I cannot decide if signing up for an Ironman was a marvelous choice or a horrible mistake. I had breakfast the other day with a professional in his early 40s. A nice man, and obviously extremely successful in life. The subject of Ironman came up, and he could not understand why anyone would do such a thing. He was baffled, and frankly, I did not have the most coherent answer for him. So this blog is a way of answering the simple question: why would you voluntarily do such a thing?

I imagine that the answer will become clear to me through the process.

Regardless of the answer to the question of why, the question of how to do an Ironman demands an immediate answer. It is certainly life changing, assuming I follow through with it. And follow through with it, I will. Not quitting, that has been drilled into me ever since my father forbade me from quitting a football team when I was a child. I didn’t quit then, but the act of enduring a team and a coach I hated did destroy the love of the sport for me, at least for a time. Let’s hope it is not the same result for triathlon.

Evident in the word triathlon is the fact that it entails training for three endurance sports instead of one. An obvious observation. But does the fact that they are all combined into a single event, the triathlon, render them a single sport? I don’t think so. The sport is some sort of chimera. A lion, a goat, and a snake, all mixed together, which seems just as unrealistic now as the idea that in 8 months I will be hopefully finishing the Ironman in Nice, France. 

This date is already burrowed into my mind: June 29, 2025.

Between now and then, it will be many hours of training: running, biking, and swimming. But it will also be many more hours in the gym, stretching, massaging sore muscles, napping and sleeping. All these hours are hours not spent doing other things–like drinking wine at a Parisien cafe and smoking cigarettes like the Parisians do, or practicing my French, or reading Carl Schmitt. Or Thomas Hobbes. God, my first professor loved Hobbes.

Someone once said to me that there is no such thing as over-training, only under-resting. Perhaps on a certain, metaphysical level he was right, but not in the world in which we live. In real life, the world in which I live, he was absolutely, naively wrong. All time spent training is not spent recovering, and in the final reduction there are only so many hours in the day. I think I would need Christ to multiply the hours, the way he did with the bread and the fish. So my friend’s statement was on the level of the religious, and unfortunately for me, I live on a different plane than that. 

Maybe it is my faith that is lacking. Maybe if I had a more belief, in myself or in some higher power, I would transcend all my boundaries and shortcomings and enter into some greater realm where I can train for hours a day without imploding physically or emotionally.

On the subject of faith, perhaps this is the substance for which I am in the most need of, because my principal emotional experience so far is fear. The doubting thoughts run through my head: “Is this possible? Why am I doing this? How will I get through the 2.4 mile swim? How will I run a marathon after the swim and the 100 plus miles on the bike? Will I be able to finish? Will I even be able to start?”

But the fear is not just limited to the event itself. It spans the entire process: what if I spend all my time training and make no friends? what if I am too busy training to date? and then I am alone forever?

I think this gives one clue why I decided to sign up for such a challenge as an Ironman. To learn to master my internal narrative, that constant self-dialogue, and overcome own inner limitations.

It’s amazing how the mind spirals. I wonder if this tendency to spiral is a particular idiosyncrasy of my own psychology, or something we humans all possess together. I have a feeling it is the latter, although each probably possesses the dizzying feeling of anxiety in their own proportion.

I have never been able to make the fear go away. The only thing to be done is to proceed, and after completing whatever task it was that so inspired fear, to realize that it was not that scary after all. This is growth, because through overcoming smaller fears, we grow in confidence, and take on larger and larger challenges. Thus, we grow in capacity and realize we can transcend our own internal limits and see, through experience, what we are truly capable of.

Written by Ian Good. October 31, 2024. Paris, France.