Finding Ultra

The crash comes out of nowhere. One second I'm feeling good, cycling as fast as I can at a good clip, even through the pouring rain. Then I feel a slight bump and my left hand slips off the damp handlebar. I'm hurled off the bike seat and through the air. I experience a momentary loss of gravity, then
bam!
My head slams hard to the ground as my body skids twenty feet across wet pavement, bits of gravel biting into my left knee and burning my shoulder raw as my bike tumbles along on top of me, my right foot still clamped in the pedal.

A second later I'm lying faceup with the rain beating down and the taste of blood on my lips. I struggle to release my right foot and pull myself up using the shoulder that doesn't seem to be bleeding. Somehow, I find a sitting position. I make a fist with my left hand and pain shoots up to the shoulder—the skin has been sheared clean off, and blood mixes with rainwater in little rivers. My left knee has a similar look. I try to bend it—bad idea. My eyes close, and behind them there's a pulsating purple-and-red color, a pounding in my ears. I take a deep breath, let it out. I think of the thousand-plus hours of training I've done to get this far. I have to do this, I have to get up. It's a race.
I have to get back in it
. Then I see it. My left pedal shattered, carbon pieces strewn about the pavement. One hundred and thirty-five miles still to go today—hard enough with two working pedals. But with only one? Impossible.

It's barely daybreak on the Big Island of Hawaii, and I'm on a pristine stretch of terrain known as the Red Road, which owes
its name to its red cinder surface, bits of which are now deeply lodged in my skin. Just moments before, I was the overall race leader at about 35 miles into the 170-mile, Day Two stage of the 2009 Ultraman World Championships, a three-day, 320-mile, double-ironman distance triathlon. Circumnavigating the entire Big Island, Ultraman is an invitation-only endurance-fest, limited to thirty-five competitors fit enough and crazy enough to attempt it. Day One entails a 6.2-mile ocean swim, followed by a 90-mile bike ride. Day Two is 170 miles on the bike. And the event's culmination on Day Three is a 52.4-mile run on the searing hot lava fields of the Kona Coast.

This is my second try at Ultraman—the first occurred just one year before—and I have high hopes. Last year, I stunned the endurance sports community by coming out of nowhere at the ripe age of forty-two to place a respectable eleventh overall after only six months of serious training, and that was after decades of reckless drug and alcohol abuse that nearly killed me and others, plus no physical exertion more strenuous than lugging groceries into the house and maybe repotting a plant. Before that first race, people said that, for a guy like me, attempting something like Ultraman was harebrained, even stupid. After all, they knew me as a sedentary, middle-aged lawyer, a guy with a wife, children, and a career to think about, now off chasing a fool's errand. Not to mention the fact that I was training—and intended to compete—on an entirely plant-based diet.
Impossible
, they told me.
Vegans are spindly weaklings, incapable of anything more athletic than kicking a Hacky Sack. No proteins in plants, you'll never make it
. I heard it all. But deep down, I knew I could do it.

And I did—proving them wrong and defying not just “middle age,” but the seemingly immutable stereotypes about the physical capabilities of a person who eats nothing but plants. And now here I was again, back at it a second time.

Just one day before, I'd begun the race in great form. I completed the Day One 6.2-mile swim at Keauhou Bay in first place, a full ten minutes ahead of the next competitor. Clocking the sixth-fastest swim split in Ultraman's twenty-five-year history, I was off to an amazing start. In the late 1980s, I'd competed as a swimmer at Stanford, so this wasn't a huge surprise. But cycling? Different story altogether. Three years ago I didn't even
own
a bike, let alone know how to
race
one. And on that first day of the race, after I'd blasted out two and a half hours in strong ocean currents, deep fatigue had set in. With salt water–singed lungs and my throat raw from vomiting up my breakfast half a dozen times in Kailua Bay, I faced ninety miles in blistering humidity and gale-force headwinds en route to Volcanoes National Park. I did the math. It was only a matter of time before the cycling specialists would quickly make up lost time and I'd get passed on the final twenty miles of the day, a backbreaking four-thousand-foot climb up to the volcano. I kept looking back, fully expecting to see the Brazilian three-time Ultraman champ, Alexandre Ribiero, fast on my heels, tracking me like prey. But he was nowhere to be seen. In fact, I never saw a single other competitor all day. I could hardly believe it as I rounded the final turn through the finish-line chute, my wife Julie and stepson Tyler screaming from our crew van as I
won
the Day One stage! Leaping from the van, Julie and Tyler ran into my arms; I buried myself in their embrace, tears pouring down my face. And even more shocking was just how long I waited for the next competitor to arrive—a full ten minutes!
I was winning Ultraman by ten minutes!
It wasn't just a dream come true; I'd made an indelible mark on the endurance sports landscape, one for the record books. And for a guy like me—a plant-eating, middle-aged dad—well, with everything I'd faced and overcome, it was nothing short of remarkable.

So the morning of Day Two, all eyes were on me as I waited
with the other athletes at the start line in Volcanoes National Park, tensed and spring-coiled in the early-morning dark, cold rain falling. When the gun sounded, all the top guys leapt like jaguars, trying to establish a quick lead and form an organized front peloton. It's an understatement to say that I wasn't prepared to begin the 170-mile ride with a flat-out, gut-busting sprint; I hadn't warmed up before and was caught completely off guard by just how fast the pace would be. Accelerating downhill at a speed close to fifty miles per hour, I dug deep to hold pace and maintain a position within the lead group, but my legs quickly bloated with lactate and I drifted off the back of the pack.

For this initial twenty-mile rapid descent down the volcano, the situation is what's called “draft legal,” meaning you can ride behind other riders and safely ensconce yourself in a “wind pocket.” Once enveloped in the group, you're able to ride pace at a fraction of the energy output. The last thing you want to do is get “dropped,” leaving you to fend for yourself, a lone wolf struggling against the wind on nothing but your own energy. But that's exactly what I'd become. I was behind the lead pack, yet far ahead of the next “chase” group. Only I felt less like a wolf than a skinny rat. A wet, cold skinny rat, irritated and mad at myself for my bad start, already winded and staring at eight hard hours of riding ahead. The rain made everything worse, plus the fact that I'd forgotten covers for my shoes, so my feet were soaked and frozen numb. Not a lot bothers me, including pain, but wet, cold feet make me crazy. I considered slowing down to let the chase group catch up, but they were too far back. My only option was to soldier on, solo.