Heroic

Lisa Bentley started out as a runner, in grade school. In university, like so many other runners, she found herself injured. She started substituting hour-long bike rides or hour long swims for hour-long runs, while recovering. Eventually, someone turned her on to triathlon.

As a short-distance triathlete, she was fairly competetive, competing for Canada at the Pan-Am games. However, she wasn't a strong enough swimmer to make the olympic team, so she decided to focus on longer distance events.

Her first event, a strongman race in Japan, was an eye-opener. The bike was 150km, but she'd never biked for more than 3 hours at a time. The run was a marathon, but she'd never run for more than 2 hours at a time. Her roommate, another professional triathlete, told her that she'd bonk at 30km in the marathon. During the race, she found herself in first place shortly into the run. At 30km, she started checking herself out. She believed what she'd been told, and expected to bonk. Every 5 minutes, she kept repeating the inventory check, looking for signs of an imminent collapse. She didn't bonk, though, and went on to win the race.

The next year, at Hawaii Ironman, she had arguably her worst race. She had lost faith in her coach earlier that season, and had been adding on additional workouts of her own, on the advice of other people. She'd been over-training, but hadn't quite realized and acknowledged it yet. She was also woefully ignorant on the subject of sodium depletion. She'd arrived in Hawaii a week early to prepare, and hadn't been adequately replenishing the salt she'd been losing from the warmer temperatures. Come race day, she said, she started the race with half a tank of sodium.

Nowadays, eveyone in Ironman knows about salt pills. Back then, she had only a vague idea. Into the bike, she had just passed the turnaround when her arms started cramping. She was in shock - she wasn't even using her arms! A few miles later, her quads started cramping and spasming. When she finally started her run, her quads were aching and exhausted from all the spasming. She basically alternated run/walk/cry all the way through the marathon, and had a horrible, no-fun race.

Every race, every bad thing that happens to us, she explained, is a gift. We might not know how to unwrap it right away, but there's something positive to be taken from it. This was a theme she repeated over and over throughout her talk. At the finish line, she vowed to quit "this stupid ironman stuff", and get a real, high paying job. During the job interviews, though, she kept asking, "Can I work from home? Can I work part time?" She realized that she wasn't ready to give up the sport. She found a coach that she had faith in, learned some lessons about nutrition, electrolytes and overtraining, quit her part-time job as a teacher, and threw herself into doing Ironmans the right way.

She's gone on to win 8 Ironman races, so something went right.

She claims to have read The Power of Positive Thnking 16 to 20 times, and will probably read it 4 or 5 times this year. She runs best, she says, when she's happy, and works very hard to put and keep herself in the right frame of mind. She comes across as a very positive, upbeat person, but she assured us that it's incredibly difficult, and that it's something she works at constantly.

She's a huge believer in mental training. She'll spend the week before a race focused on the mental aspect, working at least 1 hour a day on race visualization. She finds her happy spot, and writes down a long list of things that make her happy. She'll use this list to bring her to the proper mental state if something goes wrong. She visualizes the whole race day, from wake-up to the finish line. She wakes up wanting to race, ready to race, happy about racing, because that's what she visualizes herself doing.

Her visualization also includes contingency plans. What if something goes wrong? What if she loses her goggles on the swim? What if something unexpected happens? She related the story of a race in Germany, where she'd been up against Heather Fuhr. She usually can get 2 minutes ahead of Fuhr on the swim, and she really needs every second of that advantage. In Germany, she came out of the water, and was happy with the time on the clock. She heard the announcer say "Lisa Bentley, from Canada. And right behind her, Heather Fuhr, also from Canada." She basically panicked, started her bike way too hard, and struggled the rest of the race. She wasn't ready for Heather Fuhr having a good day. If she'd been mentally prepared, and accepted that she had a good swim but Fuhr had a better one, she would have run a better overall race.

Her mental toughness and visualization really paid off last week in Australia. A number of things went wrong that could easily have derailed her race. 30 seconds in, someone elbowed her in the face, and shoved her goggles into her eyesockets. Her goggles filled with water. "This happened for a reason," she thought. She kept her goggles on, and swam with more determination. Unfortunately, she lost sight of the lead group. 10 minutes into the race, and she couldn't see the leaders. She didn't panic, and focused on swimming her own race. Her bike phase, she decided, was going to be REALLY fantastic.

Onto the bike, and another problem came up. She bikes with a full 6 servings of her sport drink on her bike. The roads in Australia are bumpy, and her bottle had fallen off her bike on one of the bumps. She knew, though, that as a pro she had a backup at the special needs station, 40 km ahead. She took it in stride, and didn't panic.

At the special needs station, she screamed out her number, and held out her hand. In retrospect, she said, she probably should have slowed down. She dropped the backup bottle.

You need, she says, three things to finish and ironman. Salt, sugar and water. Her drinks and nutrition are pretty finely tuned to her needs, so she couldn't just pick up pre-mixed drinks at the stations. She needed to calculate how much water, salt and calories she was missing from the lost drink. Water, she could get at aid stations - no mixing errors or unknown factors there. She had extra salt pills - one an hour should make up for the last drink, she figured. As for the sugar, she had extra power gels, so she figured out how many powe gels she'd need to recover the lost calories.

15km into the run, she moved into first place, and won the race.

It's easy to see how mental thoughness, preparation and experience carried her through this race. What doesn't show as clearly, though, is the amazing positive attitude she kept up throughout the race. She could easily have become discouraged, upset or disappointed by all of the unexpected developments in the race. She kept reiterating, though, how each and every one of these things happened for a reason. She was going to be SO happy, she said, just to finish the race, surviving and overcoming all that went wrong. Winning just made overcoming the obstacles that much sweeter.

I found myself reviewing Around the Bay, and some of my recent training, in my head. The mental toughness, the positivity, the ability to disbelieve that the sub-conscious (the "I can't" liar voice) are all things that Lisa Bentley talked about; they're all things that I think I've shown myself to be weak on. She certainly gave me a lot to think about, and be inspired by.

On my way out, I ran into Mark, who'd dropped in mid-talk. We talked running and such, and he mentioned that I was "pretty fast". The guy has run a marathon something like an hour faster than me, so I threw back a pretty lame "you think?". He pointed out that he'd seen me run intervals. I said something else off-the-cuff and lame, but my mind started working. Everything happens for a reason. Focus on the positive. Hmmm....

One final word. Lisa Bentley contributed to an article in the Toronto Star last year about Nina Kraft's disqualification from Ironman Hawaii. At the time, I thought it was a very diplomatic statement. Not that she endorsed EPO or cheating, just that she didn't strike me as terribly outspoken. So when someone asked her about it last night, I expected her to sidestep the issue a bit. Boy, was I wrong. She felt that Nina Kraft should go to jail, for fraud. She lied and cheated in her workplace in order to get extra money. That's fraud. She also pitied Kraft, compromising her body for something as cheap and meaningless as winning a race. Lisa Bentley would rather be a person who never won Ironman Hawaii than be Nina Kraft.

It's very tough to be cynical about elite athletes and cheating. Lisa Bentley's outspoken emotional response to cheating last night earned her a sincere ovation.