09/15/2022
20 years ago today was a magical day for me. It was a beautiful sunny 70 degree day in Madison Wisconsin. It was the inaugural year of Ironman Wisconsin (IM WI).
An Ironman triathlon is 2.4-mile swim 🏊♀️ followed by a 112-mile bike 🚴, followed by a 26.2 mile run 🏃♀️. I trained all summer on the IM WI bike course, which to this day I call a 112-mile roller coaster of a bike ride. It was my 4th IM, and while I knew I was very well trained, I had no idea that I would qualify for IM HI, the coveted World 🌎 Championship Ironman Hawaii.
The training is a huge undertaking. Your life is dedicated to training in all 3 sports and somehow fitting it all in with work, relationships, and obligations of daily living. It is necessarily a selfish sport, and an obsessive one at that. Having already raced for almost 10 years at that point, I knew that, and did my best to create some level of balance despite challenges that life often brings.
I am not religious, but I am quite spiritual. I don’t waste prayers. As I racked up more Ironmans I started praying at the starts. It was not something I took for granted. You do 8 to 9 months of training and yet race day anything can happen: Weather (MAJOR kudos to any of you who did IM WI last Sunday); your goggles getting kicked into your eye socket in the swim; a mechanical on the bike or someone doing something really dumb ahead of you. And simply and somehow lasting thru the run to get to that finish line.
I was blessed that day. Everything came together. It was my day. I had no idea I was qualifying. I just remember enjoying that beautiful day, enjoying how great I felt on that course, and enjoying every last mile of it. My father took this photo. What you don’t see in this photo is the 127.6 miles I had already covered (only 13 to go.!). You also don’t see the hand of God pushing me along on that special day. I will never forget it. It will always give me teary eyes and goosebumps to think about it. The tagline when I got to IM HI was “Anything is Possible”. That was definitely the case for me.
I hope you are making it yours as well. Create your dreams. Create magic. Put one foot In front of the other and do the work to create possibilities. Lots of work combined with magic leads to great things! If we all did that, the world would be a much better place.
