Jun. 09, 2010 - Issue #764: Hot Summer Guide 2010

Entry 6: Through purgatory

Pushing through pain and physical obstacles

How do you cope with more pain than you've ever experienced? How do you push beyond the limits of your endurance?

As race day looms—at this point, less than two months away—these are the questions that haunt me. As I've trained for and researched ultra racing, I've become keenly aware that this race will introduce me to a whole new level of pain and adversity.

Over the gruelling 125 kilometres, my legs will be pounded on steep ascents and descents, my body will be drained of energy trying to sustain itself over prolonged hours of running. And then there is the mental fatigue. I begin to wonder: aside from marketing genius (obviously), why do they call it the Death Race? Perhaps, I think, that's the kind of question a smart person (sane person?) asks before signing up.

"Once you experience it you will understand," replies Sakura Hozumi, one of the organizers, in answer to my question. "After racing, racers look like zombies and hobble around with an undead smile on their faces."

OK, not exactly encouraging. But, hey, at least they're smiling? Still I have to wonder how athletes manage to push the body to that point. For answers I seek out Dwight Kroening.
Kroening, who goes by the blog handle Heart Transplant Ironman, redefines human possibility. After having a heart transplant in his 20s, Kroening's doctors told him his ability to participate in certain sports would forever be altered. Some things would just be too taxing on his heart.

Kroening listened, then set out to prove them wrong. For the next 22 years he ran, skied, coached, taught physical education and generally pushed the warranty on his new heart to the limit.

In 2004, his 18th year post-transplant, he participated in a research study at the University of Alberta under Mark Haykowsky and Ken Riess. The results suggested he might be capable of completing a triathlon. So he ran a sprint tri, then an Olympic half. Four years later, he completed the 2008 Subaru Penticton Ironman—22 years post-transplant.

"I never thought I would be able to do something like that," Kroening says. "There was always the question whether I had the capability to do something seriously physically taxing.

"The mind was a significant obstacle. I was always battling with, can the body, can the heart handle this ... this fear that you're going to be out there running and all of a sudden you're going to collapse and die because your heart gives out."

That's a fear Lynne Chisholm can relate to. While training for her first Death Race in 2009, she discovered she had abnormally high blood pressure. Doctors found a blood clot in her aorta, dangerously close to the heart. "I was hospitalized for a week, which really pissed me off because I wasn't allowed to train," she recalls, laughing.

The clot was inoperable, but Chisholm refused to give up running. A week after getting out of hospital, she ran a 5 Peaks race in Calgary, which she grudgingly calls her "worst ever" race. With medication and close monitoring, she's kept running. "I just carry on with life," she explains.

Kroening shares a similarly positive outlook, unwilling to be deterred by a mere prognosis. "You've got to believe that things are going to get better. It's easy to get into the frame of mind that, 'This is it, I'll never run again' or, 'This is all there is to it.' You have to have the conviction that this is a temporary setback.

"I've never been the type of person that will accept the fact I can't do something until it's absolutely physically impossible."

Even physical impossibility has proven to be a moving threshold for Kroening. "A transplant heart has no nerves. When they put the new heart in they sever all the nerve connections." This directly affects how the heart responds to advanced physical demands, he explains.

Doctors told him he would never do anaerobic activity again. Kroening was depressed but unbeaten. "I believe the body is miraculously created and it will adapt and I can maybe teach it, I can train it to adjust. And so that's what I did."

Ten years after Kroening got his heart, he went in for a biopsy and doctors found evidence of re-inervation. Nerves had begun to grow back around his heart.

In no way is this comparable, but in late April I injured my lower back. Each morning I woke with a pitchfork in my back. The flames of hell radiated through my core. Coping with injury is living in purgatory. You're not dead or laid up, but you're not well enough to train or perform at your regular level. Like Chisholm, I was pissed.

But talking to Kroening and Chisholm helped put it in perspective. It reminded me that seemingly insurmountable odds aren't necessarily so. That conviction alone goes a long way to transforming from a walking zombie into a confident, determined racer.

Yea, though I run through the Valley of Death, I shall fear no obstacle. V