Ironman Florida Race Recap

The metal feet of the race barricades at mile 19 do not care who you are. They do not care that you are 44 years old, or that you have been racing professionally for nearly two decades, or that your core temperature spent the first two hours of the morning hovering somewhere near dangerous. They just sit there, extending an inch too far into the narrow sidewalk, waiting for a foot to catch.

When mine did, the world tilted fast.

Your instincts take over before your brain can process the physics of a fall. Throw the right hand out. Protect the face. Hit the pavement, feel the scrape of road rash, hear the snap of your glasses, and feel a distinct crunch in your palm. I did hit my head, but the hand apparently took the brunt of the fall.

Adrenaline is an impressive thing. It floods your system, numbs the nerve endings, and whispers that you’re fine. Get up. Keep moving. But after a few minutes, that wears off. I used my left hand, my good hand, fortunately, to assess the damage. I manipulated the skin over my fourth metacarpal and could actually feel the bone moving beneath my fingers.

Not ideal. Especially when you’re hundreds of miles from home, standing on a sidewalk in Panama City Beach.

The Gulf of Mexico was 74°F

The "fight" didn't actually start at mile 19, though. It started at 5:40 a.m. before sunrise, next to the Russell-Fields Pier.

The Gulf of MEXICO (capital letters required here!) was 74°F. The morning air was about 59°F. In the sport of triathlon, those numbers carry a massive asterisk. For age-group athletes, the wetsuit cutoff is 76.1°F. But for professionals, the rulebook draws a hard line at 71.5°F. At 74°F, we swam in thin textile skins that do zero for warmth. 

I have never been particularly good in the cold. And good is an overstatement. No matter what I do while swimming at these temps, my body goes into full hypothermia. It’s happened before, including in Texas a few years ago. I've had multiple races where this exact pattern plays out: my body slowly gets warm on the bike if the air temperature is warm enough, but the damage is already done. By the time I start the marathon, my run and my body are completely done for. But this time in Florida was something else.

I did everything I could to mitigate it. I double-capped, locked earplugs in to keep the cold out of my inner ears, and kept a warm jacket on until exactly 30 seconds before the start gun fired. The first lap went according to plan. We came back onto the beach for the Aussie exit, running 200 meters across the sand to head back out. At that point, I was still okay.

But the second lap and the final exit out of the water was when things were not okay.

During that second loop, things started to get blurry. The cold began to shut down my awareness, and the lines of the pier began to get fuzzy and the message of my brain telling my arms to reach forward and pull, felt severed. 

By the time my feet finally touched the sand, I wasn't just experiencing a post-swim chill. I came out of the water shivering quite uncontrollably. My teeth were chattering, my whole body was shaking.

Getting myself through the transition area and into the changing tent is a long run in itself, and my brain went completely into autopilot. I honestly am not quite sure how I made it through. Inside the tent, my hands were entirely unresponsive. I remember fumbling with my helmet for what felt like an eternity, and I finally had to ask a volunteer for help just to secure it.

Onto the Bike...

I kept going and hoping on the bike that the pain in my legs would dissipate, that I would get warm, and my teeth would stop chattering. I used every thought process in the book, mentally trying to NOT shiver, but I just couldn't stop it. I was very grateful the course was not technical at all and I had to just sit in my aerobars and try to move my legs. My legs were burning and just felt like big bricks with nothing in them. I was telling myself - just keep pedaling... just keep pedaling...  It was at mile 60 I finally felt warmth. No joke on this. It took THIS long. It was FUN, ha!

There is a reason some people tolerate cold better than others. Body size, insulation, muscle mass, circulation, individual thermoregulatory responses, and even how accustomed someone is to cold can all play a role. Two athletes with very similar builds can have very different responses (well documented). I don't know exactly which combination was working against me that morning. It took a long time to get back to something resembling normal.

I wasn't feeling good at all on the bike, just grinding through the miles and enduring the feeling. It wasn't until mile 76 that my legs finally came around and my body felt normal. I remember it distinctly and kept a clear note of exactly where I was in the race. That is a massive, exhausting block of time to spend fighting your own body and your own feeling just to reach a baseline. By mile 80, I finally felt normal, and I could finally see power numbers I liked. I had gone from wondering how I was going to keep moving to at least feeling like myself again.

The run started OK to not OK. 

Which is why the run was particularly frustrating.

I started reasonably well. But somewhere around mile 10, my legs began to lose their responsiveness. It wasn't one dramatic moment. More of a slow decline. The strength wasn't there, the legs felt increasingly heavy, and the run gradually started to unravel. By mile 16, things were pretty lackluster.

An immense amount of fuel

By that point in the day, I had taken in roughly 1,000 total grams of carbohydrates. To break that down, I had about 730 grams on the bike over a 4:41 ride time, and another 300 grams on the run by mile 19. This is much more fuel that I had anticipated and  honestly, far more than I usually want or can easily tolerate. I am incredibly glad I packed extras on the bike on a whim! Under normal conditions, that much fuel would trigger a complete GI revolt. But on this day, I swear it is what saved me.

[When I finally sat down on my flight home, I did some digging and reading to try to understand what exactly happened. It turns out that prolonged shivering is massive, exhausting work. Your muscles are contracting repeatedly to generate heat, burning through calories (and using most of your glycogen stores) at an extreme rate (some research says 2-6x times the normal). Because my system was draining its carbohydrate stores just to function in the first part of the day, those extra carbs on the bike didn't just act as regular race fuel. They kept things moving when I had already burned through everything.]

But even a large intake of calories couldn't completely erase the earlier stress. Reaching normal at mile 80 doesn't mean the stress from those first hours on the bike disappeared. You can recover your temperature and find your legs again, but that doesn't mean the physiological strain on your system is gone. The marathon was simply where the accumulation of that stress caught up to me. And at approximately mile 19, already shuffling along, I caught my foot on that extended barricade foot, and I went down. Hard.  

[Looking at the data afterwards, I was riding somewhat OK, it was a "meh" day and same for the run.]

In the medical tent

An hour later, after walking myself to an aid station and getting race support, I was sitting in the medical tent with a fractured hand. Talk about a total coincidence and the luck of the draw. I ended up with a sports medicine doctor from Jacksonville who spends his time working with MMA fighters and putting combat athletes back together. He brought out a portable ultrasound, confirmed the fracture, and we worked together to get things aligned as well as possible and put together a brace to stabilize it. He was calm, resourceful, and genuinely fantastic. Having someone who knows how to think on their feet makes all the difference.

Broken inside, and broken on the outside

After getting released from the medical tent, the reality of the day finally caught up to me. I found myself standing near the finish line feeling completely broken inside, and quite literally broken on the outside. My hand was wrapped up in a mitten of bandages, my body was empty, and the psychological weight was heavy. In some semblance of comfort and reset my system, I stood there stuffing my face with finish-line pizza and cake. Looking back, that was the absolute best thing I could have done at that exact moment. EAT, eat, eat! 

After grabbing my bike and bags early (the volunteers saw I was in quite a state and allowed me to grab them), I couldn't get myself to start walking back to hotel juggling everything. I called John, and my coach, trapped in a completely derailed mindset, sitting in a corner behind the transition.  The frustration and exhaustion just boiled over into the phone. "Who the f*** breaks their hand in a running race?" I asked. "What am I doing? Why am I even doing this anymore?"
"I had zero enjoyment today. How does this even happen?"  I was spiraling, completely overwhelmed by the sheer ridiculousness of the injury.  They listened, as I quickly had to find reality of the situation, walk to my hotel and taking next steps. 

 I had come to Florida on my own. I'd met some great people before the race and had a really good time, but there I was afterward, sitting with a broken hand, feeling pretty down and wondering what the hell had just happened. The logistics right after those calls were not so fun. I had to pack all my gear, disassemble and pack the bike, change flights. I also just sat there while doing this, eating chips, chocolate and anything else that was available in the hotel lobby (all of this was damn delicious!). 

Between the post-race travel and the last two days getting back to Boston, my body was quite a mess. By the time I finally got home, the travel retention had set in; I looked and felt like a total Oompa Loompa, completely bloated, with swollen cankles and fluid everywhere (this is normal post-race but even with this awareness I didn't feel so great about myself). 

Go see what you can do with it

I landed in Boston, got a hotel and researched doctors I could call to possibly see me the next morning.  I wanted a specialist, and managed to get a same-day appointment with Dr. Matthew Leibman at Boston Hand to Shoulder. He is the hand consultant for the Boston Bruins, the New England Patriots, and the Red Sox. Step into his office, and the walls are lined with photos of elite athletes he has put back together. When a surgeon spends his entire career working with professional sports teams, he develops a fundamentally different perspective on recovery. He understands the athletic mindset. He knows you don't want to sit on a couch for two months.

Instead of locking me away in a heavy, restrictive cast, he fitted me with a functional splint designed to keep the bone stable while preserving as much active use as possible. Then he looked at me and said exactly what I needed to hear: "You're going to do what you're going to do in the next few weeks. Go see what you can do with it. If the hand check-up isn't doing so great down the road, I'll just fix it for you." (My kind of Doc!)

That conversation provided the exact emotional and mental shift I had been starving for since I hit the pavement. He didn't treat me like a fragile patient; he accepted my nature, gave me a safety net, and snapped me right back into the arena mindset.

Driving home after leaving the doctor's office, I turned to John and asked him if he wanted to stop and swim. He just looked at me, completely incredulous, and asked, "You really want to go swim?" I told him, well, I need to see if I can even move, and besides, I figured a heavy dose of pool chlorine was probably the quickest way to wash off the race grime and the last few days ha. Armed with that doctor's permission and a desperate need to find out how the arm felt in the water, we stopped, and we swam.

The swim felt terrible of course. The splint is definitely not a piece of technology that is going to support fast swimming; moving through the water felt like holding a giant rock in my hand. BUT, the key was that the hand was completely stable, it didn't hurt, and I could actually swim!  It was doable. 

Now, as many who know me reading this, I can be quite stubborn BUT I am not going to be stupid with my hand. Nobody wants a mangled hand that doesn't work down the road, and I know it won't actually stabilize in just two weeks. The splint is great in the sense of keeping things usable right now to a degree, and we will see what I can/can't do.  After all, I already have plane tickets, a nonrefundable resort dates booked on a little island south in Mexico, a name on a start list, and athletes racing. ....

Why keep racing professionally?

Overall, the entire turn of events and race left me with a lot of thought brewing, and me thinking more about something that comes up more often as I get older: why keep racing professionally?

I'm 44. I know exactly who is lining up beside me. The standard of the sport keeps moving, the field keeps getting faster, and every race can be a fairly substantial ego hit. Sometimes the results are a very direct reminder of where you are, and where you aren't. So why not move to age group? I could wear a wetsuit in Florida, for starters. After this swim, that's not an insignificant selling point.

But the answer isn't as simple as just wanting to chase a result or liking competition. I've spent more than 18 years racing professionally. This field is the landscape where I learned how to be an athlete, where I developed my understanding of endurance, and where I have spent the better part of my life discovering what I am capable of weathering.

We often talk about sport as a battle against the field, but the truth we find in the deepest trenches of an Ironman is that we are only ever racing ourselves. The external arena, the clock, the competitors, the changing standards, is just the theater we choose to host the internal dialogue. 

The field shapes the question

But the landscape you choose to test yourself against still matters. The field shapes the question. If I stepped back into the age-group field, the questions would change. They would become a different standard. For me, the professional field offers an un-compromised environment. It strips away the hiding places. It demands a level of focus and a confrontation with my own limits that comfort simply cannot provide. To race pro at 44 is not about maintaining a status or holding onto a past identity; it is about choosing the sharpest possible lens through which to view my own evolution.

The professional field also forces me to remain a student of the sport. It keeps the dialogue honest. It asks something fundamental of my spirit: Can you stand here, fully exposed to the current reality of the sport, and still find meaning in the work?

It is about choosing to stay in that arena, where the only comparison that matters is with the person you were yesterday.

Maybe, if I'm being completely honest, part of me is afraid to let go of this identity, even if I don't truly define myself entirely by it. Beyond my own racing, I coach athletes, and I deeply love that side of my life. I have a massive passion for helping others step out, face their own challenges, and discover what they can do. 

But deeper than any fear of leaving the pro lines is a persistent, underlying curiosity to see what is left to discover on the other side of these hard days. Maybe one day I will look at moving to the age group category. I am really not sure when that shift will happen or what the exact reason will be, but I know it will be a move made only when my heart completely says it's time.

After all these years, being able to step into that arena and race professionally is not a right - it is a privilege. And I don't take that lightly. There is a deep, simple value in just showing up, standing on that line, and seeing where it takes me.