One theory about blogging may be the need to post more then just race reports or a 100% race based product. It's hard for me to think this way and still produce a product I feel suitable for public consumption on this particular blog spot. A bit of growth is never a bad thing just maybe not in this particular post. The following may be a departure from a direct race based post but not a departure from triathlon, it's training and how it's lessons continue to shape who I am and the direction I chose to pursue.
In an effort to grow and learn from lessons of this season past I have attempted to boil it down. When you are given the opportunity for what should/could be the largest season of your triathlon career trying to reduce it to a few single moments that have shaped your season isn't as easy as it could/should be in other years.
One of the best moments from last season was watching with great pride as Bootsy qualified for Kona for her third time. Another key moment was my qualification and racing in Kona. These were monumental moments for both of us as individuals and as a couple. I couldn't have dreamed for such a scenario to play out.
Once these phenomenal opportunities are removed, what's left? What else can I point to as the moments that helped shape my season and carried the larger lessons? There where two seminal moments in the 2016 season for me. The first moment being injury unlike any I have ever experienced, the second was the loss of a training partner.
If there were a way to improve your chances for fitness success by 10, 20 or even 30% would this opportunity get your attention? How about a technique to make exercise more fun on a daily basis? A tool that automatically creates space and time in your schedule for run workouts? A proven way to help push you out the door, out of a rut or through a plateau?
It may all sound too good to be true, but countless endurance athletes, including myself, have found the right training partner can do all this and so much more.
Exercise partners provide a powerful combination of support, accountability, motivation and in some cases, a healthy competition. Although never one to take to the water and those little legs could have never powered a bike, they could and would however out sprint me across the park to the front porch of our home every time. Even in his latter years.
The emotion of grief may be triggered by the loss of something loved or as a result of a life circumstance. It could be believed that if we have effectively mourned a loss we will then achieve closure. The notion that one mourns a loss and then gets over it, to the extent that emotions about the loss are not triggered in the future, in my opinion, is a myth.
It's my belief that any personal loss, later and repeatedly, brings longing and sadness. As time passes, the intensity of feelings about the loss may lessen, we might also find ways to soothe or distract ourselves, this beginning the process of partially burying grief-related feelings through the process of creating new memories. But we may never get over the feeling of it being next to impossible: for me I have found it hard to erase emotional memory. Besides it's maybe not about achieving closure at all. Instead maybe I should attempt to figure out what I'm going to do when emotion of memories are later triggered.
My experience with the breed began in college. A lifetime friend had a Siberian Husky as a companion who traveled most places with him. Sasha was bright, beautiful and full of life. Throughout my college years I wondered if the day would come when I would bring a Siberian into my life with everything the breed has to offer.
In the early 2000's I had the opportunity to do some photography work for an international company who had bought the Carnation Corporation. Part of the Carnation brand at one point was a line of dog and cat foods. In development a line of dogs and cats were held. To keep in the tradition of this history, Nestles introduced three lines of dogs to be breed on the grounds, one of which were the Siberian Husky. These three breeds were cut from some of the best lines in the world and were available only to employees from around the globe.
When I placed my order for what would eventually become Butch, I was looking for some very explicit features starting with a male, the females are generally higher in intelligence and have been known as escape artists. I also sought the traditional black and white markings, piercing blue eyes and a reasonably low key temperament suitable to be a training partner and the companion I craved. The staff at Nestles were very professional in all aspects of the health of the breeds and furthering a world class line but they were also very thorough with the needs of all special requests so after 18 months Pavlov Butch Chinook was delivered.
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| Smile Butch |
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| Those eyes got him out of a lot of sticky situations. |
A Siberian is an athletic, intelligent breed that can be independent and challenging for a first-time dog owner. They are not know to be aggressive, do well with children, and will welcome everyone into their home - even intruders. The fact is that they tend to love everybody. Ordinarily your most extreme danger with a Siberian is being licked to death.
Siberians are a high-energy, gregarious breed that must have an occupation. They are a working dog bred for strenuous work hauling sleds in difficult terrain and weather conditions. A Siberian will demand attention and will get it one way or another. If not provided an occupation, they will find one, and you may not like the method chosen.
Siberian Huskies dig. If your lawn and flowers are the pride and joy of your life... I may caution you against this breed. Butch would dig holes to cool off in the summer and would dig what would appear to be cozy nests in the snow. It didn't matter snow or no snow Butch's instinct said, "Dig!!" Butch and I had few contentions through out our time together so in this case we would simple agree to disagree.
Butch was strong, stubborn, independent and rambunctious. Another way to say that may be Butch was powerful, persistent, smart and full of energy and stamina, desirable traits in a training partner, but in a house pet only if he were well trained. In time Butch became a polite and relatively calm house pet but only when met with companionship, training and exercise - lots of exercise.
We all have those days when we have no ambition to do what's best for ourselves and our goals. I was struggling to get back into the endurance world, this is when Butch entered my life.
Running long distances is what Butch was bred to do. This ability didn't go away when it wasn't part of his normal routine. Butch had a special way of getting the chosen off the couch and out the door.
Dogs shouldn't start running until their growth plates are closed. That meant we would wait until Butch was one or even two years old before we would begin any type of structured running. We worked with our vet and were given the green light to start running Butch at 18 months old.
So we were first time dog owners with a puppy with plenty of energy and the natural instinct to pull when on a leash or in a harness. We had seen plenty of example where a Siberian owner had failed to teach their puppy not to pull when walking. In many cases the argument could be made that the dog was walking the pet owner not the other way around as the pet dragged the owner around the neighborhood. We were warned of this early and made the decision this could not be in our case.
When faced with the task of training the instinct to pull out of a rambunctious high energy Siberian puppy lots of short-long walks are necessary. How this is done is when on the collar each time your puppy pulls or creates tension, what the puppy is looking for is tension on the collar against his neck, each time this would happen we would stop and sit. Eventually teaching the pet that tension meant a stop and sit or a diversion from the goal, a goal of covering distance through exercise. Butch and I had many long walks that would only cover the distance of around the block, each time he pulled we would stop until he was sitting along side of me. There were plenty of times we wouldn't take a step forward without Butch leaving the sit position only to start pulling again. We wouldn't cover much ground in the beginning but with time he would begin to learn tension means sit, no tension means freedom, freedom to move as one with whomever would take him out to be exercised.
I loved running with Butch, his enthusiasm and sense of adventure always on full display. He would push for additional exercise on every run, only heat as a motivating factor to wrap it up. Butch would accompany us on 3 to 4 runs a week on average. We would eventually train him to run as far as 18 miles mostly on trails through Riverside State Park. We would carry a small collapsible water bowl so we could get him water along the way or we would pull over along the river for a short time to allow him to drink and cool standing waste deep. Days that were unseasonably warm we would leave him at home or just take him for a longer walk. It would always prove a challenge to get away from the house in running cloths on warmer days. It didn't take Butch long to figure out the difference between running and cycling cloths. If I were in running shoes I would have a Siberian stuck to my leg.
There would come a time when we would begin to ponder Butch's retirement from running. Because there are days when Bootsy needs to train in the early morning hours we would bring in another running partner as Butch approached his retirement years. We decided to bring in another breed and that's when Kailua came to live with us.
Two big dogs in our home was never something we would have considered if we were not in need of another training partner. Wanting to be sure Kai would be ready to pick up where Butch left off, we decided to bring her in when Butch reached the age of 10 and had begun to slow down. We understood the life expectancy for a Siberian is between 12-14 years so we would need time for Kai to mature into the running partner and companion we looked to move forward with.
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| My two favorite ladies. |
As Butch's body began to slow his spirit did not. He would struggle when Kai would be harnessed for a run but he would not. I had a great deal of guilt when forced to leave him behind for the run portion of the workout. We would return post run and pick him up for a walk during the cool down portion.
Although it was best for Butch to retire as we could see his body had worn to the point where his spirit would carry him a little to far from time to time and we were left to watch as his aging body paid the price. My guilt when leaving Butch behind was based largely in the fact that I knew he felt deprived of the very thing he was bred to do but it was personal as well. Butch had been there for every step of my growth in the endurance world and I didn't want that to change - on a personal level. I moved up an age group last year now racing in the M 50-54 A.G. which by the way is a line in the sand of noticeable magnitude. I have to wonder if the opportunity to P.R. (Personal Record) is also beginning to dwindle. To stand by and watch Butch on the back side of his "arc of fitness", I would have to evaluate if this were a mirror image of mine. Never a bad idea to evaluate where you are in your endurance career from time to time but also never an easy exercise.
When Butch left us I was heart broken in the same way anyone would be with the lose of a long time companion. But there was something else for me in this case, something I wasn't completely prepared for. After all it wasn't a secret he would someday soon be gone, he was a large breed at the age of 13 for goodness sake. I however was surprised by how much emotion I had tied to his little wagon.
I get it Butch was "just a dog" and his only true fault was that his life was to short, but what he represented in my head, in my heart and as a partner in the my growth in the endurance world, this would take some evaluation.
In the few years leading up to Butch's arrival, I had gotten to a place where I had lost confidence in myself. The softball diamond became my outlet for my competitive spirit and for a while it had become my sanctuary. Although I was having some success on the diamond my drive to stay at the competitive local level had began to dwindle along with my confidence.
Be it right or wrong, sport has had a huge impact on how I view myself, how I define myself and that in turn affects my self esteem. This also has an affect on my confidence because confidence comes primarily from self esteem.
Sport brings goal setting, strength and structure. Without these I began to tear myself down and in the process lose confidence. It was reflected in the lose of passion for things away from sport, weight gain and in the fact that I began to look at only the things I didn't like about myself. Sport provided the avenue to once again embrace who I was and a to re-establish a missing confidence.
Butch helped begin the process of healing most of these issues as he pushed me back toward an old friend, toward a form of sport that is triathlon.
As Butch aged and his running health began to decline, I found myself re-examining the time in my life before his arrival and all things that brought disappointment in myself. So it would seem natural that I would link his companionship and drive to most of the good things I enjoy through sport.
Kia is a wonderful training partner and companion. I can rest easy when Bootsy steps out into the early morning air for a run with Kia by her side. But for as wonderful as it is to be out there losing ourselves in a run on the trails through the park, I often times find myself revisiting time spent with Butch as Kai and I cover the same ground covered with Butch by my side. Creating new memories with Kai is a welcome and enjoyable activity but to be honest there have been runs were I have been forced to stop and walk as I worked through the emotions and memories of runs with Butch. The need to work through this style of emotional memory is expected but there have been more then enough memories that continue to catch me off guard.
I have a longstanding tradition each Saturday in the fall of the year. Fall brings football season which in turn brings the ESPN product Gameday. I have for years been out of bed each Saturday by 5:45 a.m. in preparation for Gameday viewing, Butch at my feet as I sit in solitude for 3 hours of football zen.
This year at 5:45 a.m. on the much anticipated opening day of College Football I could't get out of bed knowing Butch wouldn't be at my feet. My heart just to heavy to carry forward in a tradition I completely revel in. It was a defining day as I eventually would make my way through something that was a complete blindside.
Emotional memories are all part of the process and some of it's moments keep surprising me. But I am also beginning to celebrate the memories as they sneak up on me. For example, this fall I was gifted with a weekend on the Grande Ronde River in pursuit of Sea Run Rainbow. As my fishing partner and I stepped into the clear cool water of one of our favorite spots on the river he mentioned rather matter-of-factly "The last time I took a fish in this hole Butch was with us". A great memory that brought a smile for both of us.
In the end, triathlon is a large part of my life because it is my chosen lifestyle, a lifestyle Bootsy and I continue to enjoy for all it gives us on a daily basis. Butch's roll in this lifestyle going forward will be largely unfulfilled as we move forward without him, Kai by our side. As I continue my growth in this lifestyle I will carry the lessons learned with him and from him but his presence and what he represented can never be replaced.
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| Butch was never much interested in family portraits. |
"Until one has loved a dog, a part of one's sole remains unawakened" - Anatole France
