Triathlon is a 2.4 mile swim, a 112 mile bike ride and a 26.2 mile run.

It takes all day to complete.

When I crossed the finish line of my first, my coach was standing there and she said, Oh my God, how do you feel?

And I said, Why is it so far when people ask me questions about Iron Man?

The first question that they usually ask is, Why?

Why do you do this?

And after spending nearly a decade racing this distance and coaching hundreds of athletes to complete this distance, I've been exposed to a lot of the reasons why people would choose to train and race for this kind of endurance of it.

Some athletes do it to push their physical boundaries.

They want to see where the limits are of their bodies and what they can do.

Some athletes do it for a more ex distension ll reason.

They want to feel alive.

They're looking for something in their lives that thrills them or scares them, but gets them out of bed in the morning.

Some athletes do it just to check an item off their bucket list.

These athletes are constantly seeking adventure, the collecting experiences and Iron Man is just another stop along that journey.

These are all great reasons to race.

I race because every time I have finished an Iron Man, I have learned something incredible about myself.

Ironman does something to you out there.

You're all alone.

You're working through your day and it's strips away all the barriers that you put up in life to protect yourself.

I never realized when I was racing how rare it was to be able to race an Iron Man.

If we set aside professional athletes and the crazy athletes, you can really only do it a couple of times a year.

And how many chances in a year or in a lifetime, do you have to strip away everything that you've put to protect yourself from the world and find out who you really are in my life?

Not that many times I've completed nine, and each time I've finished, the lessons are all right there, waiting for me to pick them up.

Once the dust has settled and see what's left, people ask me what my favorite momentous and they expect that I'll say the finish line, but that's not it.

My favorite moment happens in the morning once all the logistics are done and all the running around has been complete.

And you squeezed into your wet suit and you're squashed up inside the swim corral with hundreds, sometimes thousands of other athletes, and everyone's excited and happy and chattering and nervous and roll, anticipating what the day is going to bring.

And in the moment before the cannon fires to start the day, this silence comes across all of us, this collective unconscious.

All these people that love the same thing that are there for the same reason.

It's incredibly powerful.

That's my favorite moment.

When I talk about Iron Man, people expect me to talk about resilience.

They want to hear about how it's taught me to be tough, to fight and to never give up.

And they weren't wrong.

Iron Man has taught me a lot about pain, about how I experience it, about how I carry it along with me athletes as a collective, we can be pretty shut down emotionally.

Ah, lot of us race because it gives us a place to hide from all the scary emotions in the world that we should maybe be feeling instead were feeling the fatigue of training were feeling that we're hungry again.

We're feeling our bodies moving through our run or our bike ride or our swim, and we're letting all of these things replace pain or joy or pleasure.

The lesson I learned from my first iron man was no more complex than Yes, I can do this.

The lesson I learned in my second was a modem can fix anything.

I was most of the way through the bike leg of my third when I heard a noise coming back from the back wheel of my bike.

I wrote a couple more minutes and it didn't go away, so I pulled over off the road and onto the shoulder to check it out.

I despondent my bike and I was leaning over my back wheel, and then I was flying through the air.

See, another athlete behind me had been refilling his water bottle and not watching where he was going, and he drifted off the road and onto the shoulder, and he hit me dead on going about 30 miles an hour He apologized profusely as I got up and shook myself off and wondered where all the blood was coming from and maybe what was wrong with my right arm.

And here's the thing about endurance athletes, the thing that makes us crazy and amazing and ridiculous.

I got back on my bike, and anybody here that's an endurance athlete is nodding along.

Of course you got back on your bike because when you're an endurance athlete, if you can move forward, why wouldn't you?

I wrote down the road.

I got to the next aid station and I stopped to clean myself off.

At some point, I had what I rubbed my hand in the blood and then robbed a handprint on my face and then another one on my shorts.

And then I got back on my bike again, and I rode one armed, one handed the 30 miles or so back to town.

When I got back to town, I handed my bike off to the volunteer.

I put my run shoes on and I came out of the transition tent and I saw my husband waiting there to cheer for me, and I walked over to him very quietly and I said, Hey, I'm fine.

I think I have a broken arm.

I'm gonna go run Here's the thing.

Every race is an opportunity.

Every race is a chance in life to see who you are when you're in pain when you're struggling, when all these voices inside and out are both begging you to quit or to make the easy choice.

That's part of why we race.

I struggled a little bit.

I walked the beginning of that run, but eventually I started running.

I finished that race because Iron Man has taught me how to endure how to survive physical pain.

It's given me a toolbox called endurance, and it's taught me how to suck it up and keep moving forward, no matter how brutal the conditions may be.

In the spring of 2015 my grandmother passed away.

She had been sick for a long time, but it was still shocking when she moved on.

She was one of my favorite people, more than anyone else in my life.

She believed in me and she loved me and I knew it.

The best story that I can tell you about my grandmother is that when she was irritated at my grandfather, she would crumble up Ben a drill and put it in his spaghetti to get him.

So pipe down makes my grandmother passed away from complications with Alzheimer's.

And I very clearly remember the last time that I saw her and she still knew me.

I can feel her hands on my back when she hugged me and called me by my name for the last time.

Four weeks after she passed away.

My grandfather had a massive stroke in church on Saturday evening, and two weeks later he passed away as well.

The pain that I felt in the weeks and months following their deaths was not something that I knew how to understand.

Grief is so great and grand, and it rips the breath from your body.

I thought I knew pain.

I was an iron man, so I handled it the way Iron Man taught me alone.

I got quiet and silent.

Ah, hidden training and I survived.

Ah!

Few months later, I signed up for another iron man.

It seemed like a good idea.

All the hiding in training had made me pretty physically fit.

I thought it wouldn't matter that my mind was a wreck.

I thought somehow that there would be comfort in the suffering that I could choose, and it was comforting and distracting all the way through the swim, the bike in the first couple miles of the run, and then suddenly my body just stopped.

I couldn't move forward.

I tried everything that I knew how to do in Iron Man.

When anything goes wrong, the first thing that we try is a snack because we must be hungry.

Tried everything that I knew and I just couldn't get my body back in motion.

And I wanted to quit all the people that were out there with me that day that I knew tried to convince me to move forward.

I knew that I would be angry and ashamed later if I quit and it wasn't enough.

But I couldn't fight against all those people who wanted me to finish.

So I walked it in because that was what Iron Man had taught me to finish.

No matter what the thing about Iron Man is, it's not teaching us to be resilient.

It's teaching us to endure.

It's teaching us to survive.

When the pain is so excruciating that we don't know how we're gonna go on.

That's not always a bad thing.

Sometimes that's the first step that we need to take towards healing.

But in that situation, all it did was put off the moment in time until I was forced to finally feel the grief that I had been holding myself away from, and when I finally did, it was overwhelming.

Resilience has become a bit of a buzz word, but I hear people use it like a weapon.

People use it to say that what you're doing right now isn't good enough.

Oh, he needs to be more resilient.

What that person is saying is, Oh, he needs to suck it up and pretend that everything is fine.

That's not what resilience is.

Resilience has a lot of definitions, but one of them is the ability to maintain reliable functioning despite adversity.

So first of all, that's not Iron Man.

Iron Man is a choice that we make to suffer in a controlled environment towards a goal we choose.

We actually embrace the suffering that the day brings for all those reasons that I talked about earlier, and those are good reasons, but finishing an iron man, that's just endurance.

That's not being resilient.

And that's not to trash endurance, because finishing an Iron Man is an incredible thing.

But Ironman didn't teach me how to deal with pain.

Ironman taught me to suffer by choice.

So what about when pain isn't a choice?

What about pain that isn't physical in nature?

After my grand parents passed away, I spent months paralyzed, gritting my teeth against the pain and grief that I refused to experience.

I was trying to do it alone because that's what Iron Man taught me.

We do it all the time when we're in pain or were angry or were hurt or upset.

We withdraw into ourselves.

Endurance is something that we can do alone, but it's not enough.

We need resilience, and resilience comes from belonging to other people.

That's how I survived my grief through human connection by reaching out in the same way that I carted my broken arm off to the hospital, connecting with the people around me to experience what I was feeling in a safe space if we use it appropriately.

Resilience is a really powerful tool when people are resilient.

They can thrive in the most hostile of environments.

Resilience comes from having allies from having a community for having people on your side.

I saw it for years as a teacher, as a coach, as a mentor, and I see it now in the PhD program.

When you take time, the most precious resource that you have and you invested, you connect with another person.

They will grow, they will thrive, they will become excellent and they will become resilient.

It happens through human connection.

That's what resilience is.

It's a phenomenal thing to raise an iron man that moment in the water in the morning, the silence, the collective unconscious of all the athletes who love passionately what we're doing, it's so powerful.

But it's not the same thing that empowers ups to deal with our pain or with our grief.

It's not the same thing that makes us resilient.

Nine times now I've stood on the line nine times.

Now I've finished some days ecstatic, Somedays frustrated, somedays angry or broken or alone.

In all these years that I've raised Iron Man, there are times that I've wondered if embracing this suffering would destroy me.

But Every time I race, I find answers to questions that I didn't even know I was asking.

Am I strong enough?

Am I tough enough?

Am I confident enough?

Am I smart enough?

My connected enough to the world around me to get through?

We could never really know.

Not for sure.

That's that's life.

We could only do our best to show up, to reach out, to connect, toe, look through our silence and try to overcome it in order to really experience our pain.

That's how we grow and thrive.

That's how we become excellent.

That's how we become resilient.

An iron man taught me that it can't teach me everything.

It can only teach me so much.

But that is why we race to find out.

Thank you.