Iron Heart: The True Story of How I Came Back From the Dead (22 page)

Every time I lift my head to breathe, I’m greeted by the sun’s orange disc hanging low in the sky. Wow, what a sight. I’ve never experienced that kind of view while swimming laps.

I pass an orange buoy. A swimmer on my left comes too close for comfort as we round the buoy and our arms keep colliding. What’s his problem? I elongate my stroke and edge past him.

I sneak a glimpse of my watch—27:12. Then,
bam
! My mind takes an unexpected detour and visions of being back in the hospital intrude. Three years ago, I was on my deathbed, and now I’m swimming in Lake Michigan. If somebody came into my hospital room back then and said, “Someday you will be competing in a half-Ironman triathlon,” I would have considered that a cruel, sadistic joke.

“Just keep swimming; just keep swimming,” I repeat over and over in my mind. Where is that line from? Oh, that’s right! It’s from the
Finding Nemo
soundtrack. Then it’s onto the drum solo in Led Zeppelin’s “Moby Dick.”

My goggles begin to fog. Luckily, it happens close to the beach. When my right hand rotates around and dives down in the water, it picks up a handful of sand. Land! Hallelujah!

I stand, but my legs are Jell-O. I fall back in the water and do a belly flop. I get back on my knees, disoriented, and crawl through the shallow water until I stumble back on my feet. I jog up the beach across red carpet mats. I feel so dizzy that any second I could throw up. Too late. I stop, bend over, and dry heave, but fortunately nothing comes up.

“Hey Brian! Over here!” The voice comes from my right. I look over and see my mom and dad. I wave to them and head over to the bike corral.

As I fumble taking off my wetsuit, I hear someone else shout, “Hey Brian, how are you doing?” I look around and see a guy standing near the bike rack. He’s wearing a red Ironman triathlon cap, dark sunglasses, a navy blue polo shirt with the Ironman logo, and a pair of dark gray khakis. “It’s me, Peter Henning.” He walks up and shakes my hand.

“Mr. Henning! It’s great to finally meet you.” We begin having a casual conversation as if the triathlon isn’t taking place. I slip on my bike shorts, jersey, socks, shoes, helmet, and sunglasses. “It’s a nice day for a bike ride,” I add, while munching down a PowerBar. Meanwhile, a long ribbon of triathletes continues to funnel through the bike corral; they tear off their wetsuits, change into bike gear, and jog off with their bikes toward the transition area exit. I realize I should get going.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” says Peter, handing me my race bib number. I stop to wrap it around my race belt and attach it in the front. I wheel my bike out on the asphalt road, but as I lift my right leg over the top tube and seat, I clumsily high-kick the Gatorade bottle off the back of my seat. Because I’m not used to running and walking in bike shoes, I leave the bottle on the ground. I have another.

It’s a losing battle to get both feet clipped into the pedals. Left foot is in, but I’m a zigzagging danger to other competitors. I’m teetering like a drunk, nearly plowing into a group of three riders. “Hey watch it!” one yells in disgust. I lower my head in shame and furiously hurry to click my right foot into the other pedal. I’m barely moving until I finally hear a click. Now I’m in business. In the meantime, about fifty triathletes have zoomed right by.

As I flick through the cog selections to find the correct gear, I sit upright like I’m riding a beach cruiser. The other riders are bent over their aero bars, slicing through the air. I can’t chance riding that way—I’d be a safety hazard to the triathletes who are flying by in a kaleidoscopic blur.

The bike course travels through a series of small neighborhoods, back roads, and small streets where police monitor the traffic at each stoplight. On slight curves, I slow down. On straightaways, I pedal faster and reach a regular rhythm. This section of southwest Michigan is known as the fruit belt and includes blueberry, strawberry, and raspberry farms, as well as vineyards and orchards.

Within an hour, I must be passed by over two hundred riders, and the number increases every minute. The only people I’ve passed are several racers fixing flats by the side of the road. What would happen if I got a flat? It would be disastrous.

I keep both hands glued to the handlebars since my bike-handling ability remains shaky. The slightest movement in steering throws me offbalance.

I pass an aid station where volunteers hand out bottles of water and Gatorade, but as badly as I want to reach out and grab one, I’m afraid of running into people. I smile politely and keep going.

But it’s getting hot, over eighty degrees. My black bike shorts have turned white from all the sodium that I’ve lost from sweating. A Gatorade bottle sits in the downtube cage, but I’m too nervous to reach down for it. So my thirst mounts, reminding me of when I was in Intensive Care and forced to spend endless hours dreaming about having a sip of water from the nearby sink. It’s happening again—a drink just out of reach.

I’m also famished. I have been riding for over two hours. A PowerBar and several PowerBar gels are nestled in a small black bag attached to the handlebars. Food is tantalizing close, but there’s absolutely no way I’m going to ride one-handed.

Drained of energy and strength, I’m getting progressively more dizzy and nauseous. I’m not sweating anymore, but feel cold and clammy, a sure sign of approaching dehydration and heat exhaustion. My legs feel like rotating anvils.

At the next aid station, I’m determined to get something to drink. I slow to a crawl, release my right hand from the handlebars, and timidly raise it a few inches. In a leap of faith, I launch my arm and grab a water bottle from a volunteer’s outstretched hand. I hold the bottle close to my chest before chugging down its entire contents in three continuous gulps.

Several more miles and at long last, there’s a most welcome sight for this boy from Welcome, Maryland. Just ahead is the bike-to-run transition area. I made it! Fifty-six miles!

Thousands of spectators line the park. I notice Peter Henning and an NBC camera guy filming. Now that I’m on camera, I pretend that I’m Mr. Cool rather than fatigued and hurting. As I brake to a halt and attempt to plant both feet on the ground, I slip and fall. Peter rushes over to see if I’m okay. I tell him that I’m good to go as I start hopping away, scraped and bruised, with my bike rolling alongside me.

I place my bike into the rack, then sit down for a quick meal of two PowerBars and PowerBar gels. I remove my bike helmet and lace up my running shoes. Peter walks over. He says that I finished the bike ride in almost three-and-a-half hours—an average speed of sixteen miles per hour—as he helps me stand because my legs are locked tight. I feel like the Tin Man in the
Wizard of Oz
before he gets his can of oil.

I jog out of the transition area. I see my parents and throw them a wave and smile. My jogging is more like bouncing from one foot to the other because my knees won’t extend much. My legs have just finished spinning in tiny circles all morning. Of course, they want to remain uncooperative.

Several other triathletes are also lumbering at my pace. They appear to be in their forties and fifties. We’re back-of-the-packers. It’s been a long while since I have seen any guys in my age group.

At mile two, a steep hill wants to break my resolve. Jogging is replaced by walking. When I reach the top, I hum the theme song to
Rocky.

The run course follows the St. Joseph River. Each mile takes me about twenty minutes. By letting gravity do the work, my body falls forward and then catches itself before it hits the road. That’s how I cover ground with numb legs.

Exhausted and aching all over, I find myself replaying painful periods from the coma and recovery. As I grind past the fourth, fifth, and sixth mile markers, I think about all the people who have helped me along the way—my parents, doctors, nurses, rehab therapists, friends.

I hear my dad’s voice from the hospital in a continuous loop: “We all know how much you’re hurting right now; we know you’re in pain, but you have to keep fighting. Don’t give up.”

Mile nine. I stop at the aid station and splash three cups of water on my face, head, and under my shirt. I grab a handful of ice-cold sponges and stuff them under my jersey. I down two cups of Gatorade, take a bite of banana, suck an orange slice, and squeeze a PowerBar gel into my mouth. It must be ninety degrees. The sun is cooking my skin lobster-red.

Mile ten. My dad’s voice from Intensive Care returns. “Come on now, you can beat this; we know you can. We have been here by your side every day.”

I’ve stopped all pretense of jogging. Instead, I scrape my feet along the hot asphalt pavement.

Mile eleven. I’m a walking, stumbling corpse. My dad’s voice again from the hospital: “You can do it son.”

Mile twelve. One more mile to go before the torment ends.

The finish line is near. The announcer screams out each person’s name as he or she crosses the line. Buoyed by the spectators cheering, my death walk turns into a stiff-legged jog.

Mile 13.1. I cross the finish line. The announcer booms, “Brian Boyle from Welcome, Maryland, has crossed the line at seven hours and thirteen minutes.”

Peter Henning rushes over and congratulates me. The NBC camera zeroes in on me. My parents emerge from behind the spectator fence and embrace me. My mom is sobbing; these are tears of joy, not sadness. My dad proudly pats me on the back. A small team of race volunteers wrap a towel around my shoulders, unravel the timing chip from my shoelaces, and place a shiny finisher’s medal around my neck. I’m wobbly. I need to sit down somewhere. But before I depart, Peter asks, “Because the Hawaii Ironman is
twice
the distance of the Steelhead 70.3, do you think you could go back out there and do the race all over again?”

I respond with a huge grin. “Twice as far? Yes, of course. Just give me another two weeks to train.” We all start laughing. My mother’s tearstained cheeks are glistening in the bright sunshine.

Kona, here I come.

I
’ve paid dearly for the Steelhead half-Ironman by pushing my body almost to the breaking point. For several days afterward, my legs are wooden and sore, my lower back hurts, my neck is out of whack, my feet look like raw hamburger, and several toenails go black before falling off. I’m back to shuffling around like I did for months following my release from the hospital. Fortunately, I don’t need a cane or wheelchair. By week’s end, my body’s fully recovered.

My grandma’s health, however, refuses to rebound. Doctors have determined she has pancreatic cancer, and it’s terminal. She has been moved from the hospital to hospice care at her home in Oxon Hill. My parents and I visit her right after returning from Michigan. I bring my Steelhead finisher’s medal to show her.

She looks much thinner and the cancer is spreading quickly. She smiles when she sees us. Her bedroom is filled with all my aunts, uncles, and cousins. I place my finisher’s medal in her right hand. When she feels the cool metal in her palm, she feebly wraps her fingers around it, but she’s too weak to speak. Two days later, she is gone.

Around this time, Henning calls, informing me that I’ve been granted one of the coveted NBC media slots for the 2007 Ironman World Championship in Kona, Hawaii on October 13. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the race is only forty-five days away. It will be a race simply to see if I can make it to the starting line in one piece. At my grandma’s funeral service, I lean over her pearl-white casket and tell her that she will be with me in spirit on the Big Island.

The Ironman folks place me in direct contact with their official coaches from LifeSport because they want to ensure that I’m adequately prepared for Kona. I have less than two months to whip my body into shape. This will be like cramming for a final exam, except this test takes all day to complete. LifeSport’s founder and head coach, Lance Watson, trained Canadian Olympic triathlon gold-medal winner Simon Whitfield to his victory in Sydney and now trains Ironman champion Lisa Bentley. I just want to survive Hawaii. By the time the pros finish and are getting their massages, I’ll just be starting the marathon. I’m not out for glory, just to finish.

I do some rough math. Of the 1,870 Steelhead triathletes who started that half-Ironman race, I finished in 1,707th place, or the bottom 15 percent. I was far from last. My time was 7:13:20. So double that and add an extra hour for Hawaii’s heat, wind, and exhaustion, and I hope to complete the Ironman in just over fifteen hours. The race starts with a 2.4-mile swim in the choppy Pacific Ocean. Rush out of the water, dash through a shower to rinse off the salt, change clothes, jump onto a bicycle, and pedal for 112 miles through a lava desert. To finish, you’ll need to run a hot, windy 26.2 miles. The fastest pros will complete the race in a little over eight hours, and the last person will hopefully finish by midnight, or in seventeen hours—the official cut-off time.

Each day, I receive an email from LifeSport with a list of suggested workouts. Some routines consist of a forty-five-minute run followed by a weight-training session in my home gym. The next day might be an hour swim in the backyard pool followed by a long bike ride at the local high school track. I’m still too green to risk riding a bike on the local country roads. My parents emphatically agree; they want to keep me far away from traffic.

So around and around the high school track I go on my Cannondale CAAD8, lap after lap, sometimes for two or three hours. This seems like sheer lunacy, but I have no other option. Some of the runners look at me like I’m crazy, but they eventually get accustomed to my two-wheel presence. The good news is that I’m gradually acquiring the skill and confidence to ride tucked into the aero position, clicking gears up and down with a better understanding of their intended purpose. I’ve also improved my balance so I can consistently ride in a straight line. The track’s white lane lanes are a great help. Memories of Steelhead when I almost ran into people in the bike transition zone haunt me.

LifeSport also recommends that I do longer weekend workouts called “bricks,” which involve cycling five hours followed by a thirty-minute run. There is no way I can ride for five hours around the quarter-mile track, so I expand the bike course to include the school parking lot and private road, which is maybe a half-mile long. On weekends, this works well because school isn’t in session and I have the road all to myself. My dad often rides alongside me on his mountain bike.

To train for Steelhead, I only ran indoors on the treadmill. That has to change for Hawaii. But once again, my parents have a justifiable concern about my not running on the road with traffic. So I do all my marathon preparations for Kona in my neighborhood where there are only ten houses. The road is one mile long. It takes eleven minutes to run its length. My neighbors often wave to me as I run back and forth. There’s virtually no traffic, maybe a car every hour.

It’s an awkward transition to go from the treadmill to the road because I’m used to the treadmill’s bounce and cushion, so my joints are a little sore at first. Running up to eight lengths along the same road is mind-numbing, so I usually bring along my iPod, which I keep attached to an armband around my bicep. I usually start my training with Alice in Chains’s “Rooster” or AC/DC’s “For Those About to Rock.” By the workout’s end, I’m listening to Judas Priest’s “Delivering the Goods” or Pantera’s “Revolution is My Name.”

I relied on my swimming background at Steelhead. But I have to increase my mileage for Hawaii. Since my swim time for 1.2 miles in Steelhead was around thirty-nine minutes, I estimate that my time in Kona will be a little more than double that—around one hour and twenty minutes. When I trained in high school and college, I’d swim continuously for up to twenty minutes, but now I’m swimming for over an hour in the pool. I often go to the high school pool where Sam is the lifeguard. For some workouts, I only use my arms, swimming with a pull buoy held between my legs. The pull buoy is a light floatation device to keep the body upright so the body won’t sink when the legs aren’t kicking. With open-water swimming, you want your arms doing most of the work in order to keep your legs fresh for the bike and run. With the pull buoy, I swim anywhere from four laps to fifty laps, then alternate with regular front-crawl swimming between twenty and a hundred laps.

After my bruising experience in Lake Michigan, when I was knocked about by other swimmers like laundry in a washing machine, I’ve prepared myself for the swim start’s free-for-all. I have my younger cousins smack me with foam bats and repeatedly jump on me from the sides of our backyard pool as I swim laps.

Besides swimming, biking, and running, I’m also improving my lung strength by doing various exercises in the backyard pool. Since our pool is eight feet in the deep end and four feet in the shallow end, I run from the shallow end to the deep end underwater while holding a twenty-five-pound weight against my chest that keeps me submerged. My inspiration for this type of workout came from watching surfing films when I was growing up. These movies showed Hawaiian surfers training to improve their lung strength and endurance by going out to a spot in the ocean that’s about ten feet deep, grabbing a large rock and running along the sandy bottom for as long as they could to strengthen their lungs. This was good preparation for when a surfer got knocked off his board and pinned underwater by crashing waves.

As the autumn days become shorter and the leaves begin to change colors, my body is also undergoing an alteration from all the triathlon training. I have lost about twenty pounds. I can run about a ten-minute mile. I’m a lot more efficient on the bike. My only hope is that these improvements will get me through the Ironman in under seventeen hours. Still, was six weeks sufficient time to train? Was I setting myself up for failure and a crushing, collosal disappointment? Why didn’t I refuse Peter Henning when he offered me the Ironman slot? I could have thanked him and told him I wasn’t ready. I could have told him maybe in a year or so, but not now. Where was that inner voice saying, “slow down, Brian”? My only plausible answer is that I’m supposed to be dead, like I’ve been living on borrowed time ever since the accident. This means that when an opportunity like the Ironman presents itself, I must accept the challenge without reservation or delay. Rejection or anything else only serves to reinforce the painful memories from the past, a past from which I can’t help but flee like a fugitive.

A Sample Week of My Ironman Training

MONDAY

TUESDAY

WEDNESDAY

THURSDAY

FRIDAY

Rest

SATURDAY

SUNDAY

October 6, 2007. I arrive with my parents in Kona, Hawaii, one week before race day. It’s three in the morning when the plane lands at Keahole Airport. My jet-lagged sleepy brain is locked within a state of disbelief when my feet touch the tarmac. In the dark, humid night I feel confusion, even intense disorientation. Everything seems unreal. Just being here feels like a dream. Just over three years ago, I was waking up from a coma. Everything was puzzling and strange in the hospital room. Nothing made sense. I didn’t know where I was, how I got there, why I couldn’t move any of my limbs. But there’s a big difference between coma and Kona. I didn’t ask to land in a coma. A speeding dump truck made that happen. But I
want
to be in Kona. I’ve worked hard at it, fighting against steep odds. I have had tremendous help along the way, from the doctors and nurses when I was smashed and crushed, to the generous assistance from the Ironman organization. While I’m not an elite agegrouper who qualified for Hawaii, I feel as fortunate and as lucky as any of the other 150 lottery winners who snagged an entry slot.