My first ironman, sort of

Yesterday Silvia, my trusty sidekick, and I participated in our first ironman... as volunteers. It wasn't an official IM so there weren't tons of participants, and for many triathlon seemed to be a hoby (I'll get more into this later). Most of all, the organizers were local, so the thing went off like just like you would expect something like this to go off if a Spanish person organized it: without a hitch - mostly by luck and a little bit of faith that mankind was smart enough to figure out what to do for themselves. My job was to stand by the metal gates blocking off side streets and make sure that no cars went through and drove onto the course anyway. Of course, the organizers hadn't put any indication down the road to warn drivers that the main road was closed, but never mind, when they got to a big, yellow gate at the end and we made them back it up they figured it out.

The race was in a little town that is called, fittingly, L'Ampolla. If you don't get it I'll help you out, ampolla means "blister" in Spanish. The race organizers tried to open themselves up to participants from all around the world with the following image on their web site, but despite all their efforts, most of the participants were locals.
(in counter-clockwise order starting from top center: "The Milky Way", "Earth", "Spain", "The Ebre Delta", "Blister").

My hat goes off to ANYONE who participated in this race. Well, my hat goes off to anyone who has completed an ironman (and if you, reader, have finished one, my hat goes off to you too; you are a rockstar), but especially those roughly 111 people I saw slogging away past me yesterday. First of all, after months of rain, it was hot and sunny yesterday (around 80 degrees) and the course had no shade anywhere, as far as I could tell. But worst of all was the course. I guess when a small town tries to put on a big race you get a lot of loops. This course was a SEXTUPLE (that's the word for 6 times, right?) out-and-back bike AND run course. That means that the bike course was only 15k (9.3 miles) out, and 15k back, six . flipping . times. The run course was only three and a half kilometers (2.2 miles) out and 3.5k back six . futher . mucking . times, on the same course as the bike! I'm confident that I would have the physical fortitude to finish an ironman one day, but to complete a race where 72% of the course was on the same 2.2 mile stretch that I had to cover twenty-four times in one day would break me before I ever got to the finish line (for the 24th time).

When Silvia and I were taken in the back of a white van to our post it was 1:30 in the afternoon and the guy in first place still hadn't finished his final bike loop. I didn't know about the 6 "loop" (read: "out and back") situation, and since we were only about a quarter of a mile from the finish line/turn-around point/transition area I started screaming my head off for everyone that came by, and then again when they came back in the other direction 5 minutes later. When I saw them come back again I would start screaming, "Way to go! You're here! You're finished!" Some people yelled out "I still have 2 to go". I figured it must be 3 loops. I wonder how many morales I broke that way? One guy rode by with a ham and cheese sandwich flapping in the wind and I screamed out, "¡Que aproveches!", which I thought meant "Buon Apetite!". "It's que aproveche," Silvia corrected me. Turns out that I'd said something like, "Hope the sandwich enjoys you!" Oh well, he stuck his hand out and waved anyway. There were surprisingly few smiles as people came in from their last loop, but man, if you could have seen the few smiles that there were. One guy audibly said, "¡Por fin!!" ("Finally!").

By the time the bikers had all trickled in and were pacing back and forth on the run course I was getting pretty famous. Some of the people I saw so many times that I could have sworn that they were throwing the little bracelets they got when they finished each lap into the sea. I think one guy said it was great running past me, but then again I either didn't hear him right, or didn't understand the expression that he used. Either way, he used the word grande ("great" or "big") and seemed to like me. When another ran by smiling (or maybe grimacing) I yelled, "Just keep smiling!" and he trotted for a bit grinning and doing the Queen Wave. Another guy who'd been running back and forth for ages (it turns out he took second, I think) was coming up behind someone else, "Come on, you got him!" I yelled. He kind of gave me a dirty look. "Honey, he's totally wasted (está hecho a polvo, litterally "ground to dust")," Silvia said. I felt bad. Another guy who looked like he was having trouble putting one foot in front of the other passed and I yelled, "Just one meter at a time!" Only as it turns out there's no expression in Spanish to say, "one at a time" and I was screaming gobbeldygook at him, something like, "Remember, all at once one meter".

Silvia could have sworn that we were only going to be there for 2 hours, so when they drove by at 3:30 we thought it was to pick us up. Then 4 arms stuck out of the driver's side window with two sandwiches and 2 8oz bottles of water. Silvia sat back down in the shade where she'd been sitting all day (in her neon traffic vest, see right) and lit another cigarette. I opened the foil and looked at what was inside. Ham. No sandwich for Claire (Claires are vegetarians). It wasn't quite as blisteringly hot anymore, but it was still sunny, and we had forgotten sunscreen. By the time they finally came to get us at 5:30 I was starving and thirsty and both of us were sunburnt (me more than Sílvia, but she wins for having the racoon-eyed sunglasses tan). I wanted to stay and watch someone finish, figuring that some of the people that I'd seen run by half a million times must be finishing soon, so I stalled by asking for a t-shirt. In the 15 minutes that we were waiting for the t-shirts, no one crossed the line even though I saw some of the bracelet chuckers come through the aid station... again. When we left to catch a train at 6:00 (hour 11) only 3 people had finished and I didn't get to see the look of satisfaction on anyone's face as they became an ironman.

Now, this is an event that I had almost planned to do. I even started training for it in October, but wound up falling back into drinking and smoking instead and had to admit that this was NOT the time. Since Europe tends to be more serious about athletics I didn't want to be the one to show up just trying to survive and finish grumpy because I was dead last instead of with a smile on my face. Nevertheless, when I got there, I saw people doing a lot of things that even I thought were silly. Here are some of the things that I saw:

• Long-sleeved, all-black jerseys.
• Disc wheels on a windy day (like you usually have on the coast).
• People way in the back wearing aero helmits (you have to be going fast for them to give you any advantage) with the point sticking way up in the air like they were trying to pick up satelite cable.
• A bottom-of-the-line surfing wet suit hanging on the bike rack in the transition area
  
• Mountain bike shoes
• One guy running with his bike jersey still in his hands.
• A transition bag that was nothing more than an IKEA shopping bag.
• Countless people with elite gear and a weekend warrior's fitness.
  

But it's so easy to sit there and be critical from the sidelines. And I'm not making fun of those people, I'm only saying that I would have felt a whole lot better signing up for the race if I'd known that some of the competition would be as ghetto as me. And speaking of competition, there was only one woman in the race. ONE. She was among the last of the bikers - the ones that we thought for sure were going to miss the cut-off. The complete results aren't up yet, so I don't know how she did overall, but she did the swim in 1:23:43, and wasn't off the bike for about 7 1/2 hours. I couldn't help but think, 'dude, I should have trained for this race. I would have won my first ironman." Now, again, watching from the sidelines on fresh legs and calm lungs is quite different from racing head-to-head. I've never even swum 4000m straight without stopping or turning, and have never quite made it past 100 miles on the bike, and I can't even imagine a marathon after something like that. I won't have any idea how my body reacts to the race until I try it myself. Either way, it was hartening and it got me pumped to try one (a different venue) next year.

I'd asked Silvia along to keep me company, but I did have an ulterior motive in asking her. I was hoping that it would get her fired up to get off her ass and start moving, but her reactions were more of shock than awe. When we showed up a guy in his 50s was in the transition area with his bike. "Isn't he a bit old to be doing this type of thing?," she asked. Pretty soon we figured out that he was dropping out, and she said, "This is too tough for an old body like his". As it turned out that he had won the race a year before. "Ooh, look at his jersey, it matches his pants!" she said. "He looks like he's about to fall off his bike," she giggled. "Isn't he a bit fat?" "Oh my god! Look at that guy's muscles! He looks like Victoria Beckham!" "That guy just cheated! He took a sandwich from that chick with the baby carriage!" And when we hadn't seen someone in awhile she would say, "He probably dropped out." (me: "No, I don't think he did, he's probably just going very slow.") "I bet he died." When I asked her what she thought afterwards she said, "It's enough to kill you. I don't know why anyone would do that to themselves. I mean, you looked at them and they were dying." I had to give in and not be angry when she said that she didn't want to do the 11k walk/run with me the next day (stay tuned: to be talked about in upcoming blog).