The OSL Making of an Ironman


The meaning of life is to give life meaning.

Viktor Frankl

Everything I do means something to me. At 3:45 on Sunday morning I pulled into the parking lot of the Indian Wells Tennis Gardens and did something I’d never done before.

I wrote a prayer. I wasn’t asking for anything. I just had a strong, clear sense of gratitude that I wanted to remember word for word.

None of us really does anything alone, but in today’s world it’s easy to feel alone. That’s why I included Civic Fitness (how we operate in the context of social systems) and Spiritual Fitness (how we operate in larger contexts that we can’t always observe or understand) in the Open-Source Learning framework. Orienting ourselves in the big picture is a skill for which there is no GPS, no sign that says, “you are here.” Like anything we learn, being part of something bigger than yourself takes practice.

So, in that moment, I took a deep breath and quietly reflected on everyone and everything that brought me to this particular moment in my life. I do this from time to time, especially when I’m about to embark on something big.

Here is what I wrote:

Then I turned off my phone, got out of the car, and spent the day completing my first Ironman triathlon. I swam 1.2 miles. I bicycled 56 miles. I ran 13.1 miles – half the distance of a marathon.

On the surface, my preparation for this event began in June, when I started my training calendar.

ironman-training-calendar-2022

Actually, it started a month earlier when my neighbor made noise about doing something bold to inspire himself.

The truth is, I’ve been training for this my whole life.

THE HAND I WAS DEALT

I was sick as a kid.

As an infant I had scarlet fever, asthma, and I was allergic to everything from dust to pollen to Penicillin. I was even allergic to citric acid. When my family got pizza for dinner I couldn’t eat the tomato sauce. They passed me the crusts. I learned early in life that tomorrow, and pepperoni, is promised to no one.

In elementary school, my best friend Preston (!) had a slumber party for his birthday every year. But Preston also had a cat. I was so allergic that I couldn’t breathe in his house.

I went to the doctor every day after school for an allergy shot. Eventually I got to mow the lawn, but I am still allergic to cats. I missed Preston’s parties four years in a row.

When I got asthma attacks at night my mom would shove me out the back door so the cold air would shock me into breathing. She did this out of love and it did the trick. When it didn’t, we went to the ER.

I had to sit in the front row of the school bus because less pollen blew in the front window.

During the smoggy 1970s in Los Angeles I spent school recess in the office, listening to my friends outside on the playground.

I’m not complaining. That’s just how it was.

But I was a kid, and when you’re a kid these things matter. I got frustrated. Eventually I got angry.

THE BET I MADE

People respond to life’s circumstances in different ways. I steer into the skid.

I responded to my physical limitations by doubling down. I pushed myself harder to participate in sports. Sometimes I succeeded, like when I made the soccer all-star team, led the baseball league in home runs, or became a lifeguard. Other times I failed or got hurt.

Back then I didn’t know about stoicism.

What stands in the way becomes the way.

–Marcus Aurelius

But the ups and downs definitely seemed related.

My mom, my teachers, and even some of my friends thought I was too intense, too serious, too hard-boiled. They weren’t necessarily wrong.

I broke my back on the soccer field when I was 12. My mom saw me limping and yelled at the coach to pull me out of the game because she saw that I wanted to keep playing. When we got to the hospital, the doctor told me that if I’d stayed in, and my vertebra had slipped another couple millimeters, I could’ve been paralyzed from the waist down.

I got off with a lesser sentence and had to wear a hard back brace for a couple months. I felt like a turtle. Kids teased me. That came to an end when I stepped to the school bully and dared him to punch me in the stomach, which he did, breaking his wrist.

Three years later I sent a letter to Cleveland High School basketball coach Bobby Braswell, who had “a reputation as being a tough coach,” telling him I was going to play on join his city-championship team.

What a sight I must have been. A scrawny white nerd running stadium stairs and lifting weights and suffering through conditioning with hood rats and future NCAA and NBA players.

Those were the days before dehydration and concussions were a thing. Admitting pain was weak; we sucked it up. I’m not saying that was a good thing, it was just what we were expected to do, so it was what we did. We practiced for weeks without seeing a basketball. Sprints, drills, and stairs in the late summer San Fernando Valley heat. More sprints. More stairs. If you threw up or passed out, you got cut. After a month of conditioning I was exhausted. My mom talked me into taking my uniform to school one last day before I quit. That was the day. Someone had taped the final roster to the trophy case just inside the gym entrance. My name was on it.

DURABILITY OVER TIME

My great grandfather survived the Holocaust and got his daughters out of Germany. He loved paying taxes, because: (a) he loved being American, and (b) paying taxes meant he had enough money to pay taxes. He said – and meant – things like, “If you don’t have shoes, be glad you have feet.”

I wish my Opa could see how I took on challenges that made me stronger, how I drew inspiration from my ancestors and my mentors, and how I try to use everything in my own experience to help others.

My heroes have always been people who overcome adversity. Ten days before my tenth birthday the Pittsburgh Steelers played the Los Angeles Rams in Super Bowl XIV. Everyone was amped up about the star players and the Steelers winning their fourth championship. I didn’t care about that. I wanted to see the players who proved everyone wrong just by showing up: Pittsburgh’s Rocky Bleier, who made it back to football after getting blown up in Vietnam, and LA’s Jack Youngblood, who played the game on a broken leg.

My role models taught me that I define my life by the way I respond to my circumstances. Over time, I came to understand the value of that lesson as I experienced injuries of my own.

My freshman year at UCLA I brought the ball up Dykstra Hall court at full speed. Near half court I planted my foot to change directions. I caught my toe in the cracked asphalt, at the same moment that my defender accidentally stepped on it. My foot stayed straight while the rest of me turned 90 degrees to the right. The sound echoed off a nearby dorm building like a rifle shot. Everyone froze. I had shattered the bones and tore the ligaments in my left knee. I got up slowly and limped what was left of my ACL to the medical center. Two hours later I reported for my graveyard shift as a security guard in a full leg brace. My walk-on basketball dream was over. A few weeks later I had the first of 11 knee surgeries.

In 1994 I was visiting my parents in Northridge when a blind thrust earthquake caused “the highest peak ground acceleration ever recorded in urban North America.” I bounced out of bed just in time to feel the walls of my childhood bedroom collapse on me. The back spasms, epidurals, and surgery came later. It took me a year to heal.

The week after I was cleared to lose the back brace and resume normal activity, I was sitting in the back seat of my parents’ Oldsmobile on our way to celebrate with a rare dinner out. My Dad slowed for a red light. There was a loud crash, broken glass everywhere, and I was suddenly doubled over, my head folded into my lap by the heavy, hairy stench of alcohol. A drunk biker had failed to stop, rear-ended us, and launched himself off his Harley, through the back windshield, and onto my shoulders. The police later reported that his Blood Alcohol Content was three times the legal limit. They estimated his speed was 45 mph on impact.

in my thirties I was surfing Old Man’s in San Clemente when an actual old man barged onto my wave, promptly wiped out, sent his board flying, and sliced my head open with the fin.

Whatever. The list goes on. Saving my then four-year-old daughter on a ski lift and tearing up my shoulder for the first of three rotator cuff repairs. Food poisoning. A lousy first marriage and a bunch of other crap that happens to everyone and isn’t even worth mentioning.

TOMORROW IS PROMISED TO NO ONE

I am painfully aware that everyone has a list like this. Everyone – maybe even you too – has reasons to feel disappointed, or angry, or sad.

The thing is, the universe doesn’t care. It doesn’t owe us a thing. I’ve found a tremendous amount of freedom and power in realizing that I get out of this life exactly what I put in. Nothing more, nothing less. I wanted more. So I started putting in more.

People may know about Open-Source Learning, or Academy of One, but it’s the before and after hours stuff I’m talking about here. The stuff no one sees, which is why I’m telling you about it now.

20 years ago I signed up for the Arthitis Foundation’s weeklong bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Then I went out and bought a bike.

In 2004 and 2005 I ran the Los Angeles Marathon with sixth graders from Haddon Avenue Elementary in Pacoima.

In 2009 I ran the Big Sur Marathon just before my daughter was born, even though I was getting over pneumonia.

In 2020 I walked into Bobby Maximus’s gym.

TODAY I AM AN IRONMAN

I’m a month shy of 53 years old. I wear glasses to read. It’s been a long time since I could slam dunk a basketball.

When my neighbor first mentioned the Ironman, it seemed like a lofty, intimidating goal. I get what he was doing, trying to puff himself up like Hamlet getting up the nerve to kill his uncle.

It works. Big talk can pay off. It sounded great to me, and it’s the reason I took on the challenge and started telling people what I planned to do. I wanted to be accountable. I wanted to push myself to the next level.

That’s exactly what I did over the next five months. I trained. Week in, week out. I did the work. My neighbor never showed up. It didn’t matter. I put in the miles. I did practice triathlons in Malibu and San Diego.

I met some truly amazing people along the way who I am now both proud and humbled to call my friends. I’ll introduce some of them here in future posts.

In the end, I did it. I earned the right to put my arm around my inner sick kid who couldn’t eat pizza or go to parties, my inner disabled basketball player, my inner battle-scarred, caring man who worries about the world, and say with integrity: “You got this. It’s official now. You are an Ironman.

Thanks for reading. Whatever you’ve got on your plate in life, I hope you pick something rewarding, something meaningful, and get after it. Put in the work. Suffer for it. It will pay you back. I promise.