IRONMAN Lake Tahoe, 2015 Is Here!
If you’re local to the North Shore and Truckee, you’ve seen plenty of athletes on the course these past weeks, traversing the ridiculously long and rocky shore out at KB, busting their butts spinning up the steeps of Brockway, and grooving a nice pace along our not-so-groovy, dry 
Truckee River Bed. I’ve been working one on one with a few dozen of these athletes over the last two years of IMLT, and this year is no different. As some of you already know well, I love working with people of every kind, size, and ability, but I have thoroughly enjoyed getting to know this elite group for so many reasons. Each and every person I work with has a unique story to tell of why they choose this path that many see as suffering. And you know I love a good story! I’m intrigued by endurance athletes from a physical perspective sure, but the psychological side is what truly amazes me.
I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself more than an aspiring distance runner, but my first half marathon took a substantial amount of mental determination and focus to keep on keepin’ on when my gams were cramping up and screaming to stop. But my most intimate and rewarding experience with the “endurance mind” was when I completed the Wildland Firefighting Academy for CalFire back in 2007 (when it was still CDF). It was a full week “boot camp” with as much para-military style training as our captains could cram in. We “slept” on crappy, narrow cots in a cold apparatus bay with several dozen 20-something young men, all striving to be that firefighter they imagined as a boy (did I mention I was 31 at the time, the oldest cadet). There was one other female besides me. We were up at dawn, running 3-5 miles, followed by calisthenics on the lawn, the fastest breakfast you’ve ever eaten, clean up that we were never 
given enough time to complete so therefore duly punished with an unequal number of pushups. Then came line-up and more pushup punishment for a belt-loop missed, a slightly untucked shirt, or being a step out of line with the cadet in front of you. Then drills. And pushups. Hauling 45 pounds of hose and gear up and down slippery dirt hills, laying hose lines at breakneck speed, “wrapping” hydrants, cleaning thousand of feet of soiled hose and relaying it all back in the engine only to be told to do it again. And faster. I have never come so close to what I thought would end in a heart attack or a ruptured lung as when we were pitted against one another to race up a steep hill and lay a thousand feet of hose faster than the other cadets in 90 degree heat wearing hot protective gear. And yet, I endured while other young men (and yes, the other woman) failed, quit, got injured, cried, walked out.
I remember very distinctly, the exact moment I found my “zen” and truly connected with the “endurance mind”. We were in morning line-up, on the 5th day. We’d lost about a third of the cadets already and those who remained looked like they’d been ridden hard and put away wet. They had. We all had. I was bruised all over, sore in muscles I wasn’t aware I had and to a level that was nearly unbearable. Like when your quads are so sore after a ton of heavy squats that you can’t sit on the toilet without holding onto something. Times a hundred. So, morning line-up. The kid in the line in front of me every day was still in the game, but barely. His eyes were dull, not the shiny glow when 
we started the first day. His shoulders sagged just a bit from the proud military stance we were demanded to uphold. And he couldnt stand quite still. Kept shifting his weight ever so slightly from foot to foot, drawing the attention of the captain overseeing us and elliciting a demand for, yes, you guessed, more pushups. My god, my arms and pecs screamed their fury from what I had added up to about 1000 pushups daily, give or take a few hundred. I’d seen this kids feet in our sleeping “barracks”, while he sat on the edge of his cot and nursed them. He had new boots (first mistake) and the blisters he’d generated were tremendous, his feet a warzone. Now, my own feet were wrapped in varying arrays of moleskin, bandaids, duct tape, gauze and athletic tape in so many places to cover my own growing blisters and hotspots. We all had the same problem. It was inevitable.
But what wasn’t inevitable, was giving up. THAT was a choice.
And THAT was a choice one made who did not have a mind built and conditioned for “endurance”. This young man did not have that mind. He left mid afternoon that day and I felt his pain, physically and emotionally. But, while I suffered great pain in that same morning line-up, I stood stock still, legs solid, shoulders back, chest up, eyes dead ahead with every belt loop accounted for, shoes polished, laces tight, collar folded. And I did not do pushups in that line-up. And I graduated. I fought fire that year and grew ever more appreciative of the “Endurance Mind” and what it is capable of carrying us through when it seems nothing else can carry us. How it allows us to have such an intense level of one-pointed focus when our bodies want to focus on nothing other than stopping. The Endurance Mind is a powerful thing, one that can be nurtured and honed to help us accomplish exceptional feats and endure tremendous difficulty we would never have thought possible. It is most certainly not isolated to those of athletic endeavors but the men and women of IRONMAN Lake Tahoe have reminded me of it every year, with it’s gifts and it’s pitfalls, and given me a new appreciation for the ability to endure whatever it is you must, to stand for what you believe in. Thank you for that.
Lauri Glenn & Bodhi Therapeutics
Let’s all keep our fingers crossed for a smoke-free, snowless, calm late summer day so all our athletes who have bled, sweated and cried to get here can take on this immense challenge in full Tahoe Glory! Good Luck to each and every one of you!