Thursday night, I listened to the Zen and the Art of Triathlon podcast, an interview with Uberman race organizer Dan Bercu. Listening to Dan recount the 2016 race and share the challenges of all the competitors should have been a fun, enjoyable experience.
But it was wasn’t.
I felt a sense of incompletion. I felt angry. I felt regret.
Most of all, I felt disappointed that I was feeling this way because at that moment when I turned off the timer in Death Valley, I promised myself and my team that I wouldn’t feel this way.
The more I thought about that regret, the more that regret was directed to what could have been with the right planning.
Going into the race, I know I prepared the best I could, from training to diet to logistics, all while running a business and supporting my family. I sat on my living room floor every night pinning lacrosse balls into my back and shoulders. I woke at 4:30am for 7500- and 10,000-yard swims before breakfast. I tortured my lungs and muscles through Cross-Fit workouts. I found experts to help me prepare.
By all measures, I accomplished an enormous amount with the adventure. And still, I sat there on the couch, then in bed unable to go to sleep, then I laid awake at 3:38 AM because I let the missing parts of my Uberman experience override what I completed.
My mindset improved markedly on Saturday night, when Brett Blankner interviewed me for the podcast as well. We talked about the importance of starting versus finishing, and how to approach endurance athletics with the right perspective towards family and personal health.
This is the important moment to remember from Uberman.
If you’re wondering, the answer is still no. I’m not going for Uberman #2. It’s too much on my body and family. It’s never the same the second time, and if I did decide to give it a go, it would be for the wrong reasons – it would be against why I chose to stop and against the contentment with that decision. Uberman, and any form extreme event or life objective, should always be about the journey not the destination, no matter how trite that sounds. Brett and I talked about this at some length in our conversation.
Most of all, we’re talking about a silly endurance event. On the other side of the world right now, a seven-year-old with murdered parents is trudging these distances without a water bottle in flight from torture and death. For real.
In the mean time, while waiting for the podcast episode to publish, I wanted to share a few lessons for those thinking about Uberman or any massive personal effort of its kind, I hope you’ll learn from these mistakes so you don’t lay awake at 3:38am wondering “what if?”
1 – A plan that can’t be changed is a bad plan. Looking back on my race planning, I had absolutely no room for error. I didn’t have a backup plan for missing the targeted swim landing spot. I didn’t build in a rest day. I didn’t account for the probability of injury.
There was plenty of information I ignored – accounts from other Catalina swimmers that missed the Terranea landing spot, the rocks, experience with going longer on an event. Despite these data, I built an inflexible plan that prevented my race completion.
2 – My 4:00am swim start. Marathon swimmers tackling the Catalina Channel usually leave the island at midnight. We chose a 4am start because we wanted to avoid crossing the shipping lanes.Had I started at midnight and even with a 15-hour swim (I finished my crossing in 14:24), I would have hit land by 3:00pm on Wednesday, instead of 6:30pm. This would have meant:
- Less time battling wind and current as the day wore on, reducing the physical toll of the swim on my body.
- More time to recover from the swim before the bike start.
- Time to comfortably return to Marina del Ray post-swim, then back to the bike start on Thursday morning.
Maybe I still would not have been ready to hit the bike, but the extra few hours of a midnight start would have increased my chances, say from 1% to 15-20%. A 1% chance is no chance, while 15-20% is something. As soon as I missed the first bike segment, I lost the opportunity to complete the whole course.
3 – No backup plan for pickup after the swim. From research about Catalina crossings that swimmers are regularly pushed down shore from the target landing spot at Terranea Beach. Even though I was only 1/4 mile off from my target, that 1/4 mile was a world away. Tbone (my sister and crew) awaited my landing with an RV where I planned to sleep for the night then hit the bike in the AM.
Missing the landing spot meant there was no way for her to meet me. Rocks jutted out from shore that prevented her from meeting me and there were no access points to the beach where I landed. This meant that post-crossing, I had to return back to the boat about 1/2 mile offshore and then was faced with a choice of either swimming back to shore again, in the dark, by myself. No thanks.
I didn’t give clear directions and while I was getting settled back o the boat, the rest of the crew was putting away the kayaks. No one was in charge of thinking through the scenario that could have had a kayaker ready to take me back to shore again. It was now past dusk and dark. No flashlights were ready. No glowsticks. No one ready to hop in the kayak to help me. That’s my fault for not taking command and thinking through this scenario before it happened. In my condition, it would have been exceedingly foolish to try to swim back to shore with the current and the conditions, so I was forced to opt out of meeting Tbone.
By the time the boat returned to Marina del Ray and we got back to the apartment, it was well past 10pm or later (I can’t even remember), making the trek back to the bike start 30 miles south at 5 or 6am was a world away.
4 – I thrashed my feet hitting land. Feet are pretty important to cycling and running. Duh. Again, I knew about the rocky beach and how many other swimmers had cut their feet reaching shore. I rushed my landing to clear the water and ended up with two deep cuts on the bottom of my right foot. This was stupid. I could have worked with Nicki (my super awesome kayaker) to find a clear spot to land. Taking an extra minute or two would have saved my a lot of pain down the road (no pun intended…).
5 – I didn’t expect my shoulder ailments post-swim. In July, I did an 11-mile Tahoe crossing. Afterwards, I felt very, very good and had no soreness whatsoever. I wrongly assumed that any additional soreness I’d feel after doubling that swim would be manageable, if not tolerable.
This was a mistake and I should have known better. Having completed 70.3 triathlons vs Ironmans, and half-marathons vs marathons, I should have known that the effort and physical toll to one’s body is three to four times what half of the same distance does. With under a 12-hour turnaround planned from swim finish to bike start, even if I would have hit my landing spot on shore, the chances of being ready for the AM bike start were almost nil.
6 – Omitting buffer times in my race plan. Seeing a trend here? I planned one day for the swim, two for the bike and two for the run – a five-day race plan to cover the entire course. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Even adding a single “wildcard” rest day to my plan to use when needed would have given me a number of options:
- A full rest day post-swim (which I took, forfeiting the first bike segment)
- Three days on the bike: 3 x 133 miles vs 2 x 200 miles
- Three days for the run
Pay me now or pay me later. I didn’t plan a rest day, and that cost me the opportunity to complete the course. The sole finisher (Giorgio) took eight days (191 hours). One rest day built in could have meant a finish, and probably a finish ahead of him.
7 – No way to extend my race plan. This is more of a constraint than a mistake. Lena and I had each taken an entire week from work already. The five-day race plan also meant that my crew commitments were over on Sunday night. T-bone had flight home from Sacramento on Monday night, and had already taken a week from work to crew. Tim had a job to get to Monday AM. I could have chosen to extend my race plan, and that would have left Lena, Benjamin and me flying solo in the desert with an overdue RV. No thanks.
8 – A big support team. Just like #7, this was a chosen constraint. I wanted and needed my family to be there with me. I wanted to share the journey, not just embark on some crazy odyssey then report back with pictures. I wanted all of us to see it and experience it together.
This decision meant committing to a large support crew and heavy logistics, everything from the RV to having Tbone and Tim meet us in California, to having my in-laws fly to LA to stay with Benjamin while Lena and I crossed Catalina. Each night, I couldn’t just crash in the RV. We had to think about getting food and checking into hotels. We had to think about bath time, finding a glass of milk and which books to read before bedtime.
Having Lena there along the way for emotional support was, without question, a critical component to every moment of the effort. I remember a walk we took after arriving to Catalina Island. I was scared. Very scared. Scared of the swim. Scared of what might happen out there. Scared of sharks. Scared of not finishing. Scared to start. She was there to tell me that everything would be okay.
At the end of my race, having Lena, Benjamin, Tbone and Tim there was an enormous sense of closure. It was a celebration of what we had accomplished as a team over the week, and over the past six months.
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So there you go… A few mistakes and a mini-therapy sessions for myself. I’m feeling much more at peace this morning than Thursday night and Friday, when for a period of about 36 hours, I was seriously considering taking another crack at this year’s race.
Nope. That’s okay. I’m good for now. I’m closing this door so another can open. I don’t know when, but another journey awaits, one more important and more impactful. I just wonder what it’ll be…
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Then I decided to begin again. I did what I could – pushups from my knees because my arms couldn’t support my body weight, a few kettle bell swings and sit-ups. Soon my breath got heavy and my forehead beaded with sweat. I remembered the process. I remembered how this made me feel. I remembered why I chose to begin again.
