Several months ago, after completing an olympic length triathlon, I signed up for a Half Ironman length triathlon (1.2mi swim, 56 mi bike, 13.1 mi run or 70.3 miles) that took place about a week ago. With a summer to train, it seemed like I might be able to get ready and my friend Jason who I convinced to start doing triathlon with me already signed up; how could I let him suffer alone?  After working hard through the summer with only one week away the doubts start setting in: did I train enough? Will my bike work? Why in the world did I pay money to do this? Am I going to die?

But then it was go-time and Jason and I arrived at the Boulder Reservoir before dawn; well before dawn, like pitch black before dawn, with the sliver of the Harvest Moon hanging low in the sky which not coincidentally was the name of this triathlon: Harvest Moon. Not only was it black, but it was about 45 degrees cold.  No lights except the headlights from cars left running and some head lamps from those more prepared than we were.

We filled up the tires on our bike one last time and walked them to the transition area, carrying a ridiculous amount of equipment, as we prepared to suffer for several hours.  The anxieties from the week before faded, here we were and we would have to roll with whatever challenges lay ahead.

My goals for this race were three-fold:

1. Finish (don’t die)
2. Finish in under 6 hours (my pace of doing each event individually – up to this point I only ran 13.1 miles once and that was two weeks prior)
3. Win the Clydesdale division (against my other larger competitors topping 220 lbs) — After the last Olympic length triathlon, another Clydesdale named Kevin beat me by under a minute to take first place.  We both knew we were going to be racing this distance and became Strava friends and even set up our transition areas near one another.  But there were 9 other people registered as Clydesdales before the race started. Ominously, only two finished the previous year!

But at this point, finishing was the main thing on my mind as I unpacked my transition area, setting out clothes for each event, trying to stay warm and mentally simulate each step.

After a quick warm up jog and a trip to the port-a-potty, it was time to don the wetsuit which absolutely makes me look like a whale. Then all the rubber clad athletes gathered on the beach, ready to jump in the water and swim.  The horn blew and the splashing began.  Kevin and I stayed neck and neck almost the entire time, but he pulled ahead at the end (he is a much stronger swimmer and runner). Glad to get out of the water and see my parents cheering, it was time to start pedaling.

But first I had to remove the wetsuit which after a swim is a lot like spinning around in circles (swimming makes me a little light-headed) and then taking off a pair of tight jeans as quickly as you can.  It’s embarrassingly awkward.  Fortunately, everyone else is so busy figuring it out themselves that no one is watching.  After throwing on my bike jersey, helmet, gloves and shoes, I made my way over to the beginning of the bike leg.  Kevin had already left the transition area as I struggled to get it all together and set off.

The bike course was two laps and it’s mostly up hill at the beginning of each lap.  My bike training paid off and after a few miles, I caught Kevin and mentioned that I didn’t think Clydesdales were supposed to do hills, and carried on.  Over the next several hours, I ate 900 calories of almost pure sugar and drank almost a gallon of water.  Every once in a while taking a few moments to enjoy the beautiful mountain foothills and scenery.

Near the end the second lap, excited I had no mechanical issues or flat tires, I was ready to stop biking. I hopped off my bike to numb feet that turned to pain as they awoke only for me to punish them some more.  Another change of clothes, number strapped on, I headed out for one of the longest runs of my life.

Again the run course had a few hills at the beginning before gradually descending. After about 5 miles my right foot felt like it was developing a blister, but when you’re racing you don’t want to stop. Fortunately, I remembered a story of my friend who didn’t stop as he was feeling the blisters while running a marathon and ended with ravished feet: people asked him why he didn’t stop to fix it and he didn’t have a good answer. I also realized it was going to take 5 seconds to adjust my shoe, so I forced myself to stop and tighten the shoe: a half mile later, the pain had subsided.

I kept waiting for the “wall” of exhaustion to overwhelm me, and while there were various points where my legs felt like they had turned to lead, I kept plodding along at my sub-10 minute mile pace which was my goal even speeding up a little toward the end and crossed the finish line.  This production company puts a slip-n-slide at the end of the race which I tried during the Olympic length event, making it a third of the way and developing a bad hamstring cramp.  I skipped it after this race.

Having accomplished the first goal by finishing, I looked at my final time: 5 hours, 29 minutes! I had beaten my second goal too by a pretty good margin.  Even though all three courses were a little short of the proper length, my pace in each had me on track to finish in 5 hours and 50 minutes.  Jason who started 10 minutes behind me, finished 2 minutes after me, thus once again beating me, this time by only 8 minutes – both of us exceeded our expectations for the race.

And as for the final goal, I never saw Kevin again but that didn’t mean another Clydesdale beat me and my dad mentioned that the 1st place Athena (women over 165lbs) finished a while ago (she beat me by 20 minutes and once I saw who she was, I remembered her passing me and a few other guys around mile 7 and said as she passed us, “Alright boys let’s crush this” and then passed all of us).  But I was the first of the horses to cross the finish line. (Results). Kevin crossed about 20 minutes later, which was impressive since he had been unable to train much due to injury and travel.

Reflecting over this journey, finishing my first “Techman Tri” (Ironman triathlon worth of activity in a month) almost 2 years ago, the goal never started as doing long distance triathlon or even real triathlons, but to simply exercise consistently. Elliptical and rowing gave birth to running and swimming. The races became a chance to test myself and as I saw improvements, gave birth to curiosity about just what might be possible. This particular race never felt crushing and demoralizing, but rather felt very challenging and therefore engaging.  Rather than being the conclusion of a journey, it feels like a milestone on a path that I’m continuing to venture out on: one step at a time.

After a restless nights sleep, I woke at 4:30 in the morning, ate a quick PB&J sandwich with a banana, and threw on some ridiculous looking compression shorts and a bike jersey. It was time to see if my goal from a year ago would come to pass, doing an olympic length triathlon. Because nothing says good morning like a 1500m swim in a lake, biking for more than 25 miles and then running 10km.  Earlier this year, I picked the Lake to Lake triathlon as one of the few triathlons near my hometown in Fort Collins of this distance, but it felt like a stretch because I couldn’t run more than 3 miles without significant knee pain.

At the end of last summer after completing another sprint triathlon, I discovered that I was able to run longer and longer distances leading to a goal of running a half marathon in the fall. Unfortunately, during a long training run in early October, after only 4 miles my knee suddenly hurt enough that I had to hobble the rest of the way back. Sometimes these pains just go away, but this one made clear that it was here to stay. Doing a little research, the symptoms matched “runners knee” which is when your knee cap does not track properly and rubs up against the grove.  The book that some one lent me assured me that this was 100% fixable, but the knee-joint is incredibly complicated and so it can be caused by many, many things. After two months of trying things on my own, I finally went to a physical therapist who identified an imbalance in how my muscles were working. She prescribed a few exercises to do twice daily — I asked how long it takes to fix this kind of thing and she said anywhere from a few weeks to 5 years.  Oh boy….

The pain subsided if I didn’t run, but the idea of not running anymore was not an option – it was so painful to even workup to running 5k that I didn’t want to give that up and I wanted to complete a longer triathlon. After a couple of months of the exercises, I could see some slow progress and I started to ramp my running again and was finally able to run 6 miles again with little pain, opening the door for competing in the Lake To Lake.

Normally you compete against people in your age group at a triathlon (40-44 males for example). These guys don’t just beat me, but usually are nearly complete while I’m still riding the bike.  This year though I discovered that they also have a Clydesdale class for all male athletes over 220lbs which I still easily qualify for. Since I weigh almost twice what the winners of my age group weigh, it’s nice to have some fairer competition.  Plus at the Lake-To-Lake triathlon, the previous year’s fastest Clydesdale finished in just over 3 hours and 15 minutes which was my target time (assuming things went well).

So at 5:15 in the morning, in a grassy field near Loveland High School,I set up my transition area.  Running Shoes, Bike Shoes, Wetsuit (the water was cold), Gloves, Helmet, water, and a bunch of other junk necessary to do all three activities.  Transition area set, I donned the wetsuit, wondering if once I zipped it up, people might confuse me for a beached whale. My wave left and after swimming nearly on top of one another, we swam around a couple of buoys as the sun was just rising. Normally, the transition area is near where you get out of the water but at this one, it was a quarter-mile away, so I got out and jogged incredibly ungracefully back to the transition area, think gorilla more than Clydesdale. I mounted my bike and started the journey up to Horsetooth reservoir.

Over an hour and a half later, I ran my bike back to the transition area, threw on my running shoes and started the final phase around the lake.  I felt tired, but not crushed.  I ran at a reasonable pace, keeping an eye on my heart rate to make sure I had enough to finish.  After 4 miles, I still felt pretty good so I turned up the gas and ran to the end, even sprinting at the finish line — 3 hours, 13 minutes from when I had jumped in the lake. Elated to be done, I stuck around to discover I had taken second among the nine horses who competed that day.

Over the year since my first triathlon and almost 18 months of doing an Ironman worth of activity each month, I’ve learned that our bodies respond to gradual change sometimes in ways that we don’t even notice.  In all three events, I’ve seen improvements but they come so slowly that sometimes it’s hard to even notice them except by looking back over a long time – and so I keep pushing.  I injured myself in part by trying to run too far, too fast without giving my body a chance to catch up and heal from the previous exertions. Often times slow change is the only way to conform or bodies to what they should be and after doing so the momentum carries us forward.

P.S. As a reward for this one and to celebrate 2 years of doing this, I signed up for a triathlon that is half an Ironman in September (or about double the distance of the Lake-To-Lake).  So the training continues, not as a chore, but as a hobby experimenting just what my body is capable of expect the 3rd part of this series then.

More Pictures are available here

Race results available here

When it rains, it pours.

When we have a lot of something, we tend value it less, especially any more quantities. If we are hungry and all we have is one orange, it’s pretty valuable.  The second orange is still valuable but less so.  The hundredth orange doesn’t have much extra value compared to the 99th.  This economic principle underlies why we trade the things we have too much of for things we don’t have enough of (and why that transaction makes sense for the other party).  Economists call this decreasing marginal utility.

Almost every day we experience feast and famine.  Not only with goods, but also with our experience. When we are young we have excess energy and time and can easily become bored.  As we get older, we have more resources but not enough time to fully use them.  Even raising children has a similar path: when our kids are young, they are more needy and therefore enjoy cuddling and hanging out with their parents.  As they get older, they have more independence which is great, but no longer want to hang out.

It might be nice to have a smoothing function that allows us to share the abundance of today with our future or past selves.  There is actually a retirement theory based on trying to smooth our life income (saving = giving to your future self, borrowing = your future self giving to you now).  But this is hard to do with things like time or experiences.  As a result,  we live our life with excesses in some areas and not enough in others.  Perhaps the secret of contentment is to treasure those things we have too much of while we have them, knowing that we may not have as much in the future, instead of our natural tendency to focus on our lack confident that few lacks last forever.

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And lest anyone think this is only happens to others, in a conversation with another friend whom I greatly regard, while trying to understand why he was solving a problem a certain way, he suddenly became defensive.  He took my comments as being condescending rather than helpful. I had to apologize and reiterate that contrary to thinking lowly of his thought process, I assume that if he is solving a problem differently than I would, he probably knows better and I wanted to understand why.

For the most part, we don’t intend to be condescending. Instead, we condescend when we try to communicate in a more basic way that underestimates the comprehension of the listener. If we estimate correctly, they take no offense and often appreciate that they now understand. This underestimation is rarely intentional but exhibits a much larger problem of communication.  The person speaking has some intent they try to communicate and the listener interprets both what the speaker said as well as their assumptions. So whose responsibility is it to close this gap?

Sometimes we take offense at what another person said. When confronted, they respond that it’s not what they meant. So who needs to change? Most of the time, we assume the other person — if we’re speaking, they should understand our intent; if we’re listening, they should speak better. As a result, both parties believe the other person needs to change making this conflict difficult to resolve.

We should instead take responsibility for our own part.  It’s not possible to always communicate perfectly so that the other party always understands our intent.  When we miscommunicate, we should take responsibility for communicating in a better way going forward and apologize for communicating the wrong thing.  Similarly, if we hear something that seems offensive instead of taking offense we should ask the speakers intent and give them as much benefit of the doubt as possible.

We learn to communicate better by practicing both.

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We often like to take a black and white attitude toward bad things in life trying to avoid anything which may even remotely be bad for us. We convert the soccer study mentally from “too much use of your head” to “any use of your head”. But most negative things are not catastrophic when they occur occasionally. Eating more than you should is not healthy, but doing it once in a while is going to have little effect — doing it everyday however will.

And therein lies the tension, if we rationalize allowing a negative thing to slide once, what prevents the second time?  Maybe we should just avoid it altogether and in some cases, that can and should be our response lest we slide down the slippery slope.  At the same time, recognizing that a small amount of a bad thing carries little long-term effect can help us to not worry about them. In fact, small amounts of adversity can even make us more resilient.

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We often see parents putting children through tremendous pressure to become great early, sometimes even against the desire of the children.  And while it’s true that childhood is a good time to practice becoming excellent, it’s not a guarantee of becoming world-class nor is it the only time one can become the best. Life is far more complex than any one pursuit. Parents absolutely should encourage dreams and hard work even when it feels frustratingly difficult, but this isn’t the only time we can develop excellence.

Often times parents apply this pressure because they think it’s too late for them, but it’s not.  Most of us were not child prodigies, but it’s never too late to pursue mastery.

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Since this was the first version, I drove the group to write a list of requirements for the system so we could figure out what to test.  Since we were near the end of the development phase, some derided this effort as playing Jeopardy – here’s the answer, what was the question. I sent out a template for everyone to fill in with the various pieces they “knew” about and then took each person’s suggestions and put them into the same place.  Sure enough, I got contradictory requirements leading to several shocked parties as they expressed: “Wait, if we have to do that, then I need to ….”. We sometimes find that we are under the delusion that we’ve communicated only to realize that we haven’t communicated at all.  The written word provides a grounding for everyone to literally be on the same page.

Writing doesn’t just help in our communication with others, it also helps us. When my wife and I took a trip to Ecuador and Columbia 8 years ago, I carried a small book that I used to capture various ideas running through my brain: mostly random observations about the world. Originally, I planned to just write about these ideas and share with others on this blog,  but what I discovered was that forcing myself to dwell on a topic for more than a passing observation allowed me to make more connections with other various ideas as well as clarify ideas in my head.  Sometimes it’s easier for us to deal with abstractions without thinking about what lies underneath them and writing things down helped me penetrate that veil.  Ultimately, having thought through how to express an idea improves our ability to clearly think about the idea ourselves.  Writing let’s us practice that.

One common objection to writing requirement specifications is that no one will read them, but there is one person that most definitely will read them: the author.  We often think of writing as being only for others but forget how much it can help ourselves too.

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For most of us, it’s been a while since we did that for a class, but we still find ourselves in this pattern for goals or projects in our lives. We find ourselves crash dieting or pulling all-nighters at work to get things done and while there is little doubt this provides results in the short-term, it rarely leads to the long-term change we desire.  Sometimes it makes our long-term prospects worse.

When learning to run long distances experienced runners recommend ramping only 10% a week, with some weeks to take a step back.  Not doing this can lead to injuries that we struggle to recover from. Doing this requires discipline both to go slowly when you feel great, and to keep it up when you feel horrible.  We can’t cram our way to fitness even if we want to.  Staying disciplined with small things over time leads to the long-term changes we hope for.

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And this is exactly what we do as we daily wade in a deluge of information: we edit our input often to be what we want to see. We have little time to research each headline we come across and so we just look at the lead.  If it fits our worldview, we accept it as true – if it doesn’t, we edit it out.  No need to research, we just stitch these leads into a sea of isolated facts and keep swimming.

One of my favorite authors, Neil Postman, used to see how much his other professors had given into this mode of thinking.  He would ask if they saw the C-section of the New York Times.  If they said no, he would proceed to mention an article he read about a study done at the University of Minnesota (or some lesser known school) that showed that people who ran 3 times a week were twice as likely to die of a heart attack. This makes no sense based on what all of us experience as a result of exercising, yet many believed it because there was a study. In this case, it’s a world view where studies edit out common sense.

As our ability to discern truth collapses to editing for our worldview, we become pawns swayed by any that understand our inability to fight back. We are too busy to research, too busy to question what we believe, too busy to consider the philosophy that makes things less black and white than they seem.

If we’re disappointed by our leadership’s ability to speak truth, maybe it’s worth taking a moment to question what we’re doing to establish what is true. We may be busy, but we can chose to shape our input to include views we disagree with and be skeptical of pabulum that seems too simple a summary of our complex world. We can seek sources which research and work to present a full picture instead of an edited, or worse photoshopped, view that many with agendas thrust upon us hoping we’re too busy to notice.

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I look back on that time in my career as a pivotal moment when I transitioned from needing to prove my ability to desiring to use my ability as part of a team.  Years later, this came back as a struggle when dealing with a manager who was still very clearly working for his own recognition and reward over the success of the team.  After feeling used (i.e. asked to sacrifice for his benefit) , we had a few very frustrating conversations that left me feeling both increasingly frustrated and filled with self-loathing, primarily for having to push for my own personal benefit. During my next vacation, I ended up reading “Tribal Leadership” by Dave Logan and John King and it finally provided words to describe how I was feeling and reminded me of my earlier realization.

King and Logan set out to characterize organizations by the way they talked among themselves.  In the end they created several levels of organization:

1. A level 1 organization communicates that “Life Sucks!” It doesn’t matter what you do, life is going to suck, so beg, borrow, steal, cheat, whatever it takes because nothing will change. Life sucks for everyone.  This level of organization would describe something like a street gang.
2. At level 2, it becomes more personal: “My Life Sucks”.  Now there is a recognition that it appears some people’s life doesn’t suck, but mine does.  This would be the way highly bureaucratic organizations might talk among themselves – they work for the weekends, something to distract themselves from their pain.
3. At level 3, we transition to feeling better about our own life and describe it as: “I’m great (and you’re not)”.  The parenthetical is important because it describes the tension.  A personal pursuit of excellence and competition with our peers to prove our greatness.  There are plenty of high performing organizations whose employees stay at this level.
4. At level 4, through some kind of epiphany, we realize that in fact:  “We’re great!”.  Upon realizing this, we can start seeing and appreciate the different skills our peers bring.  Getting the credit is less important than succeeding as a team.

When we are working with a level 3 mindset, we tend to want to have dyadic relationships: lots of one on one relationships where we are the center.  This allows us control, influence and power.  As we move to a level 4 mindset, we start having triadic relationships.  We may know two people who should meet and go on to do great things (even without us).  We want to introduce people rather than viewing our relationships as a resource that allows only us to succeed.

They discuss the transitions through the different stages as a progression.  One needs to feel comfortable with their own ability in level 3 before they can progress to level 4 and as I noted they describe the need for an epiphany – which some people like my previous manager never have.  Plenty of people have incredible success and never go beyond their own ability, it requires a realization that it’s not about them and that it’s awfully lonely viewing everyone else as the competition.

This is partially why it was difficult for me to go back to working with someone who had success in level 3 and had no concept or understanding of level 4 or team work for that matter.  I felt comfortable throwing down in a level 3 game, but hated myself because it’s not who I want to be. But this model provides words that can help us recognize where people are at in their progression and can help us better know how to work well with them.  It can also help us seek out jobs with people who are similarly minded. Where I work now, I’ve often described that I work with a lot of smart people who know they are smart so they don’t have to keep proving it to you.

Regardless of the organization we find ourselves in though, we can’t forget who we are, nor who made us.

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Poverty, like many other global problems, feels so daunting that we are tempted to do nothing about it.  What can we do that will even begin to move the needle and make the problem better? This man, however, decided to see the people instead of the whole problem. He didn’t solve the problem in general, but for those he did help, it made a lifetime of difference.

Sometimes we feel disappointed when our projects don’t end up impacting many people.  We feel discouraged at our powerlessness to change large systemic issues and sometimes chose not to even try.  Perhaps instead we should stop trying to see problems in the large and instead focus on the people those problems affect.  How can we make a difference in their lives?

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Sometimes though we experience the opposite. We dislike our situation and wish for something to replace it.  We don’t like centralized engineering, we don’t like that there were layoffs, we don’t like that our boss didn’t give us the raise we wanted.  Often we complain about the path someone chose when the obvious alternative seemed perfectly viable and preferable.  We can visualize and wish for the life with the option that wasn’t picked.

Wishing for an alternate and knowing the path that gets us there gives us motivation to work for that reality. The problem arises when we complain about reality but can’t really visualize or suggest the alternative. We wish things were different, but different how? We’re not sure, just not this.  We’re complaining without a cause.

Not being able to visualize the realistic alternative to our current situation leads us to being jaded. Like when the people managing our apartment complex treated us like their job would be awesome if it weren’t for all the tenants.

If we’ve identified something we don’t like, we should do more than whine. We should become proponents of the alternative, even with its warts, and fight for that instead of spending time complaining. We should know what outcome will satisfy us and when that comes be satisfied.

It’s always easier to critique than create.

Most of us laugh at this example recognizing that statistics don’t work that way, yet at the same time our brains tend to translate the statistics we hear into a similar refrain.  We simplify the outcome into one of two possibilities. Back when I was working for a startup, every year when family would get together and ask how the startup was going, I would answer that we were either on the verge of taking off or on the verge of going under.  This same update year after year: neither of these outcomes reflected reality.

Often times limiting choice helps us feel better about our decisions. Parenting often involves providing choices for our children but limiting them: Do you want to wear this dress or this dress?  Usually followed by, do you want to choose or do you want daddy to choose? etc.  False dichotomies help us make decisions by simplifying the amount we need to think through, but if we’re not careful, we can end up looking for our keys under the street light, not because that’s where we dropped them but because that’s where the light is.

In the book Decisive, the Heath Brothers introduce the WRAP acrostic for making decisions.  The first item, W, being to Widen your options.  Since we will naturally narrow our decisions to simplify our thinking, we should instead start by resisting that temptation and think of more outcomes, more possibilities.

Ultimately, most of the things we do are not as dire as destroying the world, but as we look at the decisions and outcomes we imagine before us, we should take note to see if we’ve artificially simplified the situation and beware of the two outcome fallacy.

[PS While writing this blog I remembered one of my favorite XKCD on how we interpret statistics so I thought I would embed it here]

Similarly, we’ve all experienced amazement at an expertly cooked gourmet dish where we could still taste each individual ingredient and yet the medley tasted better than each part.  Enjoying the play of each flavor, we appreciate more the masterpiece of the composition.  Much better than the casserole mush we sometimes find at a potluck, which tastes fine, but unremarkable and unmemorable.

Yet we can muddle more things than  just art and food.  At work, the products we build stop solving specific problems but become a confusing mess of options.  Or sometimes when we describe the benefits of our products instead of giving 1 or 2 clear reasons, we give so many that the message becomes lost.

Perhaps the most important thing to avoid muddling is our own lives.  Too often we are so busy packing it all in that we stop enjoying the smile of our children, the small accomplishments at work, the laughter of our friends and even the dark struggles and frustrations we all experience every day. Instead we just throw it all in the blender and experience life as a brown grayish goo: everything and nothing.

As we look toward the New Year, perhaps we should take a few moments to enjoy and appreciate all the individual flavors of life and work to shape the composition of all of them together.

[PS. If you want to check out a good system for keeping roles clear, check out PilotFire – Plan A Great Week In 20 Minutes]

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We feel frustrated when our situation thwarts our goals.  In this way, our perspective of the situation controls how much we feel frustrated.  If we change our goal from getting somewhere to enjoying the conversation with the person in the car next to us, the red lights seem less frustrating. If we double down on our goal, we can start trying to weave through the parked cars and get angry, yelling at all of them through closed windows  (as I noted one car doing on our trip).

One of my friends did Amway a couple of decades ago before realizing that it was never going to return money. One thing they taught people was to change their goal to avoid frustration.  Namely, when recruiting your friends to change your perspective from getting 1 yes to getting 100 NOs.  In this way, when someone says no, instead of getting frustrating, you feel a sense of success (though you may have just lost a friend).

While frustration may motivate us to fix the situation, many times we feel frustrated and there is nothing we can do about it.  If we can’t change the situation, then maybe we should change the goal, at least for the moment, and make our lives more enjoyable instead.

[PS While thinking about this, I remembered David Foster Wallace’s commencement address called “This Is Water”.  Its’ a short and wonderful read if you have a few minutes.]