Once a Triathlete

He named himself after a quality he did not have.

In the spring of 2007, a forty-one-year-old man sat on a bicycle doing arithmetic about a hundred-mile ride he was not sure he could finish. He weighed two hundred and forty-three pounds. He could not swim a length of a swimming pool. Four doctors had told him his running life was over.

He decided to call himself Will Power.

Eighteen months later he crossed the line at Ironman Lake Placid. Over the next nineteen years he would finish fifty-eight triathlons, four of them Ironmans, and more than three hundred races in total - always as a Clydesdale, the heaviest man in the field, the one nobody expected to still be out there.

He would also lose all of it. Two hundred and seventy-five pounds, thirty-two heavier than the day he began. Eight years gone from the sport entirely. And then a return, and the first outright win of his life at fifty-seven.

He was drinking through every one of those comeback years, and nobody at any finish line had the first reason to suspect it. The races were run clean. A taper week was a dry week. The calendar did the policing, and he took the medal home and called it discipline.

He has been sober seventeen of the last forty years, in four pieces - and has never once managed it without something to train for.

We use these sports to try to save ourselves.

Not for fitness. Fitness is the cover story, and it is a very good one, because it is true enough to survive any question anybody is polite enough to ask. Underneath it, a great many people in endurance sport are doing what this man did: trading one compulsion for a better-behaved one and calling it health.

Sometimes it works. It saved him, twice, and he does not hedge that.

And sometimes you build the entire apparatus - the training plan, the race calendar, the club, the name on the bib, the whole identity - and the thing underneath it is still there, waiting.

"The substitution is not a cure. It is a much better problem than the one it replaces, which is not nothing - it is, in fact, almost everything - but it is not a cure, and anybody selling it to you as one has either not run the experiment for long enough or is not telling you the whole result."

This is also a book about the bill somebody else pays for a man's better addiction - the Saturdays, the absences, the two decades quietly subsidized by people who were never asked whether they wanted to. Can you save yourself without leaving casualties? This book does not pretend to know. It only refuses to describe the rescue as though it were free.

It was written from fifteen months sober - only one of his five attempts was ever shorter - and it does not tell you how the story ends, because the author does not yet know.

If you have ever built an identity on something you cannot put down, this was written for you.

You do not need to have swum anything. The triathlon is the vehicle. The golfer gone every weekend, the ultrarunner up at three in the morning, the man who moved his whole appetite into his job and got promoted for it - same machinery, different uniform, and all of it applauded.

Will Power Byron is a Marine veteran, a four-time Ironman, and a USA Triathlon national qualifier at sixty. This is his first memoir.