“What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.” ~Zig Ziglar The Journey is the Reward Now that the big day is a memory, I am struck by what seems like a (now) obvious truth: racing the Ironman World Championships in Kona has never been about the race …
*Note: This is a race report about my experience with IMLou in 2014. If you are looking for a course overview of Ironman Louisville, please click here. *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* In the 24 hours after I finished Ironman Coeur d’Alene, narrowly missing a Kona slot by 90 seconds, I hastily decided that I was swearing off Ironman for at least a year. I didn’t want to take the sting of another defeat if it didn’t work out. Again. Again. Again. Three near misses were starting to shake my confidence. And, sitting through three sets of slot allocations was pure torture, feeling like my heart was being torn …
During the second week of June, 2012, my mother began what would be the last week of her life here with us. Of course, at that time, we didn’t know that. My family and I went about the routine we had established in the previous 7 months, caring for her as the cancer, which began in her pancreas, was tearing through her body like a school of ravenous piranha. My sister, brother and I went about our usual routine, which typically included us bossing her around — a fact which she was quick to share with the hospice nurses. “Mom, …
Standing on Ali’i Drive, after watching the swim start of the Ironman World Championships, I saw their purple shirts, a shade of purple I recognized immediately as belonging to pancreatic cancer awareness. The front of the t-shirts read, “Molli is doing the Ironman with Pancreatic Cancer.” That must be a typo, right? They must mean ‘for’ pancreatic cancer. There’s no way she could be doing it with pancreatic cancer. Having witnessed the pain and torment my mother went through in the past year, I couldn’t imagine anyone surviving that horrible disease, let alone completing an Ironman with it. I didn’t …
“She’s at peace now,” my Aunt Val consoled me on Tuesday. My mother had died just hours before this phone call. “Your mom fought a tough battle, and dealt with a lot of pain–way worse than any Ironman.” I was at my mother’s bedside during her final hours. They were a challenge for her, and for my nephew and I, who were on-duty that night. While we knew her end was coming, no one in my family thought it would be that night. I was unprepared and shaken by what happened in those final moments. My aunt was right: those …
When I started this blog several years ago, my concept was that I would write about my training and racing, and all of the lessons I learned from it. Hence, my tagline: Learning about life while pushing the limits of the body. At the outset, there was no way I could have understood just how significant some of these lessons would become. Today, I’m writing from my mother’s bedside. She’s been hospitalized, again, as a result of the complications of pancreatic cancer and its treatment. This time, it’s dehydration, which is not uncommon in cancer patients, nor is this the …
The last month has been stressful. Now, I know that “stress” is a word that can be overused and misapplied. So, let me be clear. According to the American Institute of stress, a basic definition of stress, originally coined by Hans Selye in 1936, is “the non-specific response of the body to any demand for change.” Change, in and of itself, is not naturally or automatically good or bad. An appropriate amount of stress can aid in human productivity, as the graph to the right illustrates. For example, training sessions are carefully calculated to introduce an appropriate amount of stress …
