This will be the final of my “Favorite Photos” posts, following up on the last three posts about my favorite swim, bike and run photos.

This post is mostly chronological, but it diverges a little more than the others.

With that said, here are the final photos and their stories:

This isn’t 100% of every race number I’ve worn, but it’s close.

This photo was taken shortly after finishing Ironman California in 2001. I crossed the line with just a few minutes of daylight left and it looks like by the time I met up with my parents that darkness had set in. I think I look more sleepy, as opposed to tired, than I do in any other finish line photo. I doubt I had ever exercised beyond six hours in one day so finishing in just under 13 hours was the longest bout of exercise I had ever taken on (and still is for that matter).

If you look closely, you’ll notice the USMC t-shirt that my dad is wearing. The race utilized a large portion of the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base (for the bike) and we stayed in a hotel on the base on race weekend.

In January of 1967, my father was stationed at Camp Pendleton for his final training prior to shipping out to Vietnam.

This photo was taken by my Aunt Sherry shortly after finishing Ironman Hawai’i in 2004. I had traveled out to the race three weeks prior to attend Epic Camp Kona, hosted by Gordo Byrn and Scott Molina. At the time, Epic Camp had primarily served as a somewhat extreme training camp at a few various locations (originating in New Zealand). However, this camp in Kona was built around race performance so it was more tailored to understanding the course and peaking fitness for race day (instead of logging a 60-hour training week).

My mom, Karin, had decided that she wanted to come over to the Big Island as well and she completely immersed herself in the community and the race organization. One of my mother’s many strengths is the ability to thrive, with ease, in new environments. She started volunteering for the race very early on and it seemed like she knew just about everybody and anybody involved in the race by the time it started. As such, she got the opportunity to volunteer to put leis on the all finishers from the winners to whenever I finished (just inside top 50). That led to this special, shared moment we had at the finish line that year.

Challenge Wanaka 2009. Photo Credit: Sherry Daerr

This photo was taken shortly after finishing Challenge Wanaka in 2009 by my Aunt Sherry. I think my face clearly shows the aftermath of what a double bonk feels like. You can read more about the double bonk in the Run post from last week.

Ironman Texas 2014. Photo Credit: Sherry Daerr

This photo was taken as I crossed the finish line at Ironman Texas in 2014. As I mentioned in the previous post, this was a race where the whole day felt like it was pushing back against me. Nevertheless, on the last loop of the run (8+miles) I managed to rally and move into 3rd place in the final mile. Brooke had to physically catch me at the finish line because I was so spent.

Photo Credit: Larry Rosa (left), Nils Nilsen (right)

Ironman Boulder took place eleven weeks after Ironman Texas in 2014. Following IMTX that year, I went to three destination weddings in three weeks. The first was in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, the second was in Washington D.C. and the third was in Winter Park, Colorado (not as far). After the third wedding, I felt like complete shit. I was out of shape and worn out and I had this other race coming up in eight weeks time and it seemed as though I was starting from ground zero. As Brooke and I were driving back from the final wedding in Winter Park, we were talking about the upcoming race and I essentially said something along the lines of “I’m not going to worry about it, I’m just going to go train and see how fit I can get.”

Fast forward to 2020. Early that year I started reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: a very, very, very long book. The book has multiple settings, but one of them centers around the students/athletes at Enfield Tennis Academy. At this academy, there is a character that is a performance coach/sports psychologist and his philosophy on the key to performing at a high level is that the athlete needs to simultaneously care about something completely while also not caring at all.

This might seem completely ridiculous and given the humorous nature of the book it might be easy to lump it together with everything else that seems absurd. And I have no idea if Wallace was actually taking a dig at sports psychology in general with this character’s philosophy.

But this idea actually resonates with me quite profoundly. That initial mentality I had in the car ride home from Winter Park stayed with me over the next eight weeks. I seemed to be training at a high level, but I also seemed completely detached from the potential result of the race. There are other times in my career where I think I had a headspace that reflected this same mindset, but never to the degree of the summer of 2014 when I won my only Ironman race.

I think the photo of me and Brooke at the finish line shows the side that cared completely.

Moving on to the first of these next two photos, you will see a picture of the Sports section from The Denver Post the day after Ironman Boulder. That morning, Wayne Kansas (from Houston) happened to see that photo. To me, Wayne Kansas was, and will always be, Coach Kansas. I was not involved in competitive team sports growing up aside from my younger years (before high school) when I played little league soccer and baseball (only 4 years in soccer, about 8 or so in baseball). During that time period, Coach Kansas was my head coach (in both sports) on five separate occasions.

Chris Kansas was Wayne’s son. Chris and I were on all these teams together (Chris was a star athlete, way above me) and we attended the same schools from elementary through high school, many times in the same classes. Chris and I were not close friends, but he and his family were part of my life and our community from as far back as I could remember at the time (his mom was one of our school counselors as well as a substitute teacher. She would do a Marisa Tomei impression from My Cousin Vinny that the kids absolutely loved).

In August of 1998, Chris died tragically in a car accident in Houston. He was 17 years old.

I still think about him a lot. I still think about his family a lot. Even all these years later.

The morning after the IM Boulder in 2014, Coach Kansas saw the picture of me and Brooke in the paper and his wife reached out to me via Facebook to say hello and congratulations. We ended up meeting up in Boulder shortly after that, which is shown in the final photo above.

When I was in seventh grade our baseball team won the championship and we dumped a jug of Gatorade on him just like you see the pro’s do on t.v. But it wasn’t done simply to emulate what we saw on t.v. It was done out of joy and respect for all he had done for us. Whenever I see a team do that on television, I always think of Coach Kansas and how we all felt about him that day.

Thank you Coach Kansas. You were such a great influence for me and so many others.

In March of 2015, I was training in Boulder and I came down with a cold that had all the normal symptoms a cold has including a sore throat. Over the next week or so I got better, but I still had this mild sore throat that never seemed to dissipate entirely. I went down to The Woodlands in April to do a final training block for Ironman Texas that was coming up in May. In the first four editions of IMTX, I had always felt like I was a little behind in my preparation. I had finished 7th, 2nd, 4th and 3rd in those races and I was determined to try to up my training to a level where I could compete for the win.

Throughout the month of April, I was putting together some high quality training, but I still had this light sore throat that lingered. It never got worse, but it also never really got better. It was just there.

Two weeks out from the race, and back in Boulder, I woke up one morning with a chest cold, but this felt like something I hadn’t experienced before. For several days I tried to rest up and recover, but I wasn’t getting anywhere. In hindsight, I waited too long, but I finally went to the Urgent Care after 5-6 days of trying to recover on my own and was diagnosed with pneumonia (pictured left at the UC). Later on, I had some tests run and my doctor believed that I likely had something like mono throughout that time period with the sore throat which ultimately led me to developing pneumonia.

I started my treatment a week out from race day and I knew that my chances of doing as well as I had originally hoped for were gone, but I was still willing to try and start the race if I felt like it wouldn’t set me back even further and/or do permanent damage to my health.

I waited all the way until the night before the race, but I finally decided to withdraw. The photo on the right is from a sign someone had made for me on race day without realizing I had pulled out the night before.

I was quite heart broken to not start that day and I was frustrated that all the work I had done in the lead up could not be realized on race day. No preparation is ever perfect, but I felt confident that I was in the best shape I had been in leading into IMTX since its inception.

Eleven weeks after dropping out of IMTX for pneumonia, I finally got to race again at Ironman Canada in Whistler: the coldest, wettest Ironman I have ever done. In the Favorite Cycling Photos post I talk about race day and the conditions. After recovering from pneumonia, I wasn’t sure how long it would take to get back into good health and training so being able to get a podium finish in this race gave me the confidence that I could get back on form again.

Three weeks after racing in Whistler, I went to race Ironman Mont Tremblant on the other side of Canada. Following Whistler, I got home and decided that I wasn’t interested in trying to target an early fall Ironman (in 8-10 weeks) so I decided to travel to Mont Tremblant instead and just roll the dice. I knew going into the race that I wasn’t going to be 100% three weeks after racing Whistler, but I felt that if I could get everything out of what I did have, I might be able to break into the top 5 by the end of the day.

This approach ended up working better than I had expected with a 2nd place finish. Jordan Rapp was far up the road in first place, but the race for 2nd-5th was tight throughout the whole marathon. With that said, the effort to get into, and stay in, 2nd place took a huge toll on me. I actually think these two photos above really capture how I felt, not only at the finish, but for much of the run that day.

I managed to hold it together through a quick post race interview, but as I was being escorted to post-race drug testing I threw up multiple times. Even the few days after the race I felt completely wrecked and had two nights of Ironman insomnia (if you know, you know) which just made things worse.

Following the Whistler/Mont Tremblant double, I was ready to go home and regroup a bit, but the final Kona slots were being assigned that week. At that time, Kona slots for professionals were distributed based on points accumulated (a combo of Ironman and Half Ironman races). Most of the slots were allocated at the end of July, but a few spots were allocated at the end of the month of August. After being sick for the first half of the season, I had never even considered being eligible to qualify since I had earned very few points. However, after the two Canadian races I managed to tie in points for the last Kona slot. A tie-breaking rule went to me and I got the last slot. So instead of taking a break, I had the World Championship to train for that was less than eight weeks away.

The photo above, on the left, is of me and Laurel Wassner. This is from the pro meeting before Kona. We were both the “last ones in” for the Women’s and Men’s races.

The training for Kona was going surprisingly well, but two weeks out from the race I got called in for jury duty. I initially thought it was just going to take an hour or two before I was dismissed, but the day kept progressing and by noon that day I was selected to serve on a jury in a criminal trial. The trial took three days and unfortunately I got sick while serving on the jury. I wasn’t sick during race week (the next week), but I never really felt right and the race ultimately went pretty poorly. The photo on the right is me at the finish line feeling totally spent. I never raced Kona again so I’m glad that I finished despite wanting to drop out most of the day, but it was a disappointing way to close out my time there.

You may have noticed that a large majority of the photos I have are credited to my Aunt Sherry Daerr. As such, she isn’t in a lot of them so I felt it was important to show who was behind the camera. Over multiple summers, I lived with Sherry while training and she came to multiple races and Endurance Corner camps over the years. At all occasions she took numerous photos cataloguing many moments that we would otherwise have no evidence of. So a BIG thank you to Sherry for always being there capturing these shots over the years.

This is going to be the last photo that I write about extensively. It is my all-time favorite photo from all the years in triathlon, taken by my mother-in-law, Gail Hughes.

This was shortly after finishing Ironman Arizona in 2008. If you notice on the right, my friend, Daniel, is carrying my shoes. Whenever I wasn’t racing particularly well, all I wanted to do was take my shoes off and on that day I did it within 30 seconds of crossing the finish line.

Brooke is helping me walk and carrying all the gear needed that day in the backpack. Her day would have started when mine did, likely at 3:00-3:30 a.m. depending on the race start that day, and it wouldn’t finish until all the gear had been collected post race and we were back at our homestay or hotel. She would always fall asleep before I did that night after the race. Racing is tiring, but supporting people racing is even more so.

On this particular day, I didn’t race that well. Nothing catastrophic happened. I just had an underwhelming day, finishing in 11th after spending most of the day feeling somewhat flat.

The reason I like this photo so much is that I think it perfectly encapsulates what many days after racing look like. It’s easy to remember really great and really bad days, but most days just are just days. Races come and go and a lot of the time it doesn’t work out as you may have hoped it would.

Having family, friends, and especially, Brooke, at the end of those days gave me the support I needed to always reflect, regroup and go out and try again.

Thank you.