1993. July 31. Santa Rosa, California. 103 degrees. Roughly two-thirty in the afternoon.

I rack my bike and attempt to run out of transition. It feels like with every step someone is beating my quads with a baseball bat, so I walk. Always the optimist I attempt to run about every half mile only to experience the same excruciating pain. I wanted to quit because I wanted the pain to end. I wanted to continue so I could prove to myself that I had the inner strength not to quit. For six hours the Angel and Devil in my mind played mental ping pong. It was exhausting and at the same time it was liberating. Crossing the finish line was the beginning of a new me. I had no idea how that day would completely alter the course of my life. How on earth did I find myself here?

Let’s go back a few years to when I was 20 years old. Not unlike many twenty somethings I felt lost. I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do with my life. I was attending classes at California State University, Chico, though to be honest, I felt like I was wasting my time. I had no direction and no clear motivation to finish my degree as it seemed to hold no purpose for me. I was depressed, sleeping more than 10 hours each night. I was unmotivated and my days were filled with very little joy. This continued for two years. Eventually I grew tired of being tired. I desperately wanted my life to be different. To be better. To be more.

One day, around my 22nd birthday in August of 1992, I was wondering through the self-help section at the local book store where I picked up a copy of Anthony Robbin’s book, Unlimited Power. In many ways I feel like the book picked me. I had never heard of Anthony Robbins. I looked at several book covers that day occasionally reading the book jacket; for some reason that book spoke to me. And I’m grateful it did because it helped me change my life. On more than one occasion people made fun of me for telling them how that booked changed my life. I’ve never understood the shame of going to therapy or admitting that you are reading self-help books. So many people see it as a sign of weakness. I only see wanting to better yourself and your life as a sign of strength. Even today, 23 years later people are often made to feel ashamed to admit they see a therapist or read self-help books. What’s so wrong about admitting we don’t have all the answers and need help in order to become a better version of ourselves?

So much of what I read in that book rocked my world in a remarkable way. One of those many things was this idea that in order to create massive motivation and inspiration you needed to choose a massive goal. I remember reading about how if you feel depressed then you need a bigger goal, something that almost seems impossible. Something so motivating it will actually get you out of bed in the morning excited for the day ahead. Oh, how’d I’d welcome that feeling.

“People are not lazy. They simply have impotent goals – that is goals that do not inspire them.” -Anthony Robbins

This resonated with me because it helped me understand that maybe I wasn’t damaged goods and perhaps I just need goals that motivated me. I wanted to create massive enthusiasm and action so I decided that I would choose a goal that seemed border line impossible. The rest is fate as I see it.

I was a bus boy at Tres Hombres in Chico. One day in November of 1992 as I was getting ready for work and as was my habit, I flipped on the TV planning to listen and half watch some sports, whatever might be on. I turned the channel to NBC. College football just ended and it was followed by some event I had never heard of. No other sports were on CBS or ABC so I just left the channel on NBC. I was half paying attention, listening, watching occasionally. Over the next hour I became captivated. I remember it so vividly partly because I was never late to my job. I had about a 10-15 minute commute by bike to Tres Hombres. I was totally engrossed and it was scheduled to end at 5 pm which was the same time I was due to be at work. Surely I would need to turn off the TV, hop on my bike and get my butt to work. However, I couldn’t pull myself away. These people were doing something so incredibly epic that I thought it looked impossible for an ordinary human being. I watched to the very end, listening intently to the announcer talk about these people trying desperately to beat the midnight deadline for something called the Timex Ironman Triathlon held in Hawaii. Finally at 4:55 pm when the credits began to roll I jetted out my door, hopped on my bike and peddled as hard as I could to work. My manager Joe was waiting for me wanting to know why I was late. The fact that I was sweating profusely from riding all out helped sell my story that I got a flat tire. (Sorry I lied to you Joe.) Clearly I had made an effort to get to work on time. All night at work I could only think about this crazy seemingly impossible thing called Ironman. I still did not know what it was entirely but I had decided before my shift eneded, Ironman would be my goal. That was the thing that I would do in order to spark massive action and that Tony promised would pull me out of my funk. One day I would do Ironman Hawaii. KONA became my mantra.

The next day I went down to Fleet Feet Sports to find out what exactly was this thing I had just seen on my TV and now committed to doing. Something so epic it would change my life simply by being nearly impossible. I picked up a copy of Triathlete magazine that had some guy named Mark Allen on the cover showing blood soaked through his shoe. I read every article. I was hooked. 2.4 mile swim. 112 mile bike. 26.2 mile run. Sure, why not? That sounded impossible to me. These super human people did it. Maybe I could do it too. But perhaps I should do one before I go to Hawaii and how do I even get into this race in Hawaii. So many questions. Somewhere in Triathlete magazine was an ad for a race in Santa Rosa which was only 30 minutes from where I grew up in Calistoga. How perfect, I thought. I could stay at my parents’ house and do the race. July 31, 1993. After all that was a full 8 months away; plenty of time, right?

Great! Now what? As fate would have it the Chico State PE department had a course called Triathlon 101 that began in January. Excellent! All I have to do is sign up for that class and I’ll be good to go. Everything seemed to be magically coming together. Never mind that I could barely swim 25 yards. Never mind that I only owned a mountain bike, mainly as way to get to classes and work; a whopping 2 miles each way. I think the most I’d ever ridden was 5 miles. Never mind that my idea of running was to jog 2 miles to stay in shape for basketball. Looking back now it’s clear that ignorance is bliss. What the hell was I thinking?

Leading up to the race I had only swam a maximum of 1 hour in the pool, biked 90 miles……..once, of which I completely bonked at mile 80 not knowing I should actually eat while biking. I think I had run 16 miles as my longest run. The day of the race I lost 15 pounds from dehydration. At one point on the run an ambulance was following me and pulled up alongside and asked if I was okay. Probably because I looked like death. I remember feeling like I desperately needed to pee and I’d step into a port-a-potty, where it felt like 120 degrees, and only a few drops of brown liquid would come out. What in the hell was this? I had absolutely no idea what that meant. This also coincided with the point on the run course when I saw the ambulance.

During my death march, I could see holograms of an Angel on one shoulder and Darth Vadar on the other shoulder. I find it comical that the Devil was played by Darth Vadar and I remember laughing during the race regarding it. They were constantly going back and forth Darth Vadar telling me to drop out and the Angel telling me to keep going. It was very surreal and very powerful. To this day I still get goosebumps telling this story. Eventually I made it to mile marker 25 and for the first time I thought I just might finish. All of a sudden I took a left turn into the business park, saw the green grass and the people cheering. Then my friends Corey, Trent, and Trista spot me and Trent comes sprinting towards me screaming like mad man, pumping me up for the last half mile. I had to go around a block or two before taking a right turn into the finish chute which allowed them to cut across the parking lot to the finish line where they were standing with my Mom and Nana as I ran down the chute. Ten seconds after crossing the finish line Corey hands me a Miller Lite. Hey, what do you expect from 23 year olds?

Shortly after crossing the finish line I was amazed at what I had just done. I had completely shattered my beliefs about what I was capable of and I asked myself a profound question. I said to myself, “If I can do an Ironman, what else could I do?” By finishing that race when virtually every person I knew thought it was impossible and I myself wasn’t sure if I could or couldn’t finish it, my self-confidence began to grow. I loved the training so much and I loved spending time in Fleet Feet that I dreamed of one day opening my own running store. Much like triathlon, I had no idea what it would mean to open and operate a running store. I believed I had a penchant for running my own business but no idea what it actually entailed. Doing Ironman also taught me another valuable lesson – the value of properly preparing. This time, instead of jumping right in I thought I should go to work in a running store and treat it as an apprenticeship so that I would be prepared. In 1994 when my then girlfriend and now wife of 20 years, Janine and I moved to Seattle, I got a job at a running store in Green Lake. From day one I was on a mission to learn everything I could so that when it was my time I would be ready. Little did I know that it would take 10 years until I was able to open my own running store in partnership with two colleagues. Endurance sports teach us so many valuable lessons. One in particular is that determination is critical- both for endurance sports and in life.

Around the year 1997 while working at Super Jock ‘n Jill, the running store in Seattle, runners would ask me for advice on doing their first triathlon. Before too long I had become the person to go see about triathlon advice and without realizing it I had become a triathlon coach. Late in 2000 Team In Training called wanting to know if I’d be interested in helping them put in their first Washington/Alaska Chapter triathlon program. Very much like doing my first Ironman and not knowing how it would change my life, I equally had no idea how Team In Training would come to impact my life so profoundly.

I’ve written this book to share with you the lessons I’ve learned in training, racing and coaching and to illustrate how these same lessons show up in our daily lives.

My life has taught me that we are all capable of achieving and being so much more than we allow ourselves to believe. I’ve experienced it for myself and with so many athletes I’ve coached.

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