DIRK VLIEKS

I loved triathlon because I loved pushing boundaries. I felt there was no better way to test myself. Once I had my first taste, I knew immediately that triathlon was the ideal complement to what drove me —the perfect sport with the perfect blend of exertion and adrenaline and discipline. I thought it was the ultimate challenge, the most demanding thing I would ever face.

I was wrong.

In a lifetime of looking for challenges, I learned quickly there were a few I’d have preferred not to face. Learning to walk again at age thirty-four was harder. So was learning to eat and speak again. Those were just a bit more challenging than anything thrown at me by an Ironman.

But maybe everything I had done before “the event,” the mid-race stroke in 2006 that sent me to edge of the precipice, where my life hung tenuously by the thinnest of threads, had prepared me for what lay ahead. That day in Hawaii I was transformed in a few brief moments from athlete to helpless infant, from the lead group of cyclists to an intensive care unit where doctors felt certain I would not make it, from trying to qualify for the big race to simply staying alive.

Maybe triathlon saved me.

If you’ve never thought of attempting to swim, then bike, then run without interruption over any distance, your first question is obvious.

“Why?”

If you ramp up the distances, Ironman distances, between seventy and one-hundred forty miles for a day’s outing, your next question will be, “Are you out of your mind?”

For me, my first triathlon was an irresistible Siren’s song. Once I heard it I couldn’t get it out of my mind. And nothing in my life was ever the same again.

I love triathlon. I’m not trying to be disingenuous when I talk about how difficult it is to finish one while I call attention to the fact that I’ve finished many. I don’t believe in ostentation or showing off. These races are difficult for everyone, plain and simple. In many ways, they are ordeals to be finished, not events to be savored. But in other ways they are celebrations of your physical strength and mental tenacity. That’s the point, and that’s why tens of thousands of athletes, men and women of all ages, take them on every year.

Finish an Iron-distance triathlon and you are on top of the world, exhausted, elated, and ready for anything that life will throw at you in the real world. An oft-quoted saying among competitors is “triathlon doesn’t build character, it reveals it.”

Read what a few other have said about triathlons and you’ll get the idea.

Mark Allen, a friend and a six-time Ironman world champion, said this about the Ironman, the competition that started this whole thing.  “Until you face your fears you don’t move to the other side, where you find the power.”

John Collins, known as the Father of Ironman, put it this way, “The pain is temporary, the memories will las the rest of your life.”

Maybe throw in what two-time Ironman world champion Chris McCormack said about it.  “You don’t play triathlon. You play soccer; it’s fun. You play baseball. Triathlon is work that can leave you crumpled in a heap, puking by the roadside. It’s the physical brutality of climbing Mount Everest without the great view from the top of the world. What kind of person keeps coming back for more of that?”

I kept coming back.

I loved it and still do. There’s the elation at the finish, of course, but there is also the growing confidence as you train, the self-assurance that comes with the discipline you need, the friends you train with, the common bonds, pushing your limits, knowing yourself. The list is long.

The idea for Ironman started in 1977 with a friendly argument in Hawaii between swimmers and runners over who was fitter, a pretty much standard dispute that’s been around probably for as long as people have been swimming and running. That’s when John Collins, a US Navy commander, upped the stakes, pointing out that Sports Illustrated had asserted that Belgian cyclist Eddy Merckx was perhaps the fittest athlete around.

Collins tossed in that maybe cyclists are fitter than either swimmers of runners,

And so the seed was planted and it quickly grew into what would be called the Ironman: a 2.4-mile ocean swim followed by a 112-mile bike ride topped off by a marathon, 26.2 miles of final torture.

Fifteen men started first Ironman on February 18, 1978. Twelve finished and nothing has been the same since.

A Sports Illustrated article after the 1979 race started the buzz building, but probably nothing did more to burn the image of what the race can do to competitors -- and to raise interest in it world-wide -- than Julie Moss’s 1982 finish, where a national audience watching ABC’s Wide World of Sports saw her collapse so torturously close to the finish and struggle to hold her lead. Less than ten yards from the line, she collapsed for the final time. As Moss lay writhing in the darkness, she was passed by Kathleen McCartney, who was unaware she had won the race.

Moss became the poster child for the Ironman, an indelible symbol of all it took. Her finish did more to put Ironman on the map than anything else.

I was ten years old when Julie Moss brought Ironman into the public consciousness. It would take me a while get to the finish line in Hawaii, but I would.

I’ve always enjoyed moving and competing, and in my peripatetic early childhood, with my physicist father moving us from Ohio to Canada and around Europe every three years, sports gave me a way to focus. At first, in Europe, it was skiing, but when we moved back to the states when I was ten, skiing  took a backseat to tennis, which consumed me all through high school and onto college, where I played Division I at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California.

A challenge from my older brother had sent me to the courts, motivated me. He played and was good, and he turned to me the summer before I hit sixth grade and said I’d never make the high school varsity team as a freshman. That was the only fuel I needed. I made the varsity as a freshman and didn’t look back.

I loved everything about tennis.

I even took it a step further after college and began playing professionally in some international tournaments. But the slashing back-and-forth of years of tennis took its toll on my knees fairly early. A year after I graduated from St. Mary’s in 1996, after playing in a tournament in Brazil, my knees were shot and I came back home for some rehab work.

“Find something to do where you go straight,” a physical therapist told me.

And so the story begins. Enter triathlon. I had found another passion.

I have never thought of myself as an elite athlete. I was simply wired to compete, able to relish the long hours of training, to actually look forward to them. And it takes a lot of hours to get to the finish line of an Ironman. I spent quite a few of those hours with guys who were Olympic and world-class competitors, and their fervor for the sport wore off on me. I saw what it took.

Basically a triathlon goes something like this, no matter that the distance:

You enter the swim leg, always the first segment, in a pack. No matter how much you try to avoid it, you’ll be kicked or elbowed, unintentionally for the most part. There is always a lot of adrenaline pumping. But soon people pick their lines and the pack spreads out. You begin, find your rhythm, mindful of breathing and stroke and cadence, conscious as you will be for the rest of the day of pushing yourself but staying below the line where you will burn out too early. It’s a long race and a delicate balance.

Next, you emerge from the water and head for your bike, the transition zone for changing usually mildly chaotic and sometimes jarring. But as always you simply focus, find your bike, get your shoes and helmet, and head out. The pack has spread even more by then by then, so the beginning of the bike leg is not nearly as raucous as the start of the swim. You ride, concentrate, and again find the rhythm. Too much and you don’t finish. Not enough and you finish poorly.

The final leg is always the run. Pushing pedals in a set cadence wears on legs in a much different way than running does. If you’ve trained properly the transition from pedaling to striding is relatively easy. If you haven’t, the moment your feet hit the road for the run, your legs buckle and turn to goo. Your quads burn and refuse to engage. You stumble. If you have done the proper training your stride will come quickly and you head for the finish.

Sounds relatively simple, but of course it’s not.

These races don’t take place in air-conditioned arenas. They are outside, and that might mean ocean waves and whitecaps, tides going against you, humidity, high winds in your face, hills. It might mean being cut off by an oblivious biker or being kicked in the face by the guy in front of you on the swim.

Each leg has its own peculiarities. The swim offers the jostling. The bike leg the challenge of trying to ingest enough nutrients to keep on the right side of the envelope, to fuel yourself to make it to the finish. And then there are the side surprises of things like flat tires and crashes and passing.

If I had a favorite leg I guess it would be the run. Fewer complications.

I never set goals for myself, but I always shot for a top finish. You just never know how you will feel in any particular race and the mechanical wild cards are simply too hard to predict. But I did go into each race with confidence.

Confidence comes from training and knowing you’re ready, and sometimes up to sixteen hours of training a week gave me confidence. Eight-hour bike rides, two-hour swims, hours of running. The discipline was part of my life. And it was part of the lives of the people I trained with who were as equally crazy about it as I was. That always helps.

After my stroke, when the biggest challenge of my life had begun, all this effort would come home to roost and help immeasurably. And so would the many friends I met and raced against.

When I was in my lowest hours after my stroke, fighting the darkness that would sometimes threaten my resolve, I’d draw on how I felt as I approached an Ironman finish, twenty-four miles into the run. In front of me would always be someone I’d been trying to catch for the last hour, one more person to pass. Maybe we’d been dueling all day.

That was when I would tell myself one more time, “kick it in and pass that guy.”

Usually I would.  My stroke, my ultimate challenge, would be yet another chance to kick it in.

In a way, that helped.

One: The Event

Rituals are always comforting, and mine always worked.

I had a subtle and practiced ritual before each race that I rarely changed. I would begin to settle into myself the night before, slowly making the transition from genial to focused. By the time I went to bed I’d be at the point where I spoke only when I needed to. Before I drifted calmly off to sleep I would put on my game face and go through the race mentally, imaging how I’d feel at certain points. Before bed I’d lay out everything I needed the next day on the floor so I’d see it and count if when I woke up -- the swim goggles, the nutrition packets and water bottles, the things that would sustain me the next day.

The night before the Honu Half-Ironman triathlon in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, I dropped off to sleep satisfied I was ready for what would be a qualifier for the actual Ironman, the big race I loved..

On race day morning I had concentrated on the phases ahead and the hours I’d be working, controlling my adrenaline surges as much as I could to preserve energy.

There were patterns in every race I knew that would insert themselves during the long day ahead, some highs—an unexpected surge of energy on the bike, for example. And there would be brief moments of despair—being passed on the run when I hadn’t expected it. For the most part I’d simply fold into the race, lost in concentration. The emotional cycle was familiar to me and in a way, comforting: the adrenaline, the tight nerves, the focus, the surges.

Then there was the finish. Since I never set out to win a race, only to do my best, I never had the crashing emotions some top finishers experience. Since I always trained to do my best and was comfortable with the challenges, finishes was nearly always a time of great relief and happiness.

The end of a race always brought what I can only describe as a wonderful and serene wave of euphoria—an almost overwhelming sense that I had again pushed myself and had accomplished what I set out to do. That’s the reason I race.

I always loved that euphoria of the finish, relished it and looked forward to it. I would let go for a bit and let the feeling of accomplishment wash over me, I’d indulge myself in pride of accomplishment. Post-race was always a great time. Usually Kelsey and I would have a slow and relaxed dinner with friends, all of us laughing and feeling the same. It’s incomparable, that feeling. It’s wonderful.

I never got to the euphoria phase on June 2, 2006. I never had the delicious dinner or hugged my wife or joked with friends. Around the time I should have been digging into a profoundly delicious dinner and relishing the day’s events, I was simply trying to stay alive.

When I stood on the beach in Kona that day, I had gone through my pre-race ritual as I always did more than fifty times. I was in full game-face mode. I was ready. My legs felt great and I was motivated.

My goal for the race was to simply not hold back on anything and to go as hard as I could, when I could. I wanted to race smart, that is, to maintain the rhythm and balance of energy over the hours I’d be pushing and not burn out too early. The funny thing is, when “the event” took me down, I had not yet really pushed myself.

I always sleep well before races and that day was no exception. And keeping with that I got up early to enjoy a strong cup of coffee and mentally go through the race.

By that point I was happy with my training. Working up to each race I always looked for ways to improve, a more efficient swim stroke, better bike cadence, smarter run strategy—the was always something I could improve. Luckily I always had great training partners, people who wouldn’t look at you open-mouthed when you said you wanted to do an extra mile of swimming or another hour of running. They were great company and we enjoyed pushing each other, another side benefit of triathlon.

These partners would prove invaluable later.

I’d left SFO from United Gate 80 for a direct flight to Kona, the Big Island, with little ado, just few “good lucks” and “do wells” from coworkers and clients and friends. They were used to the scene and I never liked to make a big deal out of a race anyway. When I got to Kona I began to settle into the pre-race ritual with a few short bike rides to get my legs moving and a few sprints to get the heart pumping a bit, but nothing too long. Before the race it was always “legs up,” nothing more than a short swim.

There was always familiar face at a race, regulars who love the competition and eat it up. Before the race there’s not a lot of socializing other than a quick cup of coffee and chat. Everyone has the game-face look.

In other words, I prepared as I always had, and I felt great and ready and excited—as I always had. There were no ominous signs auguring what would happen in a matter of hours down the highway as I stood at the starting line on the beach wearing bib number 789 with more than a thousand other competitors.

The weather that morning was cool, which is always preferable. The wind was down and the water fairly quiet. I heard the wind picked up later, but by then I was out of the race.

As the swim got off to its usually chaotic start I picked my line and tied it follow it. With so many other swimmers trying to do the same thing,  there was the inevitable jostling. The trick is to stay cool and centered.  The mildly controlled chaos is inevitable when there were so many amped-up athletes about to unleash combined tens of thousands of hours of training. On the beach, most of us would by that time be making idle silly chit-chat, just to keep our minds off what lay ahead.

Among the supporters at the start were of course my wonderful wife Kelsey, herself an endurance athlete,  and her friend Dixie, who was on hand to a encourage her husband Chris Hauth, a former Olympic swimmer and my training partner and good friend.  Kelsey and Dixie planned to follow us through various phases and yell an occasional blast of inspiration if the saw me or Chris during the race, which as a half-Ironman would comprise a 1.2-mile swim, 56-mile bike, and 13.5-mile run.

At the gun on the beach were we off, a thousand highly training triathletes with one goal in mind, finish and finish well. I did what I always did, blasted out quickly to get ahead of the clamoring masses. Three minutes into the swim, I felt fine. I was out of the water in  30.31, a good time. A friend later gave me a great photo of me as I emerged from the swim leg. I definitely had my game face on, my eyes locked ahead, but my stride was open and I was in attack mode for sure. I was happy to be out and heading for my bike without any issues.

I was ready for the bike leg, something I had worked on with a laser focus leading up to the race. It was where I planned to put the hammer down and insert myself among the leaders. Chris and I would sometimes do 100-mile training rides through the Northern California hills to get ready for Hawaii.

The transition zone, where athletes scramble to their bikes and try to get off as smoothly as possible, was fairly clutter-free. I knew where my bike, an Interloc Slipstream SC, was and headed right to it. I wanted to get out as fast as I could. I felt like the bike phase was where I would lock in on focus and give everything I had.

I had planned everything down to the final detail, bringing with me GU and GU20 for nutrition and other necessities like bananas and salt pills and of course plenty of water. The whole idea is to make sure the vital sugars I need to take in worked well together. Stomach cramps and worse are a nightmare mid-race. Having a massive stroke mid-race can be a bit of a bummer as well, I would learn later.

As I headed into the ride, my rhythm and pace building just as I had planned, the chills from the morning swim were replaced by increasingly warmer air. The wind was from the side, certainly better than a long slog into a strong headwind.

Fifteen minutes and about eighteen miles in and working smoothly up Queens Highway, I began to feel something was amiss. I was just a bit off. It was an odd feeling, certainly, when I had trained so well and planned so meticulously. It wasn’t as if I was jolted with a sudden pain. I began to feel dizzy—which in itself is fairly common with water in your inner ear from the swim trying to free itself as you move your head from side to side. I’ve had that happen before and it had always gone away within a few miles on the bike.

This time it didn’t.

It latched on and settled in, which was quite a different feeling from past rides. My vision began to blur. It got worse with each push of the pedal. For the first time ever, in more than fifty triathlons, the thought that I need to stop crept in. By that point I was approaching the lead pack, which was just heading into a downhill turn.

As I watched the lead pack I had so much wanted to catch head into the turn, I gave up, conceding the race knowing only that it would be safer to get off my bike near people rather than out somewhere in no-man’s land where no one would see me in trouble.

I felt like shit and I started looking for a place to pull off. Queen’s Highway was lined on both sides with black lava fields, not a great place to lie down. I saw a patch of grass near the Hawi town line that looked I had never dropped out of a race before. Stopping to rest had never been in any playbook I had written. I knew that once I got off the bike it was over for me. This wasn’t a time where I could get off, rest, regroup, and head back into the fray. It was over. And at that point I didn’t care. Something was seriously awry and I could sense it.

My first thought was of Kelsey. I didn’t know what was going on but I knew it was serious.  What ultimately happened was the farthest thing from my mind as I pulled off the road, but I knew I was in crisis.

I was thirty-three years old and in the best shape of my life. I thought I was dying.

I saw the grass patch and pulled off, unsnapping my helmet, and using my bike to steady myself as laid down because I had begun to stagger by that time.

That was when the first of several very fortunate blessings occurred. As I was reeling, race director Jimmy Riccitello,  passed by on the back of a Harley, scanning racers for problems, making sure things were running smoothly, as race directors must do.

“I need some help,” I told him as I struggled to keep calm. Things were getting worse very quickly. My uneasy dismount and my plea for help to Jimmy were enough to have him tell the Harley driver to pull over, but he was not initially alarmed.

Jimmy, who later became a great friend, would tell me that he didn’t realize I was in trouble, at least physically.

“You looked normal,” he said. But of course I was anything but.

As I lay on that patch of grass I told him, my words by then beginning to slur, that my head hurt. I told him I thought I was dying.

I told him to call Kelsey and tell her I loved her.

Riccitello called into Race Operations on his handheld radio and said he needed help immediately, but he got no response from that remote spot. He tried his cell phone, and again, nothing.

His driver tied as well and got through. Help was on the way, she was told, Race Operations had heard Riccitello’s first radio message.

As I was lying on the ground Riccitello checked my heart-rate monitor. It read 60. At that point in the race, after the swim and twenty miles into a strenuous bike ride, it should have been around 140 or 150.

That was the first time the alarm rang loudly, the first time the word would be mentioned.

“I need someone out here fast,” Riccitello said on a second more urgent call. “We might have a stroke victim here.”

My head still hurt and my vision was fading quickly. I asked Jimmy three more times to make sure he called Kelsey, to make sure he told her I loved her.

I could hear Riccitello asking racers passing by if they were doctors. That was one of the last clear memories I have of that day. Everything after that for a very long time would be a fast-moving blur--a mix of brief moments of clarity and nightmarish darkness.

Finally Riccitelo saw someone he knew and she pulled over—a blessing. By stopping mid-race, she had done something many others would have found unimaginable. Imagine training hundreds of hours for a race and stopping to help. That simple act was a tremendous sacrifice—and wonderfully unselfish.

She was one of several blessings that day. I could have had the stroke during the swim and not been seen in the frenzy. I could have had it on a forty-mile-an-hour downhill earlier on the bike leg. Other injections of good karma would arrive in due time.

My good Samaritan made sure I was lying on my back as medical help from Race Operations arrived. I was put on a stretcher and slipped gently into the back of a van. Medics started an IV and the van turned across Queens Highway and headed back to the medical tent at race headquarters.

By that point I was drifting I was drifting in an out of consciousness.

BY then, ahead of where I was now lying on the road getting medical attention, Kelsey and Dixie had been among the cheerful crowd standing under the palms trees in front of the Mauna Kea Hotel up from Hapuna Beach, waiting for the cyclists to pass. They saw  Chris, in the lead group of four and thought I would not be far behind.

I have often thought that following a long triathlon, trying to keep up with me, was harder than actually racing it. But Kelsey always did it, and always seemed to manage to grab a spot where she could yell some encouragement. She was there that day when I got out of the water, standing in the transition zone and yelled, “Pick it up, honey.”

They didn’t see me as Chris and the lead group swept past, but they weren’t worried. Any number of things could have been the reason. A flat tire, a mechanical problem, a crash maybe, and with more than a thousand racers, they might simply have missed me in the packs of cyclists flashing by. Of course the thought of a major medical crisis was not among the reasons.

Kelsey called her mother in Connecticut and asked her to use an online tracking system on the Ironman website to find out where I was. Her mom called back a minute later and said she could not find me. That was the first small injection of anxiety on what would be a terrifying day for Kelsey and our families.

Kelsey and Dixie decided to head for race headquarters to see what was going on. They parked their rental car and were headed to the Fairmont Hotel when they passed the medical tent. That’s when blessing number three of the day dropped in. Kelsey glanced into the tent through an open flap into the tent and noticed a pair of shaven legs flopped on a cot—my legs. She recognized them instantly.

By that time I was unconscious.

Kelsey, a physical therapist who had completed graduate school a year earlier and was working at a rehabilitation outpatient facility near our home in California, knew all too intimately the signs. Despite the tremendous shock, Kelsey snapped immediately into an unemotional and professional mode. Dixie began crying.

“I knew instantly what had happened when I saw your left side was paralyzed. That’s when I said my first prayer.”

It was strangely quiet in the tent, the scene usually of athlete being treated for dehydration or road rash from cashed or the unusual medically inconsequential irritations of a long race with many participant. Certainly not strokes among this group f hyper-fit athletes.

A nurse noticed Kelsey and asked if she was my wife. No one else was speaking, certainly not me.

It was not good.

Following established protocol, the emergency doctors on hand began what would be an IV drip of two liters of a dextrose and saline solution and pricked me to test my response to pain stimuli. I was unresponsive. The found that I would move my right hand and foot when asked, but nothing on my left side.

On hand was Franklin Marcus, a cardiac anesthesiologist, who was medical director of the race that day. Used to treating something like forty racers during a race like the Kona, he’d never seen anything a severe as my case in the twenty-five years he’d been a volunteer. Usually he treated racers for dehydration and electrolyte issues brought on by cyclists being unable to drink as much as they should have because high winds required they grip the handles tightly.

He pulled Kelsey away from my side at the cot and outside the tent.

“This is bad,” he told her. “There seems to be a large amount of internal bleeding.”

Then came blessing number four.  Assisting for the first time was a recently graduated neurologist—uncommon in a group of volunteers usually comprised of family practitioners and sports medicine guys. He was so fresh from medical school that he had not yet seen an acute stroke, but he noticed that my symptoms were textbook classic.

I began to slip into total unconsciousness, which an on-edge Dr. Marcus noticed immediately. Kelsey stood behind him yelling at me to stay awake.

Dr. Marcus immediately ordered the medical van to take me to the emergency room at the small 40-bed North Hawaii Community Hospital in nearby Waimea for more tests.

I was put on life support as soon as I was quickly but gingerly brought into the ER..

I had had a massive hemorrhagic stroke, a nearly always fatal eruption. At that early point no one was sure precisely where it had occurred, but somewhere in my brain a weakened blood vessel had ruptured. A torrent of blood was literally flooding my brain cavity near the critical area that controlled my breathing.

Survivors of these massive strokes usually end up in a permanent coma.

I was intubated, a long flexible tube inserted in my throat to allow a machine to do my breathing for me.

Much later, I would remember dreams of being trapped underwater, desperate for breath. In the dream I’d occasionally break through to the surface and gasp for breath. Then I would sink once more into the darkness.

It was odd, that small spark of memory of nearly suffocating. For years I would not be able to dream anything, and I would fervently wish each night for some relief from troubled sleep.

The severity of a day that had begun as so many other races days with hope and excitement was settling in. Kelsey, still in professional mode, did not cry, but was slowly being overcome with nausea. Dixie had left to find Chris at the finish and when they rejoined Kelsey they found her shivering at my bedside from shock and the chill of the air conditioning.

The ER physician returned with the CT scan results. I had had a brainstem hemorrhage with an intraventricular extension. The rupture had occurred in an area of the brain where all cognitive motor functions are controlled, things like vision, certain sensations, and the ability to walk and talk. It was as if Perfect Storm dropped into Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

A doctor told Kelsey that even if I were to defy the odds and survive, I would most certainly spend the rest of my life in a “locked-in state”—a permanent coma.

Kelsey asked to see the CT scan. She had seen many and understood what she was looking at. But she had never looked at one of her husband’s brain while he lay in a coma beside her.

What she saw terrified her.

Doctors told her my condition was extremely critical and I would need to be—I must be—moved to Queen’s Medical Center on Oahu. Karma again intruded. Queens had the neuroscience ICU on the islands, in fact it was one of very few on the entire West Coast.

A hospital caseworker--whose name was Angel--came in to tell Kelsey that an air ambulance had been called to fly me and Kelsey and a medical team to Honolulu.

Time passed by painfully as the flight was held up by fog.

Frozen by the delay, knowing all too well that I could die at any minute, the banality of small tasks gave some small sense of relief from other more ominous thought.

Dixie began calling parents and siblings in California and Connecticut, starting just the first drop in what would be an enormous flow of information to the outside world. The first message of what would in the next weeks be in the hundreds was simple: Get to Hawaii as fast as possible.

Kelsey even called her boss at Kenfield Rehabilitation Hospital near our home in Marin to explain the situation, and to say she wasn’t sure when she’d be able to return to work.

There was a question of weight on the small aircraft, which would carry me and my breathing machine, two medics, and Kelsey to Honolulu.

“Are you under 120?” Angle asked.

“One hundred fifteen,” she lied.

The flight was eerily beautiful for Kelsey, one last distraction before ugly reality took up permanent residence.

“I’d never seen Hawaii from the air,” she would say later. “For some reason I just kept staring out at the spectacular  scenery, the waterfalls and the lush tropical landscape, completely taking my mind off the fact that my husband was lying near death just behind me. I suppose I was in a kind of survival mode.”

We were met in Honolulu by a medical team and ambulance from Queens.

The second leg in the most challenging race I ever participated in was about to begin.