17 Days To Go (August 21)

Our hotel room had a side door that opened to a porch that was a clearing in the woods.

(Did you see a bear?)

No, but I was expecting a moose.

(You really were in Canada.)

The next morning, I opened the porch door to pray.

(I assume that you were on the ground floor.)

We were and I wanted to stand in the woods and feel the presence of God as I prayed…

But the sky had “opened up” and it was raining.

(Raining? Streams of water poured down the road outside your hotel room.)

I saw the bike case I had taken on the airplane and my heart sank…

The handlebars were bent.

(Where can you buy new handlebars two days before a race?)

The handlebars of a bike are mounted on a pole that anchors to the base of the fork that holds the wheel.

(So, you “Amazoned” a new one up to Canada?)

All I had to do was hold that front wheel still and snap the handlebars back into place.

(Wait!)

Yes?

(How did you “snap the handlebars back into place” if you were holding the front wheel straight?)

I held the wheel still with my knees and gently popped the handlebars back into place with my hands.

(Weren’t you worried that you were going to break your bike?)

Are you assuming that this was the first time that I had to do this?

(Fair point.)

Friday morning, we woke up to rain.

(It was more than “rain,” it was a flood.)

I wanted a workout and we needed food.

(You could drive in the rain and workout in the afternoon sunshine.)

There were no supermarkets according to Google, just markets.

You would be driving up a tree-lined road and just pull off the road to one of these mini marts.

(You make it sound like a horror movie.)

Or sleep away camp.

(True.)

We got out of the car and I paused. Standing in the rain-soaked parking lot where both the asphalt and the concrete “seemed” to be stained by rainwater struck me as odd.

It was August and I should have heard birds or chirping bugs or traffic.

The air was eerily still and the quiet was punctuated by the roar of the occasional semi rolling down the narrow, tree-lined mountain roads. We walked into the market and bought what little we could find with a kosher certification.

(So, you had no Shabbos food?)

This was for snacking. For Shabbos meals we ate at Chabad which was a house tucked away at the side of the road like the market had been.

So, the Half Ironman in Canada.

(Finally, you are getting to the story of the race.)

Our hotel was at the top of the mountain, that was the sky village of Mont Tremblant.

The finish line was in a village at the bottom of several hills. It was like Cinderella’s castle at Disney meets Willie Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, but on the side of a mountain … if everyone seemed to be speaking French.

I walked past the sleepy town on our way to the swim start. We weren’t alone, but you had the feeling of, “This is what Disney World is like before dawn.”

The 2,000-meter swim went well and it was onto the bike. The Half Ironman bike course was a single loop that began in Mont Tremblant and continued onto the highway.

(Wait, they closed the highway for you?)

Yes.

(So, you were riding where cars usually drive?)

Yes.

(Did it feel weird?)

Yes.

The last six miles of the 56-mile bike course meandered through the hills of Mont Tremblant.

(It is a ski resort.)

Remember, I was still freaked out about trying to climb 13 miles of hills in France.

(A mountain, not a hill.)

Yes, so when I reached the last stage of the bike course and the inclines went over 6%…

(Stop!)

What?

(I don’t ride a bicycle, so telling me a percent of an incline has no meaning.)

Zero % is flat, like the surface of your desk.

At 1-3% I can maintain my pace by shifting my gears.

At 4% the incline starts to feel challenging. By 7% incline I’m slowing down and shifting to my easiest gear.

(Anyone who had driven up DeGraw Ave from Teaneck to Fort Lee has gone up a 9% incline.) At mile 30 of the 56-mile bike course the road became a 14% grade climb.

(That’s like climbing a wall.)

Yes, but I had switched my bike computer display to elevation instead of data.

(Data?)

How fast I was going, how many watts I was putting out, how fast I was pedaling? Once I was in my easiest gear the only variable became effort. I was going to “feel” how fast I could pedal without exhausting my leg muscles. Power and cadence matter, but instead of worrying about numbers dropping due to elevation, I focused on how my muscles felt as I “grinded it out” to the top. I had been so close to failure at Ironman UK that I needed to use this race to build up confidence again … and it was working.

Then I went up a 9% climb at mile 41 and my chain popped off my bike…

David Roher is a USAT certified triathlon and marathon coach. He is a multi-Ironman finisher and veteran special education teacher. He is on Instagram @David Roher140.6. He can be reached at [email protected].