Epilogue
9:00am - The Day After
This is when I awoke. I had not slept past 6 or 6:30 am for the previous three months. All my other friends have slept very little and are wide awake by 5 am. Chipp? He got up and drove himself home to be with his wife. At 5am.
We mill about. But one by one my friends and family start peeling away. I have some breakfast with the crew. We trade stories. My wife leaves soon there after. In retrospect I stayed in town too long. The trappings, the celebration of yesterday, are gone. Like the circus -- the well oiled machine that it is -- ironman has come and gone. One more cliche that fits the mold.
By monday night the weekly sprint triathlon is in full swing and I can barely walk. Don’t these people have any respect for what I just did?
I did not deal with the week very well. I stayed with friends Amy and Greg in the house, and realized they probably would have liked a little alone time. I made the long drive back to manhattan, and when I got there no one was ready for a drink with me. The trumpets and ticker tape parade was on hold.
What I had done was pretty neat, but honestly it is far from remarkable. Almost 3,000 people had done the same thing. That very day. Hundreds of thousands will complete the event in a year. Even the let down I went going through was/is unremarkable. It happens to just about everybody who does this distance. But, for seven full months not one day went by when I didn’t think this event. I certainly did not think about our wedding this much, for this long. (For the record our wedding still ranks as a better day.) It was very hard to let go.
In the end I cam away with a few tremendous lessons from the event.
1. Patience and smiles go a really long way.
2. As important as you think you or the event is … it will end. And you are going to have to go to work, be social, clean house, pay bills, breath air down the road.
3. These are choices. We are some of the wealthiest, healthiest, luckiest people in the world. To even be able to make the choice to get across the line you are among the healthiest, safest, spoiled people on this planet. In history.
4. I’ll do it all again.
9:00am - The Day After
This is when I awoke. I had not slept past 6 or 6:30 am for the previous three months. All my other friends have slept very little and are wide awake by 5 am. Chipp? He got up and drove himself home to be with his wife. At 5am.
We mill about. But one by one my friends and family start peeling away. I have some breakfast with the crew. We trade stories. My wife leaves soon there after. In retrospect I stayed in town too long. The trappings, the celebration of yesterday, are gone. Like the circus -- the well oiled machine that it is -- ironman has come and gone. One more cliche that fits the mold.
By monday night the weekly sprint triathlon is in full swing and I can barely walk. Don’t these people have any respect for what I just did?
I did not deal with the week very well. I stayed with friends Amy and Greg in the house, and realized they probably would have liked a little alone time. I made the long drive back to manhattan, and when I got there no one was ready for a drink with me. The trumpets and ticker tape parade was on hold.
What I had done was pretty neat, but honestly it is far from remarkable. Almost 3,000 people had done the same thing. That very day. Hundreds of thousands will complete the event in a year. Even the let down I went going through was/is unremarkable. It happens to just about everybody who does this distance. But, for seven full months not one day went by when I didn’t think this event. I certainly did not think about our wedding this much, for this long. (For the record our wedding still ranks as a better day.) It was very hard to let go.
In the end I cam away with a few tremendous lessons from the event.
1. Patience and smiles go a really long way.
2. As important as you think you or the event is … it will end. And you are going to have to go to work, be social, clean house, pay bills, breath air down the road.
3. These are choices. We are some of the wealthiest, healthiest, luckiest people in the world. To even be able to make the choice to get across the line you are among the healthiest, safest, spoiled people on this planet. In history.
4. I’ll do it all again.
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