotten the pain. We were doing all these races, I was about to ride around the island, we were doing the marathon again in December, so I said, why not, let's get crazy. We signed up for the 2024 Hawaii 70.3, Michael signed up, and then our friend Jake signed up, so now there were four of us.

The room off the bedroom

That's when we admitted that riding on Oahu's roads wasn't going to do much for us training-wise. There are decent bike lanes in places, but you're still dealing with traffic and lights, and the only way to get a consistent hard workout outside is to ride the ridges and do hill repeats all the time. A lot of people don't pay attention on the road, a lot of them are texting, and it can be dangerous out there. On Labor Day weekend Garmin had a big sale, and we picked up two Tacx Flux 2 smart trainers, signed up for Zwift and Fulgaz, and parked the bikes in front of the computers in the little side room next to the bedroom. Hard, consistent bike workouts, group rides, and races in a virtual world, without the danger of being outside.

We did the Waikiki Roughwater Swim that fall too, and the rest of the readiness series, and we went into the marathon in great shape. We'd trained all year and, as you can tell from the videos, raced a lot.

The marathon, by 35 seconds

My goal was to break four hours, and I felt good the whole race until the last four miles. There's a stretch of the Honolulu Marathon people call the Kahala Death March, and I believe it's a segment on Strava: miles 22 to 25, uphill, downwind, sun at your back. It's an oven. Once you crest Diamond Head you have a little over a mile to the finish, but those three miles before it are what break people on this course, and they broke me a little. Coming down the other side of Diamond Head both calves cramped. I was hobbling and shuffling, and I knew I was close to four hours, so I pushed with everything I had to the line and left it all on the course. I came in at 4:00:34. I missed four hours by 35 seconds, and I was devastated, and I knew right there I'd be doing the marathon again the next year, because I wasn't going to miss my goal by 35 seconds and not have another go at it.

Michelle stepped in a pothole or a divot at mile 3 or 4 and twisted her ankle. She hobbled on it for about 15 miles, which aggravated her hip until it was really jacked, and she walked most of the last eight or nine miles to the finish. She still beat her time from the year before by five minutes, 5:37, and she wasn't happy with it either, because she'd wanted to break five hours, and based on where her fitness was I'm pretty sure she would have if she hadn't gotten hurt.

We were both happy to have finished our second marathon and both disappointed in the results, and we both knew it was going to be another round of marathons. Now we had the 2024 Hawaii 70.3 on the schedule too.

Christmas

Looking at the winter and spring of 2024 and how to train better, we signed up for a program called HumanGo. It's an AI app that plugs into the Garmin watch and Zwift, and you tell it you're training for a 70.3 on this date in this place and it builds the whole plan: Monday off, Tuesday a bike and a run, Wednesday the gym and a swim, Thursday a bike and a run, Saturday the long bike, Sunday the long run. It tracks everything and adjusts the workouts as you go so you're peaking on race day. We bought it around Christmas of 2023, and how it worked out is the 2024 story.