FITNESS CONFIDENTIAL (12 page)

And how did they want you to get those calories?

Largely through nutrition bars, gels and sports drinks. In other words, through sugar and grains.

Had I known then what I know now, I would have thrown that whole bullshit concept out the window and done what you’re supposed to do, which is eat a high fat diet while staying away from sugars and grains, allowing my body to get its fuel from it’s preferred source. Fat.

Unfortunately, at the time, there was no study or doctor anywhere telling you to eat that way during an endurance event. They wanted you to get your calories from sugar, which is bad enough. And, to make matters worse, during this race, I wasn’t even doing that!

I was starving.

My body was shutting down.

Even worse than the lack of nutrition was the fact that I was incredibly dehydrated. You need to drink anywhere from sixteen to twenty-four ounces of water, along with electrolytes, depending on how hot it is outside.

I wasn’t drinking anywhere near enough.

But I pushed on, biking like hell. I gave it everything I had, humping the bike like a monkey trying to fuck a football. Time crept agonizingly by. I felt like a school kid watching the seconds slowly tick away, waiting for the three o’clock bell.

By the tenth hour, I was in so much pain I couldn’t even figure out where it was coming from any more. Everything hurt. Even my hair and fingernails hurt and they don’t even have nerve endings. To make matters worse, in this type of race, you never knew your position in the pack, so I just assumed I was way behind, which spurred me to try even harder. The only thing that got me through the last couple hours was a Chuck Berry song called
Never Can Tell
. One line kept running through my head in an endless loop.

“C’est la vie” say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell …

Eventually, thankfully, it was over.

I got off my bike at the finish line to see two guys laying on their backs on the asphalt. I wondered what was wrong with them, then I took a step and found out. I collapsed, unable to stand or even move.

I had come in third.

True, those guys had beaten me but it turned out they were sponsored pros. They did this all the time.

Later, I would discover that I had driven them crazy because they knew I was always right behind them, forcing them to go harder than they usually rode. Laying there on the hot asphalt, I realized two things.

First, this was the most pain I had ever felt in my entire life.

And second, I couldn’t wait to get back on the bike and find another race.

Chapter Sixteen

THE TOUGHEST FORTY-EIGHT HOURS IN SPORTS

Once the ultra bug bites you, it doesn’t go away.

I quickly moved from twelve-hour races to twenty-four hour races and I really stepped up my training program. I bought a Schwinn Spinner. There wasn’t enough room for it in my apartment, so I got rid of my couch. I rode it every hour I was home. If I was by a gym, I’d go in and ride their Lifecycles. On weekends, I’d hit the Santa Monica mountains and ride until I couldn’t go any more.

There was a surprising side benefit to this obsession. Clients who often complained that there weren’t enough hours in the day to fit in their workouts, saw what I was doing and stopped complaining. I led by example. Some of them were even in shape enough to ride with me for a couple hours.

I was an animal. Within a couple years, twenty-four hour mountain bike racing became a big deal, with spectators and sponsors, and I was on the circuit doing my thing. Eventually, in the late nineties, a company called 24 Hours of Adrenaline hosted the first world twenty-four hour mountain bike race and I was invited along with forty other athletes from around the world. Also competing was Wolfgang Fasching, that year’s RAAM winner.

I beat him … sort of.

He quit after fourteen hours. I don’t know why. It just goes to show that there’s no guarantees. Two hours later, I crashed out myself after having blacked out on the bike. This was becoming a common problem for me. The shoulder injury I’d gotten playing college football had steadily worsened over the years and the bouncing of the mountain bike filled it with such agony that I sometimes blacked out while training. I fell off the bike and ended up with a concussion, but at least I’d beaten the RAAM winner. I guess that’s my way of putting a shine on a turd.

But then I faced a real dilemma. Blacking out while riding is a dangerous problem and doing it while flying thirty-five miles per hour down steep, rocky terrain is a death sentence. Reluctantly, I gave up the mountain bike.

And focused on my road bike.

It required just as much endurance but with less pounding, which spared my shoulder and kept me conscious. And I kept training. I rode all the time. To the coffee shop and back. Forty mile rides. Hundred mile rides. Didn’t matter. I couldn’t stop. I was obsessed with the idea of going long. Soon, I found myself biking until sunup, looking for races that were more and more extreme.

And if there weren’t any races available, I’d make up my own challenges.

I wanted to do a three hundred mile race but I couldn’t find one, so I rode my bike from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara and back, taking a long mountain route that ended up just over three hundred miles. If I wasn’t with clients, I was on the bike or the spinner, building my aerobic base. I was so busy, I didn’t date as much as I used to. I was in love with going long.

My friends saw this and were getting concerned. When I’d tell them how long these races were or how hard I’d been training, they’d think that I was either lying or needed help. In fact, it got to the point that I did lie about the length of my rides. I’d pretend I was doing less distance than I really was. Whenever anyone asked me how far I rode, my standard answer was seventy miles. That always seemed long enough to be plausible but not so long that they’d think I was crazy.

But that didn’t work on one of my friends. She was so convinced that I had some kind of mental disorder that she insisted I go see her three-hundred-dollar-an-hour psychiatrist on her dime. I went, only to prove that I wasn’t crazy.

The session lasted three hours. Nine hundred dollars later, the psychiatrist had a diagnosis. He said that, in most things, I was perfectly normal but that he thought I had Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, along with Social Anxiety Disorder. Turns out there’s medication for that stuff, which he said he could prescribe. I asked him what the medicine would do.

“You know how you go on a bike ride for ten hours?” he said. “Well, on this medicine, after five hours, you might feel like you’ve gone far enough and stop and go enjoy something else and you’d feel fine about it.”

I stared at him. If you’ve never seen me stare, it’s unnerving. “Let me ask you something,” I said. “How long have these drugs been around?”

“Oh, twenty or thirty years or so.”

I nodded. “It’s a good thing they weren’t around a couple hundred years ago or DaVinci might have blown off finishing the Mona Lisa so he could go enjoy a gelato instead.”

The psychiatrist thought about that. “You might be right.”

So what if I’m a little crazy? I’d argue that anyone who ever did anything worth doing is probably a little crazy. In any event, I never took the drugs, which was a good thing because they probably would have prevented me from tackling my new obsession.

The Furnace Creek 508.

Even then it was legendary, the toughest race west of the Mississippi. Hell, one of the toughest in the world. It was billed as “the toughest 48 hours in sports” and it was designed by a psychopath. His name is Chris Kostman. I sometimes find myself imagining how he must have described it to the first participant.

“Okay, I have this idea for a race. You’re gonna love it. It’s going to last over five hundred miles. Nonstop. No sleep. No rest. But you have to complete the whole thing in forty-eight hours or you’re disqualified.

“I see you shaking your head but, wait, it gets better.

“During the race, you’re going to have to climb a vertical mile to the top of a mountain before descending at dizzying speed to the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere. You guessed it, Death Valley. It’s called that because the conditions there are so horrible that hardly anything but snakes and scorpions can survive.

“The good news is, you won’t be doing that in the heat of the day.

“The bad news is, you’ll arrive in the middle of the night, when it’s pitch black.

“You’ll pass by a fart of a town called Furnace Creek and, because the race is called The Furnace Creek 508, you’ll be tempted to think that’s the finish line. But that’s just me screwing with you. That’s just the mid-way point.

“Ha ha.

“So you’ll ride all night long through Death Valley and, when the sun comes up, you’ll be shocked to discover you’re still in Death Valley. That should really screw with you.

“And that climb over the mountain to get into Death Valley in the first place? That’s not the only climb in the race. In fact, you’ll cumulatively climb over thirty-five thousand feet. Would you like to know how high Mt. Everest is?

“Twenty-nine thousand feet.

“That’s right. During this race, you will bike higher than Everest. And you’ll do it in scorching heat, with sixty-mile-an-hour winds and, in some cases, flash floods. And the kicker is, if you make it to the end, when the finish line is in sight, you won’t be able to coast to it because I’m going to stick it half-way up a damn hill!

“But that’s not even the final insult.

“Even though I’m calling the race The 508, it’s really 509 and a half miles. You need to go that extra mile and a half just so I can end it on a hill. And, when you finish—if you do, but you probably won’t—there won’t be any cash prize waiting for you, there won’t be any fanfare, we won’t even spring for proper “finish-line” tape for you to break through. We’ll just steal some toilet paper from the shitty hotel. Ha ha!

“So … what do you think?”

Well, this is what I thought: “Where do I sign up?”

But, before I did, I wanted to experience it. So I went on the internet to see if any of the upcoming racers needed someone to crew for them. I found three people. Two women and this guy named David Holt.

Now, don’t get angry, but my thinking at the time was that the women would probably end up crying and I had no idea how to deal with crying women, so I picked the guy. I met him for the first time the day before the race.

I was expecting a rock hard Adonis, a muscular athlete capable of tackling one of the toughest courses on Earth.

What I found was a hunched guy with bad posture who looked like Woody Allen and Abe Vigoda had a kid. He was in his mid-fifties, gentle and soft-spoken. How is this guy ever going to finish this race, I thought? What I didn’t realize was that the previous year, he not only finished the race, he came in second. And not just second in his age group—second in the whole damn thing.

David Holt, it turned out, was a badass.

Watching him during the race was an education. Not only did I learn the course, I learned all the other things that you can only discover by having a front row seat—how to choose a crew, how to organize the van, where the winds picked up, how to handle the searing heat and freezing cold. Even though David didn’t look like an athlete, he was one. He had heart. He was steady. Hour after hour, on one of the most treacherous courses around, he kept going like an Energizer bunny with oversized batteries. He never stopped. He never quit.

When it was over, he ended up finishing eighth in a field that included pro and Olympic athletes. It was inspiring and we formed a great friendship. I’d hoped to train with him as I got ready to compete in The Furnace Creek 508 the following year, which would take place in October. He was happy to oblige and we got together whenever we could.

I started training. Hard.

Beginning in January, I pedaled my bike to my client’s houses to make sure I spent as much time in the saddle as possible. That month, I spent fifty hours on the bike. In February, sixty. Every month I kept adding hours and distance until, by the end of April, I’d logged over five thousand miles.

By July and August, I was racking up nearly two thousand miles a month, including twenty-four hour periods where I rode without stopping for sleep or rest.

Finally, in October, I was ready.

I wasn’t looking for a win. I wasn’t even looking to keep up with the veterans, like David Holt. My goal was to simply have a strong finish, hopefully somewhere in the top ten.

The race started just after dawn at the Hilton Garden Inn in Santa Clarita, on a cool, clear October morning.

It ended in Death Valley the following morning as the sun began to peek over the horizon. I had DNFd—an ultra term for “Did Not Finish” or, jokingly, “Did Nothing Fatal.” I had made it almost three quarters of the way through the course when my knee gave out.

It first started bothering me in Trona, a little town notable only for the taco stand that stood about a hundred and seventy miles into the race. I felt a dull soreness in my left knee. I’d never experienced that before. I’d only been on the bike for about eight hours, so I pushed through it.

For the next several hours, it came and went and I thought I could handle it, but it really started to get my attention in Townes Pass, which is the thirteen-mile climb over the mountain range that drops into Death Valley on the other side. The grade there was between 10 and 13 percent. If you’re not sure how steep that is, get on a treadmill and set the incline to thirteen.

Now you see what I’m talking about.

As I gutted my way up the mountain, the dull pain became a roar, which culminated in a popping sensation that felt like a tendon had pulled away from the bone. I kept going, descending into Death Valley as the sun went down, flying at fifty-miles-an-hour into a dark abyss.

When I finally got to the mid-way point at Furnace Creek, I wrapped my knee in ice, took a handful of Advil and continued on, pedaling all night and into the morning. By then, I was in such agony that I couldn’t even lift my knee high enough to get my foot to the top of the pedal stroke. I began to wonder if I was doing permanent damage to the joint.

As the sun came up, I had a “come to Jesus” meeting with Mehran, my crew chief. The rules stipulated that, as long as you and the bike stayed together, you could get off and push it to the finish line. Mehran calculated how long it would take me to finish if I pushed the bike up the hills and cruised down the back sides. The math was clear. It would take about a month. There was no way I could do that and finish before the forty-eight hour time limit, which would disqualify me.

Between that, and the concern over the permanent damage I was in danger of doing to my knee, I made one of the hardest choices of my life. I’ve never been a quitter. It’s not in my DNA. Even so, the facts were the facts. I had to be smart about it. Also not in my DNA.

I dropped out of the race.

This was a race I’d spent a year to train for and a lifetime to prepare for. I was devastated. Even worse, I felt like I’d let my crew down. Adam Zelinsky and Mehran Salamati had given up their entire weekend, not to mention a night’s sleep, just to see me cross the finish line.

But then, another thought crept into my mind, a simpler and truer one—screw it. It’s just a race. In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t really mean anything. How could I be so narcissistic as to care about something as stupid as crossing a finish line when I knew there were kids, right then, with life-threatening illnesses lying in bed in St. Jude Children’s Hospital—some of whom wouldn’t live to see another sunrise?

It put everything in perspective.

So I dropped out. But I didn’t quit. The next year I signed up again and trained relentlessly for seven months to get ready. I was convinced that this time I was going to beat this thing.

By the summer of 2007, I was in the best shape of my life. My resting heart rate was in the mid-thirties—the average for a man my age was in the seventies. My body fat percentage was below 3 percent. One doctor joked that I was so lean he could almost see the mitochondria swimming beneath my skin.

I was in phenomenal athletic shape. I was ready.

I tell you all that not to brag, but so you’ll understand what a shock it was to find out I was nearly dead.