Kona Diary

by Amy White
September 19, 2001 (www.slowtwitch.com)

We are really home. If I’d had any doubt, the fog hugging the coastline this morning should’ve clued me in. That, and the snap in the air that signals the start of fall and our steady march into winter, with its rain, long nights and chilly morning runs that require a fuzzy hat.

But I can still see Kona in my mind’s eye.

I can still feel the baking heat as my husband and I ran along Alii Drive a couple of mornings. I can still see the colorful fish darting about in the coral as I swam above them near Kailua Pier. I can still hear the ocean.

I can still taste the Fig Newtons that were handed out everywhere you looked. (A sponsor I was truly happy to see!) I can still feel the blessed blast of cold Gatorade at the end of those baking runs.

In short, my brain’s still on holiday—maybe a busman’s holiday—in Kona.

This was my first trip to Kona for the Ironman. It was both everything I hoped and nothing I’d expected.

For example, I did not expect to turn into my mother. But from just about the first second I set foot on the Big Island, I actually became the world’s biggest mother. I worried for every single athlete I saw. "Oh!" I’d think. "No! Don’t ride your bike there, in all that traffic! The race is just five days away!" Or, "Why are you running so far, and so hard, just three days before the race? Fill that water bottle again! Go put your feet up!"

I was painfully aware of the fragility of the athletes and the thousand dreams they were preparing to live. I felt a great sense of responsibility to do my part to protect their dreams. I drove incredibly conservatively. I swam conservatively, trying to stay well clear of the parade of swimmers gliding by on the morning swims. I even walked down the street conservatively. I looked around me all the time, everywhere, even in the dark. (Because, of course, people were still out running and riding after dark. Yes, I know, their mothers would frown. As the world’s biggest mother for a few days, I found myself wagging a finger, too!) It’s hard to explain how tender everybody looked to me—despite their obvious strength and incredible fitness—and how vulnerable.

And if you doubt what I’m saying, let me remind you of the story of Mariana Phipps, an elite age-grouper from Omaha, Nebraska. We finally connected by phone the day before the race. As we chatted about her preparation, she said all had gone well until that morning. She’d slipped getting out of the shower and rammed her foot into a bathroom fixture, possibly breaking a toe. Thankfully a visit to the race doctors showed she hadn’t broken it, but the toe was bruised and swollen and quite painful. She was pragmatic about it by the time she talked with me and had contingency plans to walk the marathon if the foot was just too sore. (In the end, she took second in the 55-59 age group, just like she did last year.)

I did expect heat. I didn’t expect to bake in a desert. My family lived in Hawaii, on the island of Kauai, for eight years, so I’m not entirely unfamiliar with tropical weather. Of course, that was 10 years ago. And the Big Island is an utterly different banana.

The heat and the humidity and the wind surprised me with their ferocity. It wasn’t just hard to run—it almost required an act of will just to put one foot in front of the other during the six-mile runs I took during race week, and I was done well before noon. In other words, before the real heat of the day. Before anybody in the race would actually be running, on race day anyway.

It is true that I am Irish, and that means that there are others much more suited to this climate and that my impressions may be, um, somewhat unique. For proof, you just needed to have a look at my face after those jogs down Alii Drive. Imagine the reddest red you know, and that was my face. One of our condo-mates, Mark Montgomery, looked at me an hour or so after one of my jaunts and said, "That’s not from the sun?" Yes, that’s right, a full hour or more later. After the cold shower. After the icy Gatorade.

And speaking of Gatorade, I need to tell you that the environment makes you want to consume it at alarming rates and to chomp on electrolyte pills like candy, just because. This I didn’t expect. Your body knows it’s not comfortable exerting itself—at least my body did. Then you look at somebody like Natascha Badmann or Fernanda Keller, athletes who appear totally at home in the conditions, and you marvel anew.

As for the wind: Imagine the worst wind you’ve encountered in this life, and now add some heat to it. Maybe add a few more mph just to make sure your mental picture is accurate. That probably gets close to the conditions athletes were facing during the race. I knew it was bad when the car door slammed back on me as I tried to open it near Kawaihae. OK, I thought, let’s use the arms and the legs and then get the heck out of the way.

From where I was standing on the Queen K, you were occasionally in danger of getting blown over in the middle of conversation—apropos of nothing—if a gust caught you unawares. So if you’re a spindly, stick-legged person (like, say, me—all legs and no torso), those winds could knock you back into the lava fields like nobody’s business. And I am not a small person. In conversations people would occasionally grab their partner’s elbow, just to make sure they weren’t going to blow away. When we finally saw the athletes hew into view, they were managing to move along at a fair clip given that the gale was full in their faces.

The wind ripped pages right out of my notebook as I scribbled on them. Cell phone conversations were hilarious: "What?! OK, I’ll try to stand behind this telephone pole. Does that help? What?!"

I did expect to see fortitude, and sportsmanship, and downright amazing performances. In this, of course, the race did not disappoint.

A few snapshots from the roads:

Fortitude: Paula Newby-Fraser climbing back from Hawi, a look of sheer determination on her face as she held her place with the race leaders. Steve Larsen scything through the field on his bike, then hanging tough on the run as long as he could. Peter Kropko and Shingo Tani running fierce marathons that moved them up through the field. Lori Bowden running hard all the way, refusing to give an inch on the marathon.

Sportsmanship: Andreas Niedrig and Lothar Leder, running up the Palani Road hill about nine and a half miles into the marathon, passing cups of water to each other as they moved away from an aid station. Working together, suffering together. Andreas’ smile at mile 25 when he realized he’d run himself into an excellent finish.

Pride: The legions of age-groupers who didn’t quit, who didn’t fold. Lew Friendland told athletes at the awards banquet that 93 percent of them had finished the race. Ninety-three percent, in those foul conditions. It’s a measure of respect they have for the race, no doubt, and for the effort it takes everyone to get there that age-groupers will see the race through, even if they have to ratchet down their expectations and hopes in the face of all the hardship the island can toss at them.

Amazing performances: Natascha Badmann smiling in the wind, smiling on the run, making it look so blissfully easy. I want to tell you, it is not, even if you are Natascha Badmann. The tears in her eyes at the awards banquet, as she reflected on the race, were testimony to that. Tim DeBoom moving on at an alarmingly sprightly pace on the marathon, looking to all the world like he actually had springs in his shoes. That’s how darn peppy his stride looked, even 25 miles into the marathon. Age-grouper Nancy Lipira-Hoest, doing her first Ironman after a horrendous bike crash last year, running it in for fifth in her age group—and smiling after the race as the accomplishment seeped in. All the challenged athletes—they help breathe life into the words determination, effort, pride and inspiration.

It’s been said many times that the Ironman shows us what is possible in life, what the human spirit can achieve when it fixes on a seemingly impossible goal. There were so many inspiring stories around me race week that I actually got a bit overwhelmed by it all.

Now, back home, I can still feel the heat of Kona on my shoulders. My heart, warmed and emboldened by the spirit of the place and the people, is full of hope. So as we descend into a winter of uncertainty, I’m going to draw on those reserves. And that was truly something I didn’t expect: a whole winter’s worth of hope, and dreams, and beauty.

TO LANTERNE ROUGE HOME

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