We buried my father in Arlington Cemetery with full military honors. A giant Marine Corps band showed up in their red dress uniforms, complete with a horse-drawn caisson. The Marines took my father back in the end, and I walked away from the cemetery content in the knowledge that my dad was again with his people, that he was where he wanted to be. He was buried in formation alongside all the other soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who’ve faithfully served our nation in its times of need.48 His funeral was truly moving. But it was sparsely attended, however, because my father’s drinking had driven so many of his old friends and colleagues away.
True to form, my mother went into the hospital the day after Dad’s funeral, suffering from uncontrollable knee pain. I sent Sally and the girls home by themselves while I babysat. The doctors found something wrong and performed some form of minor surgery, but it was clear to all concerned that my mother was falling apart. The attending physician described her as “a medical train wreck.” A lifetime of smoking, physical neglect, prescription pain medication, and grief was finally catching up with her. Whatever her options once might have been, there was little that could be done now save trying to keep her comfortable and relatively mobile.
Grief crashed over me.
I felt like I couldn’t think, and sometimes like I couldn’t even move. It came in waves, occasionally bad enough that it was literally crippling. I would think I had a handle on it, that I could cope and begin moving forward, but then it would come back up, sloshing over me and dragging me back under on an undertow of despair. Some people can work through grief, drown themselves in their careers, but I found myself staring indeterminately into space regardless of where I was. At home or in the office, I was unable to force myself to do much of anything. I managed to get done what I absolutely had to, but that was all. That was all I could muster.
Sally saved me. She was not only tremendously understanding, she was encouraging in a truly positive, proactive way. We had a new house, two great kids, and a chance at a new life in a real hometown—my first ever! This would mean nothing, though, if I couldn’t get my head back together.
My wife understood this. She’d known me—intuitively—from the first day we’d met. She’d also lost her own father, and she understood how hard the grieving process could be. More to the point, she saw how badly I needed to channel my grief, how I needed to turn it outwards, towards something positive. I needed something that was mine, something that I could pour myself into. I had to find some way to get my head on straight before I could lead our family into a future that lay so clearly within our grasp.
I needed to rediscover who I was.
Sally suggested that I begin biking to work, and when that made a difference to my mental state, she encouraged me to expand and to think bigger. She encouraged me to challenge myself physically. She understood my connection to sport because she was herself an athlete. Thankfully, she was also content to let me make my own choices as I figured things out.
“I should run a triathlon,” I said one day, more or less out of the blue. “I already know how to swim and run. All I need now is the bike, and you’ve got me doing that, too. I’m halfway there already.”
“You should,” Sally agreed. “You absolutely should. I think that would be a great idea.”
Not knowing anything about the sport, I decided to enter the Stamford Kids-in-Crisis Olympic Triathlon, the so-called KIC IT, set for late June 2008. The race included a one-mile swim, a twenty-five mile bike ride, and a ten kilometer run. I could do all of those things easily enough by themselves. How hard could it be to do them all together in series?
Impossible, as it turned out.
I had my first ever bike wreck in May 2008, locking the brakes on my front wheel as I came off a curb downhill, headed—illegally—into traffic in the Stratford Train Station’s parking lot. I saw a car, slammed on the brakes on instinct, and sent myself flying over the handlebars headfirst. It was a miracle that I wasn’t killed. Instead, I caught myself on my hands but broke my scaphoid, a tiny bone in the wrist. This, I learned, is a common cycling injury. I walked home and tried to shake it off, but to no avail. The local clinic diagnosed me with a break later that night, and I wound up needing surgery. The surgeon inserted a titanium screw into my wrist and then removed it eight weeks later when I didn’t quite recover my full range-of-motion. All told, I was out of commission for something like ten weeks and missed my first race completely.
It was just as well. After twelve years out of the pool, swimming proved to be a more significant challenge than I might otherwise have wanted to admit. I started off with workouts that would have been a warm-up back in my Academy days but was caught completely off-guard by how slow I’d gotten. My body could feel how swimming was supposed to feel, but I simple could not make myself do it. Muscle memory was there, but I had neither the strength nor the muscular endurance to swim correctly for any length of time. Similarly, I’d run, but I’d never put in more than about seven miles at a stretch, and I hadn’t spent nearly enough time on the bike, despite some bike-commuting.
Triathlon, I was learning, was more complicated than just doing three sports in a row.
I got my cast off late that summer and started frantically trying to whittle myself back down into racing shape. I swam consistently, and if I wasn’t fast, I at least grew more comfortable in the water. I stayed out on the bike, too. At first because a friend and fellow triathlete told me that I needed to put more emphasis on riding and later because I simply came to enjoy it. I began with some short ten mile rides on my mountain bike and gradually progressed, getting a road bike and putting in ninety minutes or more at least once a week. I also ran more, heavy-footed and slow but with increasing joy. I didn’t have much speed, especially running, but I knew how to put together a training plan, and I followed that plan religiously.
Gradually, I left my grief out by the side of the road. I unpacked it swim by swim, ride by ride, and run by run. I was buoyed by the knowledge that my father would have approved. He’d always wanted to be a triathlete, but he’d never quite found the self-discipline to force himself to master the swim. Even so, he’d dreamed of us doing a race together. That opportunity was gone, perhaps, but I could still move forward in a way that he would have appreciated. Even drunk and crazy, he would have enjoyed hearing about my exploits, I knew.
I came to treasure those training sessions. I would put in an hour in the pool, change clothes, and head out for another ninety minutes or more on the bike, thinking about things in training that I simply could not bring myself to consider anywhere else. I could rage or cry or even scream when I was on the bike, and no one would hear me except perhaps the birds coming up off the Housatonic River. I could contemplate the meaninglessness of life, content in the knowledge that I personally had purpose, and that this purpose was twofold. I was living for my family, but I was also training for a specific race in a real and immediate future. I was working, but not at a desk or at a construction site or even at a forlorn Army outpost in the hinterlands of Korea. I was working to build my body, to make myself physically and emotionally stronger, to race but also to uphold my responsibilities to my family from a position of strength.
In my mind, I had known for decades what kind of man I wanted to be. Now I was becoming that man again, not just as a pale reflection of glories past. Endorphins buoyed me, and my work—my career—improved so dramatically that my bosses commented on it. People began to notice that I’d lost weight, that I was happier, and that I looked better than I had in months, perhaps even years.
I realized at last that it wasn’t racing that I’d missed, it was training--physical purpose.
Triathlon wasn’t a destination; it wasn’t someplace that I needed to go. It was a journey. The quest was important not because it led anywhere specific, and certainly not because of the medals I might win or the glory of victory at the line. Rather, it was important because it gave focus and structure to a lifestyle that I’d neglected for far too long. With Sally’s help, I found the part of myself that I hadn’t realized I’d been missing, the part that I’d ceded when I’d thrown my goggles into the trash after the finals of the 200 Butterfly all the way back in 1995.
Dad and I never ran our triathlon together as father and son. In some ways, though, I feel like it finally happened in the summer of 2008. Friends and relatives want grief to be a discrete thing, but in truth, it’s something we never get through. It’s not here, and then it’s over. True grief never ends. But we can find ways to go on despite our losses.
I learned to go on because I had a beautiful wife who was committed to supporting me and because I threw myself wholesale into an activity that I knew would have made my father proud. Whatever my dad did, whatever choices he made, I gradually came to realize that they were irrelevant. I could still live up to the ideals that he’d upheld when he had been his best self. I could still be the man that my father had inspired me to be, that West Point had trained, that had stood victorious after myriad swim races and Beast Barracks and loneliness and everything else that life had to throw at me.
In the end, I had to answer only to myself.
It took my dad’s death, my wife’s love, and many, many hours in the saddle of my bicycle to bring all of this into focus. But I saw it clearly at last. That vision of myself was what I needed to continue forward. It was what I needed to carry with me if I was going to set the right example for my own kids. It was what I needed in order to carry my family into the collective future that we all deserved and desired.
* * *
The Fairfield Sprint Triathlon was one of the last races of the summer in 2008. I got my cast off and wound up with something like six weeks to train before race day. I kept my training focused, and I set reasonable goals. Really, I just wanted to finish and figure out what I was doing with my new sport.
I’d lost half the season, but I’d found myself. Now it was time to see what I could do.
It was a big race. More than three hundred people had entered, and there were fifty in my age group, Men 35-39. They called us up in three heats, men under forty-five, men forty-five and older, and women. I went into the paddock with the first heat and settled in, unsure what to expect. We listened to interminable pre-race instructions, and then we took our marks and went, heading off into the water at the sound of the referee’s whistle.
The water was calm to the point of being glassy. I’d been expecting a jumble of swimmers coming off of my first mass swimming start, but I outpaced the pack almost from the moment we left the beach. I soon hit clear water, gliding cleanly across the preternaturally smooth surface of Long Island Sound. I sighted the buoys well, cut the turns close, and held my own against everyone I could see. Half a mile of swimming flew by in mere moments. I climbed out of the water fourteenth overall and second in my age group.
I’d surprised myself and gotten out with the leaders.
The bike course was more of a challenge. The Fairfield Sprint was designed around a two loop course, and though the ride was short, people definitely passed me. On the second loop, I passed some of the stragglers, and it became hard to tell where I was in relation to the rest of the pack. I didn’t much care. I wanted to race and do well, but I had limited ambitions.
I didn’t start struggling until we hit the run. With an edge of at least three minutes coming out of the water, only the very best guys passed me on the bike. We hit the run, though, and things changed dramatically. A lot of guys passed me in the second mile of that run course, and the day grew so hot that I began to struggle with the overall pace of the event. I’d been a median performer on the bike but that put me in decent shape based on my advantage coming out of the water. I was thirty-fifth of fifty on the run, however, and this dropped me back into the middle of the pack.
I was exhausted by the time we hit the turn-around and struggled to maintain the pace as I approached the finish. Then I heard and saw Sally and the girls cheering, and this buoyed me. They were proud of me, and I was proud of myself. I crossed the line with a burst of speed and felt a fleeting moment of triumph. I’d finished in an hour and twenty-seven minutes. I was twenty-first in my age group and ninety-ninth overall.
I felt really good about myself for the first time in what felt like a very long time.
48. My dad is in the same section as the 9/11 Memorial. Colonel A.T. Head, Jr. He was an outgoing, beautiful, friendly man who would, I know, appreciate occasional visits from strangers. Every time I go there, I feel his native cheerfulness wash over me.
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