What is crazy?

(Doing the same thing over expecting different results?)

OK, OK. What is crazy for me?

(Doing an Ironman again… expecting different results.)

What’s crazier than crazy?

(Two Ironman Triathlons?)

Two Ironman Triathlons.

(At the same time?)

Now how would I do that?

(I don’t know. How do you keep moving for 16+ hours when you race Ironman?)

Training; Lots of training.

(So how would you do two Ironmans? Is it Ironmans?)

It is and they are three weeks apart.

(Is that a good idea?)

Probably not…

(But you signed up, didn’t you?)

That I did.

(Your wife is going to kill you and your kids are going to hate you for this.)

Actually…no. My wife enjoys the travel and my kids enjoy the hotel hot tub.

(Travel? Where to this time?)

Ironman #1 is in Bolton, England.

(Where is that?)

England is an island off of Europe. The coordinates are 53.5769° N, 2.4282° W.

(No, where is Bolton?)

219.3 miles north of London.

(You biking or running to get there?)

I was thinking swimming, but we will see.

(And where is the second one?)

The second one follows the first one.

(What?)

What do you mean “what”?

(Where is the second Ironman race?)

In Lake Placid, New York. Actually, the race will be hosted in the town of Lake Placid. We swim in Mirror Lake, right next to Lake Placid.

(Wait, let’s go back to Bolton.)

But we haven’t arrived there yet.

(How long will you be in England? Do you need to acclimate?)

We will be there for eight days, racing on day seven. It is a six hour time difference and for a race of this size I need to reset my internal clock to British time.

(And sight-see.)

Well, there is that too.

(Didn’t you do Ironman Lake Placid in 2019 on two and a half hours sleep?)

Yes, but I never want to do that again, so the plan is to be as rested as I can.

(Aren’t you worried thatyou just informed thousands of people that your home will be uninhabited for eight days?)

I have a friend who will be house sitting. I have three fish tanks of fish. Someone needs to keep the fish from devouring each other.

(Fish eat other fish?)

Look at fish food. What is the main ingredient?

(Other fish!)

Remember kids, when visiting Sea World, don’t order the fish fillet at the theme restaurant.

(Why England?)

The date falls out between the end of my school year and the beginning of my summer school teaching assignment…and I speak the language.

(That’s debatable.)

I wanted to race somewhere new. We have raced Ironman in Cozumel, Mexico; Tempe, Arizona; Louisville, Kentucky; and Lake Placid, New York.

(We?)

When I race, I travel with my family. They keep me going when I’m struggling on the course. They are there to greet me when I finish.

(But why follow that up 21 days later with another Ironman?)

To see if I can. As humans, we feel the need to push ourselves to new heights. It’s in our nature to face fear to achieve a goal. In September of 1962, President Kennedy said, “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” By 1973, 12 men had walked on the moon. Going to the moon gave us handheld power tools, digital photography and microprocessors … and the confidence to face challenges so big that we can’t even fathom how we are going to complete them. An Ironman is 140.6 miles in under 17 hours. That many miles in such a short space of time creates the possibility of failure and that can create a fear of the unknown. Competing in an Ironman has taught me that courage is the thing you get when you face the thing you fear.

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]