LA - The Land of Bruised Dreams

You may have noticed that my race in LA went quickly the way of Nick Nolte's career. If you hadn't, now you know. For whatever reason, I just didn't have it. I felt as though it might be a rough day when my legs were tired by the time I reached the water, a full 15 seconds after the gun. In an effort to salvage them from the get-go I didn't kick very much in the water. After getting caught behind the group (due to bonking on the run to the water) it took some doing to get back to the front. Trying to stay positive and hoping the race would come to me I decided to just motor in the water. Then after the third turn my arms just fell off. If anyone finds some arms, one with a puffy hand, on Venice Beach, they're mine. Getting up to my bike from the water nearly sent me straight into cardiac arrest and cooked my legs. That's right, a mere 22 minutes into the race I mounted my bike as a proverbial quadruple amputee. Hoping I'd find my legs on the bike I settled in, caught my breath and set about using Linsey's trick, to eat when you're having negative thoughts. I polished off my Heed and Hammer gel supplies by the first half of the bike, at which point I noticed my front tire had a slow leak. I pushed hard trying to get off my bike before I was riding on the rim. The run was pretty much the same story, slow and painful and I may as well have had a flat tire. I finished in a truly remarkable 2:18. Remarkable in the way that Lindsay Lohan is back in jail and Britney Spears shaves her head, not in the Cool Runnings/Rudy sort of way. ...a classic Los Angeles implosion.

So, I'm looking for the bright side here, and, to be honest, it's a tough hunt. I achieved nothing that I wanted to. I didn't qualify for Dallas. I definitely didn't get my pro card. I wasn't within 8% of the winners time. I didn't even have a race that felt good. It is a crappy way to end a season of hard work and high expectations.

But I've been here before. I started swimming later than most kids and from the start, I wanted to go to the Olympics. It was an outrageous goal and few people took it seriously or supported it. In fact, most people laughed at it. By the time college rolled around, Stanford and Michigan's coaches weren't calling me. I just couldn't make up the deficit in that amount of time. So I had to make a choice, redouble my efforts and hold fast to what I believed about my potential or believe everyone else. I decided that maybe everyone else was right. It is one of the few regrets I have in life, and I didn't know it until years later. After Ironman Florida, I gave my masters swimming coach, the venerable Bill Irwin, one month to get me ready for the US Master's Swimming State Meet. We were at the pool at 5AM every morning, and after one morning's workout, a test set of 100's, he told me something that changed my life. "Ryan, I'm not saying you would have ever gone to the Olympics, but you are every bit as talented as every person on that team." What a talent and opportunity I had wasted on indulgent self-doubt.

So the bright side is this: This race does not have the power to break me as an athlete, but it wasn't long ago that it would have.

"Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up." - Thomas A. Edison