As I wrap up this serialized autobiography titled Competition’s Son, I began thinking about the craziest experiences I’ve had in running, cycling, and swimming. I’ve been a runner more than fifty years, a serious cyclist just under twenty years, and a swimmer in triathlon for the last five years.

Having begun competitive running at the age of twelve, when I first ran a time trial in gym class, covering 2 1/4 miles in 12:00, my interest in the sport never gravitated toward doing the longest events I could find. That never intrigued me. I was always more interested in covering middle distances from a half-mile to 10k and perhaps a half-marathon as fast as I could.

Yet way back in 1972, some guys on the sophomore track team convinced me to do something crazy that only got crazier as the day wore on. Here’s my first “crazy” event.

Dekalb Walkathon

One of the weird trends that cropped up in the early 1970s was walking long distances for charity. These were called walkathons, and the Dekalb, IL. event held in early April of 1972 was scheduled for thirty miles. I don’t think there was a registration fee as most of the people showing up were raising money for some cause I can’t remember.

Six of us showed up early in the morning in an array of Kaneland Knight tee shirts and short. I may have had a pair of adidas Gazelle running shoes, buy maybe not. Mine were stolen at a track meet in Rochelle during the track season, but that might have been a week later. I can’t imagine that we ran that day in the black and white thin-soled gum rubber flats popular at the time, but we were young and stupid, so we ran in whatever shoes were issued by the high school.

We weren’t the only high school kids with the dumb idea to run the Walkathon, as a group of Dekalb guys showed up. With competitive juices flowing, we raced the first six miles at just over six-minute pace, then one-by-one people peeled off and by fifteen miles I found myself all alone out in the cold cornfields under a cloudy sky. That’s probably fortunate or I would have died. But I kept moving.

There were no water stations set up because they organizers didn’t expect people to arrive at the designated points along the course until hours later. I saw tables along the route but no water. Yet I kept moving. Soon my legs and feet were sore. Finally the course turned back toward town and I was running past a set of Northern Illinois University Frat houses when one of the brothers offered me a Coke and I drank it down. That was the only hydration I had during all thirty miles.

That experience cured me of all curiosity about running 26.2 miles. I learned the hard way there was nothing glorious about it. I didn’t enter a marathon until I was ten years older and at the end of my competitive running career. But that’s a story unto itself I’ll cover later.

Jenny Lake to Lake Solitude, Wyoming

When our college cross country team made a training trip to Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons in August of 1976, I was eager to chalk up Western birds on my lifelist as I had never been to that part of the country before. We ran 80 miles in a series of training runs in the lower mountains of Yellowstone and ran a team relay from base camp up to Mammoth Hot Springs.

Then we drove south to the Grand Tetons. First we did a run out on the flats and went for a swim in the Snake River, where I dove in and after just a few strokes wound up fifty yards downstream due to the strong current. That was humbling. I realized then and there that the Western environment cared not how I survived. Then we set up camp in Jenny Lake and someone came up with the crazy idea of running up to Lake Solitude and back, a run of eighteen miles round trip with a climb from 6,000ft to 9000 ft and back down. The trails were dusty and rocky, and I recall wearing a set of adidas SL ’76 running shoes in keeping with that year’s Olympics. They were stiffer than the SL 72s I’d been wearing. That was another time I realized how different a set of shoes made by the same company could be.

We set out late in the morning but the fresh mountain air was still incredible to breathe. We knew not to stop and get drinks out of the stream because there were printed warnings about the dangers of the intestinal disease giardia caused by pack horse and other creatures whose waste polluted the streams. So we ran through the cool forest shade to arrive at the bright blue-green pool of Jenny Lake higher up in the mountains. The ascent up to Jenny Lake was of course tiring at times due to the climb, but my legs felt strong after a week of mountain training at altitude. I’d had headaches that first day running at elevation in Yellowstone, but those were over and I was feeling energetic keeping up with our top guys the whole way up the mountain. The sun was warm and a couple guys tried swimming but the water was so bracing it was hard to get past your knees without the pain of freezing water chasing you back out.

I watched a mountain trout swimming in the lake and put my hand down in the water to see if it would notice and it swam right past. That’s another moment when I sensed that the mountains really don’t care if you exist or not. On the way up the trail we encountered a massive moose sitting trailside. He was still there on the return trip, chewing its cud in the cool shade of some conifers.

Running back down was much harder. My quadriceps were shocked into submission by the downhill pounding, I tried getting into rhythm on the descent but without anything to drink for the first fifteen miles up and back, I could feel my body staring to stiffen up. Twilight was approaching and the sun dipped behind the tips of the tall mountains. The air chilled instantly which was a relief, but now I was as cold as I was tired. I wanted nothing more than to finish the run and get something to drink.

The last two miles were a determined shuffle back to camp on the flatter trails. I stumbled to my tent, opened a lukewarm Mountain Dew and gobbled down a few Oreos from the pack I’d purchased in town the day before. That was my post-race recovery regimen.

We waited a long time for two teammates and began to get genuinely worried as twilight rolled into near darkness. Finally a junior named Tony came trotting into camp. The lone guy missing was a freshman named Matt. We waited and waited. Finally a dark figure emerged from the blackened pines below the blue mountains and we gave him a little cheer. “A moose was sitting on the trail,” he informed us. “I had to climb some big boulders to get around him.”

That night a massive thunderstorm crashed over the mountains pouring rain by the buckets on our campsite. I woke up on a floating air mattress, then fell back asleep not caring if I got wet or not. At least that run was behind us. That was one of the craziest things I’ve ever done.

From Genoa to Batavia in 96-Degree heat

Somehow I got the wise idea after taking my daughter to a college visit to a Wisconsin college visit to ride my Felt 4C back from Genoa near Rockford to our house in Batavia, a distance of 45-miles.

My wife and daughter dropped me off at the intersection of Genoa Road and I-90 wondering whether I was crazy. The heat was intense, and humidity too. I smiled as they drove off and began pedaling my bike southeast on Genoa. The thermal radiation from the road was stifling. I could hardly breathe and the water I’d chilled in bottles was already warm to the taste. I made it to Genoa in ten miles and decided to dump what I had and refill the bottle. Within a few more miles those were warm too. It’s hard to drink Gatorade when it’s warm, but I felt the risk of heat stroke and dehydration was great, so I gulped down what I could.

Heading south toward Burlington, I took what looked like a familiar road but wound up lost. Fortunately my phone app showed me where I was, but that only made me feel stupid for taking the wrong road. I added a full five miles to the trip with that detour.

Finally I got back to roads I truly knew and paused by a farmhouse tucked into the shade of tall cottonwoods. My skin tingled and I wasn’t sweating as much as I should. At that moment considered calling to have my wife pick me up, but something in me, call it pride, decided to keep the ride going.

I gulped Gatorade and looked at the house to see if there might be a hose with cold water outside, but seeing nothing, I stood up on my pedals and started riding.

That’s when my mind shut down and I became nothing more than a hunk of meat and bones pushing pedals. One thought drove me. “If you can get to the pump at the Great Western Trail, you can make it home,” I told myself over and over. That “time out of mind” approach worked. Suddenly I found myself standing over the pump I’d dreamed about the last fifteen miles and stuck my head under the cold water as it burst out the faucet head from deep below in the ground. It tasted lightly of sulfur but I didn’t care. I drank and drank, then filled up my water bottle. Home was just six miles away then.

At home, my daughter took one look at my salt-crusted kit and face and blurted, “Why do you do this shit?” I laughed, admitted it had been hard, and gave a rueful look to my wife, who shook her head.

Those first few laps felt crazy

Way back in 2003, right before I tore my ACL playing soccer during an indoor match, I’d signed up for swimming lessons at the Norris Recreation Center. I’d been given a Trek 400 steel-frame bicycle by my brother-in-law, and was having enough fun riding it that I thought it might be cool to try doing a triathlon. I’d tried bike racing on that bike with shifters on the down-tube and mountain bike clip-in shoes and SPD pedals. Of course I got dropped immediately in the Four Bridges bike race I’d sponsored through the newspaper where I worked. That didn’t dissuade me from the triathlon idea.

The first swim lesson was rough. The pool was a fifty-meter setup because St. Charles East boasted a premium swim team for decades. The instructor told me to swim down and back and my form consisted of flailing at the water as fast as I could. I was so out of breath at the end of the first lap I had to hang on the pool edge and catch my breath.

She patiently instructed me how to lift my hands past my ears and drag my fingertips across the water in drills meant to build some semblance of proper swim form. Then I lost a contact lens in the water and the swim lessons that day were over. A few days later I tore my ACL jumping over a fallen player, planting my foot in a way that force pressure into my knee and snap, it was all over.

I didn’t try swimming again for more than a decade. In 2005 my wife was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, my mother died of pancreatic cancer and I took over caregiving for my stroke-ridden father. There was no time for swim lessons, but in 2007 I did buy a road bike with the approval of my brothers who agreed that I could use some money from my father’s account as payment for hundreds of caregiving hours. My late wife died in March of 2013 and by then I’d been through a criterium racing period and mellowed into riding for stress relief.

Then I met a woman named Sue on FitnessSingles.com. She shared the running and riding interest and in fall of 2013 we rode with my friends in the Wright Stuff event in Dodgeville/Spring Green, Wisconsin. I’d crashed my road bike there the previous year, and riding those hills again was intense. But after we were done, Sue and I went to the Governor Dodge beach for a pre-dinner swim. She slid into the water and swam across the surface in the smoothest stroke I’d ever seen.

Now, I’d seen her out in Lake Michigan during a triathlon earlier that year but you’re not up close when that happens. This time her figure broke a clean line in the dark reflections of trees on the lake surface and a new desire hit me: “I want to swim like that.”

I started swimming weekly at the XSport fitness club and took more lessons. The instructor was patient and encouraging but it was hard to learn breathing correctly and my arms tired quickly. I’d still find myself panting after swimming a fifty yard interval. But I kept at it like a crazy person.

That kept up for a year but when I watched Sue do the Madison Open Water Swim, I still could not imagine swimming a mile. I envied the people in their wetsuits and especially those without. How could they swim so well? I watched more triathlons and kept doing duathlons that year.

Finally I entered the Napervill Sprint Triathlon on my own. I stood next to the water in the wetsuit Sue had given me for my birthday wondering whether I’d need it for a short 400 yard swim. But I was scared. Of struggling. But I ditched the wetsuit and swam the best I could. At the first turn, a woman swam in placing slapping the water shouting “Goddamnit! Goddamnit!” but I slipped by and dog-paddled a bit to catch my breath.

I made it through the swim in that first race, but it wasn’t pretty, or fast. My courage built as my form and fitness improved, and a lesson about open water swimming helped get me over the worst of my fears.

The first time I swam open water in a large lake was the Pleasant Prairie Triathlon in Wisconsin. The day before the race Sue and I showed up for the test swim and I was hooked. Wearing the wetsuit gave e flotation and I swam several hundred yards without stopping or turning. I loved the freedom. I suddenly loved swimming.

Oh, I had a few panic attacks along the way, and thought myself crazy for thinking I could make the mistake of starting too fast. But when it came time for do the Madison IM 70.3, I taught myself to be “one with the water.”

It took a few practice swims in Crystal Lake on chill summer mornings to get better at open water swimming, but now I’m confident enough to swim just under 43 minutes for 1.2 miles. I hope to dip below 40 minutes someday. That doesn’t sound crazy any more. But it once did, so I’m proud to have progressed enough to keep dreaming.

Twin Cities madness

After competing heavily in road running in 1983 and ’84, I got married in June of 1985 and began accepting the thought that my competitive road racing days would soon be over. I still raced a fast 4-mile in the early season of 1985, clocking 19:49 in a second place run. The summer months saw weak times as I was getting ready for the wedding but by fall I jumped in the Park Forest 10-mile and ran 54:00 on a rolling course. At that point, I decided to race the only true marathon I’d ever entered.

But I made a cruel mistake the week before the race by running a “final tuneup” 20-miler in which I bonked badly for lack of water and wound up with sore legs and a sore throat. All that week I nervously questioned whether I should race or not. But I took the flight, stayed with a college roommate in the Twin Cities and got up determined to give the marathon my best shot.

I still felt hollow inside from the previous week’s bonk, but the real problem was the cold weather. The air temps stood at 34 degrees with a stiff wind blowing off the lakes. The gun went off and a mile in I locked pace with a group running 5:20 per mile. At the heart of it was the Olympian fourth place marathoner Don Kardong. He held court like a chat room as we clicked off the miles. I felt great for ten miles but then the course cut through the wind and I felt the first chilling effects of what would become hypothermia. I’d only worn a tee shirt under my Running Unlimited Singlet in which to race. That was the crazy part of that marathon.

At sixteen miles I was still on 5:20 pace but my tongue had swelled my face was blue and looking awful. A different college teammate saw me and pulled me off the course. My crazy marathon ordeal was over. My crazy decision to run 20 miles the week before cost me any hope of finishing the race, I now now. But I was proud of the fact that I was crazy enough to give it a try. It was a long arc from that Dekalb Walkathon with thousands of miles between and plenty of good result.

I attempted one more marathon years later, a hilly bugger up in Lake Geneva where I wound up sitting on the steps of the Yerkes Observatory after running 20 miles in two hours. After that, I never had the urge to do that crazy 26.2 mile race again.

That is, unless I someday attempt a full-distance Ironman. Now, that would be crazy, wouldn’t it? Stay tuned. You never know what this crazy life might bring. I never thought I’d do a Half Ironman, either. Crazy, isn’t it?