swim 2.4 miles, bike 112, run 26.2 and brag for the rest of your life, or why i do this...

if anyone has followed this journey they will have seen the hero, the hypochondriac, the narcissist, the fund-raiser, the time strapped new father, the dreamer, the jaded-self loathing elitist seeking to be an ironman, the depressive self-doubter, head banger, cancer survivor and shameless self promoter.

yet today i realized, that none of these characteurs, nor even their sum total, comes close to describing the real why about this road to penticton.

it has been a while since i made a musical reference, this one pertains to the mood that struck today in the car on the the way home from an 8 hour workout. radio tarifa. an apocryphal band from spain who take their name from the southern-most town in spain, where the mediterannean and the atlantic meet. i was in tarifa. it is a magical, windy, moorish place.  i have loved radio tarifa. they are one of the most ecclectic and original bands on the planet, i forgot how much i liked them until i dipped into the cd case today and pulled this one out.

the link above is to a modern version of an ancient castillan song, and the song that inspired this week's blog.

so now, back to me.

it is amazing how empty your head gets when you ride for six hours in extreme heat. in the car however, in the loving arms of my a/c, with radio tarifa playing, a flood of emotion and imagery came on and i began to feel like i was experiencing an epiphany.

i saw images of people finishing at kona with the most amazing smiles on their faces. i saw also,  their looks of anguish and pain and the looks that said "i can't believe i just did that".  i remembered their stories and how i identifed with the fight i saw in them. i remembered how i told myself "i want to do that" i want to fight like that, i became so moved by the shear force of their will that i wanted to become like them. identification. deep rooted.

 i started to cry my head off in the car. i thought about my dead father for a moment. i cried from somewhere deep inside. it was a type of angry tears. i thought about how futile it is to say "look, i swam 2.4 miles, i biked 112 miles and i ran 26.2 miles" and the very thought of the beautiful and triumphant futility of it caught me up in waves of a type of ecstatic yet pointless protestation at the circumstances of existence. i cried more. then i realized that these were angry tears. i realized that ironman is a bucket for deep wells of rage within me, rage over things from the present, rage about things i can remember and things i can't, rage pasted together layer upon layer like a medieval palimpsest*, so glued together as to become indistinguishable, yet never expressed, bottled inside, released somehow through the pain of physical exertion. it took a while to ground myself. it took a while to return from this space of wonderful, sad, angry, triumphant tears.

and i said to myself...relax...you havne't done it yet. (it's just that it is getting so close i can taste it)

so is that the answer??? is anger the glue? is anger the culprit that wakes me at 5 am? is this all just an outlet for rage? you mean i could've just kept on kickboxing?

i dunno. maybe there was no epiphany. maybe i was just buzzing on endorphins. weird trip.

anyways, i will finish with a pic of tarifa. strange, beautiful, far away place, at the end of the once known world.

* ( a book where monks wrote one book over the other because they didn't have enough paper)