By Tom Demerly.

The Pro-ser

Prosers race as a “pro”. They may have won Ironman Istanbul and the attendant $184.23 USD prize money after spending $5000+ to get there. They never go more than five sentences in conversation without mentioning they are “racing pro” or “used to race pro”.

Prosers complain incessantly about how the pros are treated by WTC. They remind you they always get a discount- since they’re pro. They have a day job, but did I mention? They are a Pro… And by the way, they are looking for sponsorship, a home-stay and a free meal- and they coach, here’s their website. And Twitter. And Facebook. And Instagram. And Pinterest. So you can see how Pro they are.

Prosers have weighed down the sport with their Walter Mitty, self-feeding super reality. Festooned in sponsors’ logos they never give anything back to, the proser is to the selfie as Van Gogh is to the landscape. It is their medium.

What good can you say about the proser? Well, every triathlon community has one, and usually only one. Except for Boulder, Tucson and San Diego, prosers are territorial. Those places are their winter mating grounds. Prosers are like a living, breathing Strava segment since their over-the-top countenance makes you want to catch them on the bike, beat them in the pool and stay with them on the run. Say what you will about the proser (and I have) but they push us. They keep the bar up for the rest of us while reminding us of how incredibly lame we can truly be without an occasional ego check.

The Pro

Pretty obvious: Races for the win. Has won. They’re not like you and I. They are so otherworldly fast it’s tough to imagine. The bike speed of Andrew Starykowicz at Ironman Florida: 112 miles in 4:02:17. That’s an average of 27.73 miles per hour- for over a hundred miles. That’s alien. The courage of Sebastien Kienle; going off the front at Ironman on the bike- and never looking back. With courage like that he probably needs special tri shorts.

If you put previous winner Chrissie Wellington between the sun and you, the light would shine through her she is so skinny. The miles Pros put in would be fatal for us. Phenomenon Mirinda Carfrae makes running in Kona look so effortless it is weird to remember how awful we feel off the bike. Most of us couldn’t get our knees that high on any run, let alone at Ironman with a 6:30 pace.

The downside of being a pro is triathletes don’t remember anyone but the winner. Ask a triathlete who won the Ironman World Championship last year. Ask who was third. Because triathlon is a participant sport the people who finish often have no idea who won overall. Triathletes are participants, not fans. We don’t give our pros a very high pedestal. We prefer to have one of our own.

The Warrior

Something bad happened to them. Lost a leg. Lost both legs. Lost a family member. Had a disease. When they cross the finish line at Ironman it will cast away their demons of affliction, addiction, depravation, crucifixion. Ironman is the filter through which they must pass. It sets them free. A Warrior is just as likely to win their age category as they are to barely make the midnight cut-off. Never, ever count out The Warrior.

The Warrior deserves most of the credit for the success of our sport in the modern era. Without their use of Ironman as a medium of exposure our sport would not be where it is. No other sport has Warriors like Ironman does. Their stories have inspired us. They serve as an adult version of the speech your parents gave you about children starving in Africa. Their message is clear and relevant: Use what you have while you have it. Life and vitality are ephemeral gifts not to be squandered. When you see a warrior, thank them.

An Olympic Gold Medalist may mention a charity, may have overcome a tragedy, but that is an accessory to their performance. For the warrior, their Ironman performance is an accessory to the cross they bear. For the Warrior, it is all about what brought them to the start line, and getting to the finish line. The Warrior reminds us that Anything is Possible, and Ironman is the filter through which they must pass to achieve redemption.

The Super-Grouper

The soft-spoken, amazingly fast people in the age groups: The Super-Groupers. They surprise us with their results. Races because they love the sport. Probably been doing it for a while, may have been to Kona before. Reserved about their accomplishments but turn in great races while trying to balance their racing and training against that ephemeral annoyance called “normal life”. You never know how fast they are until one day you look for them on the results page, and then you’re blown away. This is the unassuming girl or guy who kicks butt and finishes in 9 hours, 10 hours, 11 hours, 12 hours, 13 hours.

When you go on a training ride with them, you bleed through your eyes. They are often unassuming in appearance. I know an average looking lad who went 9:50 something at Ironman Arizona while he kept his day job. Another Player I know is a top-level exec for an automaker. He kicks butt at Ironman and seldom mentions it. I saw him out on a training ride one day and had a tough time catching up to him on his bike. In my car.

Super-groupers often ride an inexpensive bike from five model years ago, use off-brand aero wheels, have served as President of the local tri club and volunteered at races when they weren’t racing. They are givers and quiet local heroes contributing to athletes around them in ways we often never realize. And they still kick butt on race day.

The Struggler

They may not belong in Kona, but they are in Kona. And God bless them. Julie Moss is the original Struggler, and she put our sport on the map. Without enough training, with bad equipment and even worse race nutrition they somehow make the cutoff. These are the real “Ironmen”, and by God, they earned the tattoo. The citizen athletes. They will take 40 electrolyte tablets in a race but not drink more than a water bottle per hour and then wonder why they cramped on the run, but run they will. All the way to the finish. They finish in the hour before the cut off, the best hour of the day at Ironman.

When you ask, “What did you eat on the bike?” They answer casually, “63 salt tablets, a can of tuna, a bottle of NutraSludge, eight soggy Fig Newton’s and a GU.” And they wonder why they had G.I. issues that rival an above ground nuclear test.

Ask them how their race went and they’ll tell you, “I shit, peed, barfed, cried and even high fived myself. It was awesome!”

You think the pros are tough? They have been showered, eaten a meal and had their feet up for five hours by the time these girls and guys drag their pee, barf, mucus, energy gel and poop encrusted bodies across the finish line. They are the real Iron(wo)men. And the next morning they line up to register for next years’ race.

The Strugglers are the finishers who make our sport great. The Strugglers are the everyman with so much passion in their heart for Ironman they make it on almost entirely guts, really weird race nutrition and very little training.

67 Years Ago Today: Chuck Yeager Breaks the Sound Barrier..

By Tom Demerly.

Max the kitten has died.

He was only 5 weeks old.

Max’s introduction into this world was bad. Someone abused him when he was only 2 weeks old. He suffered a broken back and hind legs, likely thrown out of a car or building. His injuries went untreated for another 2 weeks. Eventually a Good Samaritan named Jman found Max and wrote about the kitten’s difficult life on Facebook. People reached out and helped.

But it was too late.

What can we take from the short, tragic life of Max the Kitten?

We have choices of how to shape the world. We can build a world of empathy and kindness, or be indifferent and callous.

There are many things we can’t change about life and the world, but within our sphere of influence- the small spectrum of things we can influence- we have an individual choice. We can build our own little world. The man who found and helped Max built that world for him, a world of safety and love. So despite Max’s injuries and suffering he left this earth from a good place after entering it from a bad one. Mankind initially failed him, but tried to redeem itself.

As small individual worlds of healing and kindness are created, they slowly begin to connect to a collective goodness. The world we build, built one person, one small sphere of influence, begins to slowly connect into a greater goodness.

There is a belief that how a person and culture treats animals is reflective of their overall character: if they are kind or cruel. There is science that shows empathy is taught and grows from empathy, and cruelty and indifference does the same. Humans are not wired a particular way. They reflect what they are shown.

So while there is tragic sadness to the cruelty heaped upon poor little Max and his death, there is also hope in the care and love he received in his final week.

The problem is the race between these two extremes is a tight one.

With humanity comes the responsibility of massive intellect. In general mankind has done a bad job of administering this responsibility. Mankind isn’t very kind. Our collective conduct is rife with cruelty and indifference. But within our own individual worlds we can build something better. A place where empathy and compassion are our greatest virtues, the first things we do, and in that we become wiser, stronger, smarter and more fulfilled in our own brief, ephemeral lives.

Nobel Science Prize winner, author and inventor of the communications satellite, Arthur C. Clarke once wrote, “We each create our own reality”. Clarke’s observation is true. And while our collective reality is rife with disparity and conflict, our individual realities can be abundant with kindness and empathy, a haven from the friction that exists between these extremes.

Eventually similar realities begin to connect into something called a “functioning core”. These connected realities become a group of people who expand the values of empathy and kindness across cultures and humanity. The virtue of kindness and empathy rises to trump selfishness and solitude.

I didn’t want Max’s short feline life to go unnoticed, nor did I want to leave Jman’s act of empathy unrecognized. Because these things are our moral compass. Our collective guidebook to something better. Our hope. One kitten at a time.

Postscript:

If you want to help create a greater functioning core and build an individual reality of kindness and empathy, you can. Volunteer at your local animal shelter. Spend a day at a local food bank. Make a donation, however small, to a cause that helps those who cannot help themselves. Here are two of my favorite:

The Hermitage No-Kill Cat Shelter in Tucson, Arizona:

The Dearborn Animal Shelter in Dearborn, Michigan:

By Tom Demerly.

I was sick.

Some kind of flu. It’s going around. And not enough sleep. Been up since 4:45 AM working a triathlon down on Belle Isle in Downtown Detroit. The State just took the island back from Detroit so people from the suburbs go there again. It’s OK.

I decided to take the long way home. You drive through factories, past a Mosque and through Mexicantown. It’s colorful and interesting. Like a meal eaten in a small foreign country, you’re not sure what you’ll find in it.

I saw some kind of weird industrial… I’m not sure what it was. Art? Lawn maintenance equipment? Something from a steel mill? Stopped to shoot a photo or two. A little farther down the road, through Mexicantown, the candles and bottles on the corner reminded me, and all the stuffed animals. “Man, I gotta get this…”

When I walked across the street I briefly let my guard down. Men had set up an OP (observation point) on the corner across from where I was headed, offset but with full visibility on my objective. The second they saw my camera I heard them, “He’s takin’ pictures of it.” There were three of them. Now they were between my vehicle and me. Hmmm.

There were liquor bottles, lots of them. Writing on the street, out into the street. Stuffed animals. Notes written on the pole with a sharpie, paint pen, everything. Some in English, most in Spanish. The stuffed animals were fastened all the way up the pole. Some of them were oddly garroted to the pole with wire. They were filthy from weeks in the rain. It looked like a drug cartel had murdered stuffed animals.

“What you takin’ pictures?” The tallest of the three asked. He left off the word “of”.

I walked across the street to make eye contact and speak with them at a normal conversational distance. As if it were normal for me. “I was driving home and I saw this. I’ve seen it before, with people around it at night, and candles.”

The skin on his face seemed drawn tight to his skull. He was tall, handsome and fit. Held his head a couple degrees above level. But he looked tired. “Hey man, lemme show you…”

Now let’s back up a few steps. I’m a guy pretty obviously out of my element, carrying a few thousand bucks worth of camera gear, big camera gear. My truck is parked in a lot filled with broken glass and a car, an old car, with a very large woman in it coughing… or singing… or… I’m not sure. Something really big is hanging down underneath the car. It lists to the side she is on. A man sits obscured by a dense cloud of smoke next to her. I decide this is a great photo op for my friends on social media back in the ‘burbs. The way I would photograph a peacock at the zoo. It was just so… urban.

But this isn’t a peacock in a cage. These are the lives of people, dense and complex, dynamic and evolving.

“I got a picture of him in here.” I walk into a smoky party store with a wall encased behind thick, marginally clear, mostly yellowed plastic. I’m a little wary, heck, I’m scared, so I don’t notice where the fruit pies are. There are lots of bottles behind the plastic wall, and a low man with a gigantic head that melts into an even wider neck. Patches of black hair on his head. Lottery tickets, just a few.

“Here man, this is all about it.” It’s behind the thick, yellowed lexan armor. Glare is coming off it so it’s tough to photograph.

His name was Ryan Dewayne Lee Jenkins. Nickname, apparently, “Duke”. Jenkins was eulogized on Friday, July 25. He was shot to death standing at that corner some days earlier. No one explained to me why, and I did not ask. The funeral card in the party store said, “Celebrating the Life Of…” In the photo Jenkins is making some sort of hand sign and his fingernails appear… unusual.

I do not know what happened. I did not ask. I should have. The man told me Jenkins was shot to death. There was a tension surrounding the topic, perhaps continued pain from the loss. Maybe more. I don’t know. The body language of everyone interacting with me was… guarded. I would suspect it might be, especially toward some odd guy carrying a camera taking photos of what is a sacred and intimate memorial. So I took my photos and left.

But as I was leaving one of the men walked up to my truck. I rolled the window down. “Hey man,” he said, “You wanna see something else?”

“Yeah” I told him.

“Go down there, four blocks. There is a candy store. A veteran and a girl own it. It’s new. It’s all they do. Brand new. Sells candy. They’re trying to make it. Go on down there and take some pictures of it and talk it up. They’re doin’ good, tryin’ to make it…”

I followed his directions but didn’t find the candy store. Dropped a pin on a GPS map on my phone and told myself to come back here- that there was more to the story. Much more. My head felt worse and I was so tired it was hard to drive. I went home. But I told this guy I’d help him by telling his story, so I sat down to type before I went to bed.

Detroit isn’t raw, urban or dangerous. It’s not “on the brink”. It isn’t particularly cool or edgy. It’s small town USA in the second decade of the 21^st century. People work, they’re friendly, they welcome you. They strive for a better tomorrow. They aren’t closed off and there are no barriers. Two things missing from Detroit are falsehood and pretentiousness. We know the city is run down and dirty. We’ve been through a lot. We’re working on that. It didn’t happen over night. We’re responsible for it, we’ll fix it, and it won’t happen again in our lifetimes. And as it heals and rebuilds its’ stories peel away like scabs off a wound, and sometimes they reveal scars.