The Ironman.

    It’s an incredible test of an endurance athlete – 2.4 miles of swimming, then 112 miles on a racing bike, then a 26.2-mile run. And for an Ironman triathlete, there is one ultimate test – the Ironman World Championships, held annually in the heat and hills of Kailua-Kona, Hawaii.

   For the past two years, an Amelia Island Runner has raced on this world stage. He’s 37-year-old Michael Peters, and on Oct. 15 he shattered his personal record as well as the 10-hour mark, finishing in 9:55:17 -- in the top 20 percent of the professional and elite amateur field.

   The numbers tell part of the story: Michael completed the Pacific Ocean swim in 1:14:47, the bike portion in 4:59:57 (an average of 22.4 mph), and the marathon in 3:32:16 (an 8:06 pace). To qualify for Hawaii this year, he finished ninth among 348 age-group competitors at April’s Ironman Arizona in Tempe. His time there was 10:01:48, at the same distances for swimming, biking and running.

   But as any runner knows, there is much more to such a story than numbers. There were years of training, discipline and sacrifice. There were times of fatigue and self-doubt. And there were exhilarating highs, culminated by the moment when his wife, Karen, and daughters Lindsay and Lauren joined him to cross the 2005 Hawaii finish line.

   Said Michael afterward: “I feel like the luckiest guy in the world.”

   Michael is no stranger to many runners around here – he’s coaching the Girls on the Run women’s teams for the ING Miami Marathon and Half Marathon. But until now, you might not have known that he’s a world-class athlete. His website link for coaching  is http://www.d3multisport.com/MPindex.php

   Nine days after Hawaii, he stopped by one of his favorite local spots – the Kofe hous on Sadler Road – to talk with AIR’s Ed Hardee and Mike Brodie. Here’s the interview, edited for length.

   Let’s start at the beginning. How did you get interested in triathlons, and then the Ironman?

   I’d always been intrigued by endurance sports. In my teenage years, when the Tour de France would only be covered one day a week, I still loved watching it. My dad ran when I was growing up, and so I did the Winter Beaches Run, Summer Beaches Run.

   That was in high school?

   More like junior high… I remember when I first did the Winter Beaches Run (10-miler), I hadn’t trained at all. I did it with my dad, and the next day I could barely walk to school.

    Then I watched the Ironman on television and I thought that was the coolest thing. I thought, I could never do that… no way… inconceivable. But I moved to Los Angeles in 2000, and a good friend who’d done Ironmans in college decided, “I’m going to do the Los Angeles Triathlon.” And I said, “Cool! I want to do that.” An Olympic-distance race. A 1-mile swim, 25-mile bike, a 10K run at the end.

   So, we went out and bought bikes that day. It was around the end of July 2001. The race was in September. So we started training… and I had a pretty good race. And I said, shoot, I want to do an Ironman now! So I signed up. (Laughs) I’d never run a marathon. I don’t think I’d ever run over 10 miles. It was not the most well-thought-out thing… I think I’d maybe ridden like 40 miles at one time. But I had swam 2 miles, so I had that going for me. (Laughs) So that was September, and  the Ironman was the following July.

    So then I just started training, reading everything I could about it. This guy was an informal coach, we were just doing it together. And they had a triathlon club out there, which at the time was probably about 300 members. Now it’s over 1,200 members. Which was a huge resource.

   There are triathlons, and then there’s the Ironman. Does the term Ironman define distance?

   It does define the distance, which is 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike ride, and then the marathon. That name is now trademarked. There’s a company that owns the Ironman brand throughout the world. So there are other races that are the same distances, but they can’t be called an Ironman.

    There’s the Ironman World Championship in Hawaii, and then there are several other qualifying races around the world. So what they’ve done, and it’s smart business, they’ve got the world championship in Hawaii, but to get into that race you have to qualify somewhere else. So they’ve got all these feeder races. There’s Ironman USA Lake Placid, Ironman New Zealand, Ironman France, they’re all over the world.

   So July 2002, you did Lake Placid.

   Going into that race, I just wanted to finish. Previously I never imagined I could finish an Ironman. And I had a great race. I did just over 10 ½ hours and I missed getting a spot in the world championship by about 4 minutes. So then I was hooked on that -- like, OK, I’m gonna go do Hawaii now.

   That was 2002; take us from there.

   I signed up for three Ironmen in 2003: New Zealand, Lake Placid again, and Wisconsin. I missed qualifying anywhere from 1 minute to 14 minutes.

   What does that do to your head, when you miss it by a minute?

   (Laughs) Frustrating! It’s like, Oh man! When you’ve finished a 10 ½-hour race, you start racking your brain, thinking, where did I lose a minute out there? Am I ever going to do this or not? Maybe I just don’t have the ability to do it.

   But after that year, I was thinking, maybe I need to try something different. I hired former Ironman world champion Scott Molina as my coach in October 2003. He’s an American who lives in New Zealand. Scott’s been phenomenal for me. He’s been a wonderful coach and friend, and really helped me train smarter and take my training to a different level.

   Did you go over there?

   No, I have very good logs of what I’ve done, and that helped him get up to speed pretty quickly. Basically we e-mail, three or four times a week, back and forth. I end up seeing him at races like Ironman Arizona and Hawaii, and when I go to training camps he's organized.

 Under Scott's coaching I trained for and raced Lake Placid again in ’04. I finished in 10:14 there and qualified with a lot of room to spare. More than 10 minutes.

   And what did that  feel like?

   (Laughs) That felt great! After, what, three years of trying… it was really satisfying, to have a lot of hard work pay off. In fact, I'm glad it took so long to qualify because it made it that much more satisfying. I really felt like I'd earned it.

   So then you went to Hawaii last year and did it in 10:45.

   Yep. Had a great race. I’d say last year vs. this year, I was about 50 minutes faster this year. Probably 30 minutes of that was just the conditions, and 20 minutes of it was, I’m just quite a bit stronger in cycling and running over last year.

   It was hot this year, but it wasn’t as windy.

   It wasn’t nearly as windy. The bike conditions were ideal. I don’t know what the winds were, there’s always wind there, but it was probably 10-15 mph, and we only had headwinds for probably 30 miles. The course is basically out and back, and the winds tend to shift – last year we had headwinds the whole way. And they were fairly strong, a lot of 20-30 mph winds.

   This may sound like a perverse question, but was it almost disappointing that the conditions were more favorable this time? Were you psyched?

   I think you have to go into that race expecting and almost wanting the conditions to be really bad. The Ironman, you have to prepare yourself for that. You definitely have to be physically prepared. But I think the difference between people who have a good race and a not-so-good race is often mental focus.

   I was really psyched that he conditions were so hard last year. I felt like I got to experience the full fury of the Ironman. I went  into it this year and I figured well, if it’s hard, that suits me because I think I’m mentally stronger and better able to deal with tough conditions than most.  Whether I am or not, you’ve got to tell yourself that. And if the conditions are good, then hopefully I can put up a good time. So I was just glad that my body cooperated and I was able to take advantage of the conditions. I never thought I would go that fast out there.

   Among the many things about this that boggle my mind, I guess you could be totally trained, and then you have a flat tire.

   You can have a flat tire. The defending champion had two, and that basically took him out of contention. A buddy of mine woke up and had diarrhea that morning. This guy’s a very good athlete, knows the right stuff to eat. He just got a bug. He finished, but he didn’t have a good day.

   Two years ago, the two-time defending champion, an American, was rolling along, and then he starts slowing down on the run, and he basically passed out – he’s passing a kidney stone out there. I’ve passed a kidney stone, and I’ve done the Ironman, and I’d do the Ironman before I’d want to do that.

   This brings up a whole other topic: Process goals vs. outcome goals. Regardless of how I did in the race, I had met my main goal, which was to show up at the starting line knowing that I had done everything possible to prepare myself to have a good race. You can't judge success or failure by things you can't control like finish time or place. I judge success or failure by how well I handle the conditions around me and what my body is allowing me to do. Teddy Roosevelt said something to the effect of, "Do what you can with what you have where you are." If you've done that, then you've been successful.  

   “Expect nothing, and prepare for everything.”

   Yes. Prepare for the worst, and hope for the best… You’ve just gotta say, yeah, I love the fact that the wind was blowing in my face, and I was only riding 9 mph! There are so many people who want to do that race, and never get to do it, it’s a privilege just to be out there. 

    Only a handful of people in the world could even finish.

   I think in their current physical state, yes, but … I bet 70% of the population, if they had the proper mental attitude and the desire to train for it, could finish the race. Of course a lot of people have the desire to have done the race, but don't have a desire to do the work required. I think Bob Knight said, "The will to win is important, but what's more important is the will to prepare."

     70%?

   I betcha. It might take them three years to get their bodies in shape.…  There was an 80-year-old guy who finished this year. And the guy’s in good shape, yes, but it just shows you that if you’re disciplined about your nutrition, and training, and getting your rest, and you want to do something, you can do it.

   So, you’re saying, you don’t have to be particularly gifted.

   I don’t think so. I think that’s true of all endurance sports in terms of being able to finish. Like, I’m never going to run a 32-minute 10K. But anybody can run a 10K, if they’re willing to take the time to train. Maybe they have to walk every other mile.

   Now, not if they have some kind of degenerative arthritic condition in their knees, say.

   But endurance sports rewards discipline, and stick-to-itiveness, and consistency over time. Anything like  my results, it doesn’t just happen in a year. They come out of a lot of the physiological changes that take place in a body.

   No matter what age you start running, barring injury you can get faster for at least five and possibly 10 years, even if you started at 60. And there’s a guy, Mark Allen, who won the Hawaii Ironman six times -- he went there seven times and didn’t win, before he won it. Persistence is the key to success, right?

   What about muscle fiber? Slow- twitch, fast-twitch?   

   Certainly for Ironman, a disproportionate percentage of slow-twitch fibers is advantageous, but we've all got a mixture of both. I'm short on fast-twitch. I'm not going to run 100 meters in under 11 seconds, but that doesn't mean I can't run 100 meters in 15 seconds. Same thing for Ironman. You may have a disproportionate share of fast-twitch. That's a disadvantage, but it doesn't mean you can't do the event.

   So with proper training people could compete in an Ironman, but not necessarily be competitive.

   Yeah, they might not ever be able to go faster than 15 hours. We all have limits. But I think most people, their limits are such that they could finish that race. Self-doubt and preconceived personal limits are what stop most people. One of my mentors says, "The only limits are those we give ourselves." I really believe that.

   I’ve heard that Ironman competitors eat a huge amount.

   During the race, I take in about 500 calories an hour, all in liquid form, on the bike. When I’m running I take less, I can’t digest it. There’s a company now that does custom formulations. I have a really high sweat rate, lose a lot of electrolytes, so for me, I have a formula that’s high in sodium, magnesium. I’m probably burning 800-900 an hour on the bike, so I’m still falling behind, but you’ve got a few thousand calories of glycogen in your body when you start the race.

   When I’m training big, I might be eating 5,000, 6,000 calories a day.

   How about when you’re not training?

   (Laughs) After Arizona, I gained about 20 pounds during the course of two months. It’s a lot harder to run with 20 extra pounds. I’m trying to be disciplined this time around…. I’m still going to gain some weight, I need to. I get pretty lean right before the race, about 160 pounds (6-7% body fat) before the race, and I think if I kept that weight year-round I’d risk a lot of injury, get sick. I’d rather be around 170 pounds (9-10% body fat) for training, and then lean down for the race.

   When you’re not in training, what do you do to stay in shape?

   I’m always in training.

   I think that’s one thing that has changed about the sport…   It’s a lot more competitive now. There were about 370 people who finished under 10 hours, and about 900 people finished in under 11 hours. That’s like saying that 70 percent of the field in the Boston Marathon finished in under 3 1/2 hours.  I’d say 10 hours in Ironman is kind of like breaking 3 in the marathon.

   I say I’m always in training, but it’s different phases. Right now for the next two or three weeks, I’m really non-training, I’m in recovery mode, I’m doing maybe 30 minutes to an hour of exercise a day, really easy stuff, not stressing my body, to keep the blood flowing. Plus my brain will get all whacked out if I don’t do anything. So I’m just swimming, riding a bike, maybe some short, easy  running.  Then I'll go into a couple months of easy base miles and work on my weaknesses, like swim technique. After that I'll start really building my volume on the bike and then, as a key race approaches, I'll do more hard race pace work.

    Do you do ocean swimming?

   A little bit, but mostly in the pool. I don’t like swimming in the ocean here very much, you can’t see anything. Out there in Hawaii I love to swim in the ocean, it’s great, it’s crystal-clear, there’s fish, it’s gorgeous. And there’s a lot less people to swim with here in the ocean.

   How do you train for the hills? It’s very hilly, isn’t it?

   I have a treadmill so I do a lot of uphill and downhill running. I actually jack my treadmill up with cinderblocks in the back. Something my coach really believes in is downhill running, which can be stressful on the legs. Not something I recommend for many people due to the risk of injury from the pounding. But you have to take some risks to get some reward. "Only those who will risk going too far can ever find out how far they can go." The eccentric contractions from downhill running really beat up the muscle, and with proper rest after a session, really toughen them up. That's what you need in an Ironman run. After one of those sessions I'm as sore as if I had just done an Ironman.

   On the bike, we do have wind, even if we don’t have hills. I try to simulate similar kinds of resistance, riding into the wind or putting the bike in a hard gear and standing up. I also ride on my indoor bike trainer and crank the resistance up, and sometimes put a block under the front. I also go to training camps a couple times a year that are usually in the mountains, or get up to North Carolina. There are some great hills to ride in Ocala and Clermont also.   But I’ve always said, with a bike, you can shift the gears. It’s different from running, in that riding up the hills really shouldn’t be that much different from riding on the flat. 

   How many hours a day do you train, when you’re training big?

   There are hard days and easy days. My biggest day would be probably seven hours, unless I'm at a training camp, where I might have some 8-10 hour days. On average, for the whole year, I’ve averaged 20 hours a week. Leading up to the race, I did three weeks in a row that were 30 hours a week. That’s about as much as I can handle, and still take care of other things I have in my life, and get the rest I need. If you do all that training and then you’re not sleeping, for me at least, that just tears my body down. You’ve got to get the rest.

   It sounds like a full-time job.

   It pretty much is, yeah. I have some real estate investments that I manage, but I can control the time of that. And then I’m starting to build my coaching business up as well. I’m certified in USA Triathlon, and I’m starting to take on a few people for triathlon. Some here in town, some around the country. That’s good too, because I can manage the time of that around my training.  And I really enjoy it, helping other people reach their goals and realize their dreams.

   In the past, it seemed that the very top triathlon runners seemed to have a more muscular build, as compared to say marathon-only runners. Do you do weight work?

   I do, although before this last race I didn’t do any upper-body stuff because I’d been doing it and it wasn’t making me any faster as a swimmer. I still have to carry that extra weight around on the bike and the run, and it wasn’t helping me as a swimmer. 

   For the really top Ironman guys, the swim is gonna take them 50 minutes out of an eight-hour race. If having more upper body mass gives them 5% improvement on the swim, that’s only a couple of minutes, and then they’ve got to haul it around for eight hours. Certainly there are different body types. Cyclists for the most part have pretty big quads, even bigger than a lot of runners. They say the cycling really works the front of your legs, while running seems to work the back; of course works all of the legs, but disproportionately your hamstrings, your glutes and your calves. And then, swimming works your upper body. It’s kind of the nice thing about triathlons, you kind of have balanced muscular work.

   Which is your favorite, swimming, running or biking?

   I think I was born to ride a bike, that’s where I’m naturally most gifted. When I first came into the sport, my running was -- OK. I’d come off the bike, and my goal would be not to get passed by too many people. Then I got where I could briefly stay in the same position, I wasn’t passing people but I wasn’t being passed. Now I actually tend to move up a bit. Not a lot, but a bit. It’s probably a close tie between cycling and running.

   Which puts swimming third.

   (Laughs) That’s right. Isn’t it funny how we like the things we do well? Swimming is fine, I don’t dislike swimming, but in training when riding and running you see things, it’s more social. You don’t see a lot when you’re out swimming.

   If you look at the results, when I came out of the water, 1100^th in the swim out of 1700 people. I’m not a great swimmer. But then I come off the bike in about 400^th place. So, that’s where I’m making my time. It’s more fun to be passing people than thrashing around out there.

   Your swim this time was actually a tad slower than the year before.

   Yeah, but I actually placed quite a bit higher. It was a little bit rougher out there. Everybody’s times were slower.

   But then you really kicked hiney on the bike.

   Yeah, I had a good bike ride. I had a goal for next year to ride under 5 hours 10 minutes. The fastest I had ever done was 5:13 earlier this year, so going under 5 hours was unbelievable.

   Are you now automatically qualified for next year?

   No. You have to win your age group.

   Oh, man. That’s not fair!

   That’s why it’s the Ironman! You have to win your age group, and for the pros, it’s like the top 5 or top 10 pros automatically get back in.   

   The thing that I can relate to the most that makes this so incredible, is that you swam 2.4 miles, and then you bicycled 112 miles, and then you ran a marathon in a time that would have qualified me for Boston.

   (Laughs)  It’s also starting the marathon about six hours in, at 1:30 in the afternoon, in the heat of the day in Hawaii. It’s not like you start it at 7 a.m. when it’s 55 degrees.

   And it was very hot, wasn’t it?

   It’s always hot and humid, though not as bad as Northeast Florida in the summer. Those days of suffering here in the summer really pay off out there.

   The funny thing is, if you told someone what you did in the marathon, they might not understand, but a runner really understands what you did.

   I don’t know if you guys ride, but to ride at 22.4 miles per hour for five hours with 5-6,000 feet of climbing, that’s an awesome ride for me.  That’s like, I don’t know what, a 2:45 open marathon. On that run, if you look at all my run splits, I was probably in the top 25 to 30 percent of the overall race. Whereas my bike splits were the top 10 percent. A top 10% run would be 3:15 or so out there.  But yeah, it was a very solid run, particularly after riding so fast. I really wanted to run under 3:30, so if there was any disappointment, I still haven’t done that in an Ironman. And in the first half I was on about a 3:17 (finishing) pace, so I was really rolling along. On like the first eight or nine miles, every mile was 7:20, 7:25, and I was feeling good, and then, you know how it is, all of a sudden you feel like you’re moving just as fast but your watch is disagreeing. It’s saying, like, 8:30. I had a couple over 9 minutes per mile. I hung in there to get under 10 hours, so that was good.

   What do you think about when you’re out there all that time?

   I try not to think about anything, other than technique. There’s a saying by one of the guys I look up to, “A quiet mind is a powerful thing.” And I spend a lot of time practicing mentally. You have different sayings that you just repeat over and over, like, “Relaxed is smooth, and smooth is fast.” It’s almost like a mantra, just in your head, just to keep your body relaxed. Or in this race, for some reason I got into this thing on the bike, or even running, where I was just going, “1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4”… for hours… (Laughs) There would be breaks in that, but you try to just maintain focus, almost go into a trance. 

   There’s no advantage to thinking about who’s in front of you, or who’s behind you. You have to be aware of your body in these races and just listen to it. Is my body telling me that I need this nutrition? Or, is this pace sustainable? Is this rational? Other than that, I think you have to really keep focused but in a quiet way. Not wasting energy.

   You wrote in our newsletter last winter that you went to a 12-day triathlon training camp in Australia, where you trained almost 100 hours. Over 30 miles of swimming, 1,100 miles of cycling and 125 miles of running. Train, eat and sleep, no distractions.

   That was probably one of the most incredible experiences of my life, doing that much training. The benefits of that are probably 70 percent mental, 30 percent physiological. It was mostly a lot of long, relatively slow aerobic training in there just because of the sheer volume, you get so worn down after the first week, that by the second week you can’t go hard. We did have a few races at the end for fun, and that was interesting, as tired as we were. I had a few days out there that were far tougher than anything I’ll ever experience in the Ironman. So you draw on those experiences when it gets tough out there in a race. 

    The Ironman to me – it’s almost sad -- when I first did it, there was this mystical quality to it. Now, it’s a race to me. I think about racing it, and it’s not that I’m racing other people so much. They say you just have to do your own personal time trial until you get maybe 10K left in the run, then you can start racing people. But to me finishing is not a big issue. It’s more about how fast can I go.

   How much of this is physical and how much of it is mental?

   I’ll put it this way, I think the barrier to most people doing it is mental, rather than physical. You have to do the physical training, particularly if you want to reach your potential in terms of speed. You can’t do it if you’re 50 pounds overweight. You can’t do it if you haven’t built your muscles up to sustain the pounding. But the ability to actually execute it -- what stops people from doing it is mental. Not believing it’s possible.

   No one ran a 4-minute mile until Bannister did it. And then after he did it, several guys did it in the next few months.

   Some people thought they’d die if they did it.

   Yeah, and the same thing with this Ironman. No one knew if you could do that when they first did it. There were guys bringing tents on their bikes, planning on camping out, thinking it’s gonna take a few days to do this. Then someone does it in 14 hours, then 13. Guys have done it in under eight hours now. Same thing with a marathon. The times they run now were probably unfathomable 50 years ago. And who knows, someday some guy’s gonna go under 2 hours. It’ll happen.

   Have you had any scary experiences physically, where you got dehydrated?

   No, I’ve never gotten to the point where I felt I was in danger. I think I’m pretty good about knowing when to say when. My wife might disagree. (Laughs) And I’ve had some days where I’ve come home here in the summer and thought, wow, my weight is down 5 or 6 pounds, which is too much. Just because I wasn’t disciplined enough on a bike ride and drinking enough.

   How much do you drink on the run?

    I drink at every aid station, they’re at every mile, so, seven or eight of those an hour. I probably drink at least half a cup at each one. I drink as much as I can.

    I walked every aid station in this race.

   Maybe not in the world championship, but in an Ironman, people walk some, don’t they?

   I’d say most people end up walking. The top pros don’t. But I walked every aid station, first to make sure I’m getting my nutrition in, because it’s so easy to run through and have the cup slosh, and then you’ve missed it. I also am a pretty big believer in the “Galloway method,” particularly in an Ironman, that taking breaks early in an Ironman  marathon prevents your legs from getting so torn down. I’m not walking much, probably  20 seconds. I’m not strolling, I’m trying to keep moving. 

   Do you think the run-walk method makes you faster?

   I think for anybody running over 3:30, and probably 3:15, absolutely, it’s faster. I don’t have any doubt in my mind, and all the women I’m training (for the Girls on the Run marathon training program), I have them doing that. I didn’t believe it at first but I’ve done it now, and it works. And it’s hard to do. The emotion is,  “I’m not gonna walk!” If you’re doing a 3:15, you’re probably only going to walk about 10 seconds a mile. Or maybe you just walk 10 or 15 seconds a mile for the first half, and the second half, you don’t. So you can at least even-split the marathon.

   A lot of the amateurs, people running over 3:15, they’re not negative-splitting that marathon or running it flat. And the fastest way to run a race is to run it even splits, throughout, and the reason is, you’re running too hard in the first half of the race. You feel great … and then you get to that mile 18 or 19, and you’re going slower. I think if nothing else it disciplines you not to go too fast early on. But I really do believe unless you’re a super-light, sub-3 hour guy, very biomechanically efficient, and you’re only going to be running three hours so your legs aren’t going to be taking the pounding, that that break allows you to get back to the normalized level. Whereas if you keep going, you’re just putting more and more fatigue on those legs. And then your form begins to deteriorate, and then you’re getting even more damage to the legs because you’re not running as efficiently.

   And then there’s Bobby McGee from South Africa, he lives in Boulder now, coaches a lot of Olympians -- he coaches Barb Lindquist, who’s one of the top Olympic distance triathletes in the world. She does walk breaks in all of her long runs. This is a woman who’ll run a sub-35 minute 10K on the back end of the tri. If she can do it on her long runs and finds it beneficial, I think I can stand to do it as well.     

   Doesn’t Galloway recommend walking a minute a mile?

   You look at his book, it varies, depending on how fast you are. So if you’re someone who’s running a five-hour marathon, you might be walking one minute out of every 5 minutes. So you’re taking two breaks every 10 minutes. Whereas somebody who’s running under 3:15 would be doing like 15 seconds a mile. But in general, I think about a minute.

   The women in GOTR training, some of them are new to running. So they might start out just running for two minutes and walking for three minutes. And then after a couple of weeks we’ll have them running for three and walking for two. So, slowly their body adapts, and it makes it more approachable for people. And I really do believe it’s faster. It’s a blow to our egos to hear that walking can make us faster, but I think it’s true. I mean, not in a 10K, but in a marathon, I think so.        

   In your training, did you have any really good days or really bad days?

   There are always gonna be bad days. I think you have to listen to your body. I think if I’ve learned anything, I’ve learned after three or four years that my training plan might say, “today I’m supposed to go do an hour-and-a-half run with 30 minutes of it at (a certain pace),” but I get out there and I can just feel that I don’t have it in me today -- I’ve learned to be smart enough to say, OK, this session is actually doing more harm than good. It’s tearing me down.

    I’ve learned that you always need rest, and some days you need rest even though it’s not on your schedule. You’ve got to learn what “good tired” is and what “bad tired” is.

   Robert de Castella, a great Australian marathoner, said for elite endurance athletes, “You wake up tired and you go to bed exhausted.” My coach says being tired is a way of life for people with big goals in endurance sports. But – there’s tired, and there’s overtired and overtrained, where you’re doing more damage than good. Learning the balance between those two and being able to understand that has probably been the biggest thing I’ve learned.

   Did your coach give you a structured training program every day?

   Usually he’ll write a plan for me for the next month. But we’re talking constantly, and plans are made to be changed. So that’s a guide that we structure things around and there’ll be in any given week probably four or five sessions across the three sports that are the key sessions for that point in the year. So if it were early in the year, the key session might be a long slow aerobic run, maybe a long slow bike ride. Getting close to the race, the key session might be a three or four hour bike ride with a lot of race-pace work, tempo work, and then running for say 30 minutes to an hour off the bike at race pace. Harder sessions. So if you’re tired or busy, those are the key sessions you want to get in, and then there are other sessions that are nice to have, but might be just an hour run, at a decent pace.

    With all those hours of training, do you have training partners? It would seem impossible to do all of that alone.

       I do have training partners, mainly on the bike.   I tend to run alone because I’m usually doing fairly structured workouts with targeted paces, and on my long easy runs I want them to be long and easy.  I find group runs often become races, and that can be counterproductive.

     On the bike we have a growing group of cyclists.  I ride a lot with Bruce Buchanan, who is an Ironman legend and can still kick my butt on a good day at 65, and Trent Maddox, a local cyclist and mountain biker, plus a lot of other guys.  Having said that, of my hours training I bet 50+% are alone.  I enjoy the time alone.  It’s therapeutic for me and I get a lot of good thinking done. 

   I went to Scott Molina’s website and saw listed there, “Congratulations to our Hawaii athletes,” and you were second of the group -- and the No. 1 guy came in second overall (8:19:36). Cam Brown.

   Yeah, he’s an amazing guy.

   Do you know him?

   I’ve met him. He’s one of Scott’s athletes.

   You’re in really elite company.

   Just a couple of hours behind! (Laughs)  I had a good day. Scott told me after the race, “well, I guess you can die a happy man now.”  He also said, "I guess we’ve got to get some new goals for you for next year, though!" That was a big goal for me for next year, to go under 10 hours.

   How do you top this?

   My goals for next year, I want to do probably 9:45 at Ironman Arizona.  In the race there this year, the conditions were very difficult. There were  probably 25-30 mph winds all day.

   I’m hoping that if the wind doesn’t blow there, I should be able to ride a lot faster there and get that run time down a bit.  Although time goals, I don’t think they’re great goals, because you never know what the conditions are going to be. But I’ll put that as a long-term objective. Any given race that I go into, my goal is just to do the best that I can on that day, given the conditions and how my body is reacting.

    And I have a goal that I’d like to place in the top five in my age group at an Ironman qualifier. I was 9^th in my age group at Arizona last year.   I guess my other big goal is to run under 3:25 at an Ironman next year.

   Do you ever do just runs?

   I do shorter ones, 10K, half marathons. I think running a marathon, to really run it, to race it, it takes longer to recover from that than an Ironman. Because swimming and cycling, you don’t have the impact, the muscle damage; it’s really the run where you get that. And then your Ironman run, you’re going to run quite a bit slower than you’d run in an open marathon. So your legs are not getting beaten up as much, whereas if you go run a marathon, really run it to your potential, you’re gonna do a lot of stress to your legs. So in general, I’ve avoided doing marathons. The two that I did before my first Ironman, those are my two slowest marathons. Slower than any of the marathons I’ve done in an Ironman.

   But I’m hoping to do Jacksonville this year. I’m hoping to run, not all-out, but a Boston qualifying time (3:15). I’d like to do a marathon to see how fast I could do one, but it just hasn’t been a priority right now.

   My biggest thing for next year is, I’m going to be doing another one of those training camps, in France. In the Pyrenees, so I’m going to get to ride a lot of the climbs from the Tour de France. I’m really excited about that.

   Ironman is an individual effort, but in another sense you're part of a team -- your family. Can you talk about their contributions? 

    Wow, that’s a great question.  The actual race isn’t where you do the Ironman or at least earn the right to do it.  You earn it in the months and years of training, and my family has supported me throughout.  Two and three workouts a day generates a lot of laundry, as my wife can tell you.  I don’t even want to tell you how much food I eat either.  Plus I’m just out of the house a lot training.  Of course I try to do my training when the kids are in school and we work to minimize its impact, but they have been just as much a part of this as I have. 

   When, during the race, did you realize you had a chance to break 10:00? What was going through your mind as you ran down Alii Drive toward the finish?

   Probably about 60 miles into the bike.  At that point I had completed the climb to Hawi and the notorious winds up there had not been that bad, so I figured I was going to be able to ride at least 5:10 and maybe 5:00, which would mean I would need to run around 3:30 and that was the plan from the start. 

   Coming down Alii is unlike anything else.  It’s been described as entering the gates of Heaven.  The crowd is huge, the energy is so positive.  It’s less thinking than it is emotion.  I was just so thrilled, satisfied and elated.  I’ve been thinking about breaking 10 hours ever since I did my first Ironman.  I suppose it’s a bit like breaking three hours for a marathon.  It doesn’t make you an elite, but it shows you’re a serious athlete.  To be able to break that barrier at the biggest triathlon in the world and to cross the finish line with my wife and two daughters while my parents and the guy who introduced me to triathlon were in the stands.  I couldn’t have asked for anything more.

     Coming into the race I added up all the training over the past four years just to show myself that I had paid my dues and earned the right to have a good race.  I found out that I’ve over 1.5 million meters of swimming, 30,000 miles of cycling and 5,500 miles of running in ’02, ’03, ’04 and and year to date ’05.  It’s the satisfaction of having all that hard work pay off that I was feeling.  Plus I was just so psyched to see my wife and kids.  That kept me rolling along for the last five or six miles, just knowing every step was a step closer to seeing them and crossing the finish line together. 

   There’s a lot of drama between 10 p.m. and midnight at the finish line, people trying to get in before the 17-hour cutoff so they don’t get a DNF (“did not finish”). Did you go down there and watch any of that?

   This year I made it until about 10 p.m. I was staying about a mile and a half away. I didn’t make it back down, but I could hear the finish-line speaker calling the people in. It is one of the most powerful things. I always try to go back at midnight. It is so great to see the people come in.

   That’s when you have a guy like Frank Farrar, who’s 76 years old, former governor of South Dakota, had basically a big piece of plastic in his knee because it was destroyed years ago when he was playing football – had cancer 13 years ago, and they gave him two months to live – and he does two or three of these things a year. You see that guy come across, or you see some of the amputees come across – or a guy with ALS – and that’s when you realize that your life is not about what happens to you. It’s about how you respond to what happens to you. That’s what determines the quality of your life. If you choose to be a victim then you’ll be a victim, but if you choose to take control of your life you can do a lot more than you think you can.

   I love seeing those people finish. And the great thing about our sport is, usually the top pro finishers are back out there too, greeting those people as they finish. These are not prima donna professional athletes, they’re not making that much money. They’re reveling in the experience, just like everybody else.

   You can go to ironmanlive.com,  go to  “final results/video finishes” and then  “athlete tracker,” and look up one of the later finishers, say, Farrar, and then do “watch me finish” and you’ll get to see that finish line late at night. You can scroll it forward to see the last person come across. It’s pretty powerful stuff.