NO ONE LEFT TO BATTLE: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOUR TRAINING GROUP SCATTERS

There is a moment at a race you will know if you have done this long enough. You are standing in a transition area at six in the morning, racking your bike, and you look up and down the row for the people you came here to beat. And they are not there. Not late. Not in a different wave. Not there, and not coming, and not next year either.

I could not tell you the date it happened to me, because it was not a moment. It was an accumulation of mornings in which I looked up and found fewer and fewer of them, until one day the row was full of strangers.

This is the chapter of Once a Triathlete that I did not expect to write, and it is the one I hear about most from other athletes over fifty. Not the Ironman chapters. This one.

Four exits, and every one of them is legitimate

It is worth being specific about where a training cohort actually goes, because it is never one thing, and that is the whole point.

Some of them simply retired from it. Quietly, sensibly, in their late fifties and sixties, having decided they had done enough — a completely rational decision I have never once been capable of making, and which I now suspect is a skill rather than a failing.

Some went to CrossFit. Same as me, some of them well before me. The same migration, for the same reasons, out of the same set of hips.

Some went back to ordinary life. Kids' schedules. A promotion. A parent who got sick. The thing about a fifteen-hour training week is that it is the first thing to go when a life turns up, and most people's lives turn up in their fifties.

And some got hurt and did not come back. Not dramatically, mostly. A back. A knee. Something that took eight months — and by month nine the habit was broken and the fitness was gone and the mountain to climb back was too tall, and they discovered they could live without it. Which is the thing none of us are supposed to find out.

Four exits. Not one of those people failed at anything. Ask them and most will tell you they are happier.

I am the one still standing in the transition area at six in the morning looking for them.

The part nobody says out loud about the social architecture

The whole thing runs on having someone to chase.

Not the clock. Not a personal best. Not "the process," which is a word people use when they have stopped having anybody. A person. Somebody roughly your speed whose result you check first, who checks yours, who you think about at mile eighty when it hurts and you would otherwise sit up.

I had a Clydesdale rival for years who beat me in every training session and lost to me on every race day, and nine months of that produced the fastest Ironman I ever did. I had a club that turned every ordinary Saturday into a contested hill. I built a betting line on my own friends and maintained the odds for months.

All of that only works if the other people are there.

And there is one more thing about the Clydesdale division — men two hundred pounds and up, in my age group, the first place in my life where the fight was actually fair — that took me about ten years to notice. Most of us had something in our history we were outrunning. Nobody ran a survey. It comes out at hour three of a long ride, when the group has strung out and somebody says a thing he would not say in a parking lot. After the third or fourth time I heard it I stopped being surprised, and I have never been able to unsee it since.

The man who won once and left the table

One of them I was nine and zero against. Nine head-to-head races over several years, and I won every one, and both of us knew the number, because in a rivalry like that everybody always knows the number.

Then, in a marathon, he finally got me. Fairly, at the end of a long day, no asterisk.

And he took that win and he walked off with it. He retired. That was essentially the end of his racing.

I want you to appreciate the discipline in that, because I do not possess a gram of it. The man lost nine times, won once, and stopped. He took the thing he wanted and left the table. I have never left a table in my life.

I spent about two years trying to get him back. Texts. Race links. Reasons. He was not interested. He had started doing CrossFit five days a week, building strength and muscle at exactly the age a man ought to be doing that, and he was, in his own word, content.

I could not fathom it. I remember not understanding the sentence as a sentence. How is a man content with no battle in front of him? What does he do on a Tuesday?

He was right, incidentally. About all of it. Most of the last part of that book is me arriving, six or seven years late and with considerably more noise, at a conclusion he reached on his own and acted on immediately.

Why we pull each other back

Here is the thing that took me until sixty to see, and it is not flattering.

We try to keep each other in.

That is what two years of texts and race links actually was. Not friendship, or not only friendship. When somebody leaves this sport cleanly and healthily and for good reasons, it is a problem for those of us still in it, because his leaving is evidence. Every man who walks away and turns out fine is a data point suggesting the rest of us could walk away and be fine too.

So we pull him back. Affectionately, generously, with real love, and we call it wanting our friend back.

Three answers, and I heard all three wrong

He was not the only one I went after. Over about four years I made some version of that approach to most of the men who left, and I got, in the end, three answers. At the time I heard all three as the same answer, which was no. I was wrong about that.

"I have nothing left to prove." That is the one that got under my skin and stayed there, and it took me years to work out why. On its face it is a perfectly pleasant thing to say. But it is not a statement about him. Heard from where I was standing, it is a diagnosis of me. If he has nothing left to prove, and I am still out here at six in the morning in a parking lot in the rain, then what exactly am I still proving, and to whom, and how long has that been going on? You cannot argue with the sentence. Arguing with it demonstrates it.

"I work nights now." No arc to that one. No injury, no epiphany, no decision. A shift pattern ate a fifteen-year habit and that was the whole story. I think this is how most athletic lives actually end, and I have never once seen it written down, because there is nothing in it. Nobody makes a film about a man whose hours changed. It is the most common exit in the sport and the only one nobody is romantic about.

"Yeah, I'm coming back." He is not coming back. He has been coming back for three years. He means it every single time he says it — that is the thing about that answer. It is not a lie. It is a man who misses it enough to say the sentence and does not miss it enough to enter anything. It is the cruelest of the three from where I stand, because it leaves the door open a crack and I keep going over to look at it.

What I felt underneath all three, and I am not going to dress it up, was: was my need not enough? I took it personally, for years, as a verdict on how much I mattered to them — as if a man's need for an opponent were a claim he could make on another man's Saturdays.

Nobody owes you a rival. I did not know that at fifty-eight.

And then it started happening to me

For about a year now it has been running in reverse, and I find it funny in the way things are funny when the joke is entirely at your own expense.

The ones still in it have watched the triathlons on my calendar go from a full season, to four, to one, to none. The man who never stopped has largely stopped. And what I get from them, by text and in parking lots and under photographs I post of a coffee cup at three-thirty in the morning, is this:

I need you back. I need you by my side. Where have all the battles gone?

Look at that vocabulary for a second. Battles. By my side.

That is my language. I carried it out of a Marine Corps unit in the eighties and I have been installing it in every group I have joined since — a cross-country team, a triathlon club, a Tuesday morning ride. I built that dialect. I taught these men to talk that way about a fire hydrant.

And it is now being used on me, entirely sincerely, with genuine affection, by people who want their friend back, as the most effective available lever — because it is the most effective available lever, because I made it one. It is the single most deserved thing that has ever happened to me.

And it works. Not enough to enter me in an Ironman. Enough that I feel guilty. Enough that a text saying where have all the battles gone sits in my chest for a day and a half while I compose four different replies and send none of them.

Feeling that is how I finally understood the three answers. They were not weighing my need and finding it light. They were standing exactly where I am standing now, trying to find a way to say no to somebody they loved without making it a rejection of him.

"I have nothing left to prove" is what a man says when the true sentence is longer and worse and he does not want to say it in a parking lot.

Getting better and getting smaller in the same season

The part that does not fit any story about decline: the years my triathlon count collapsed are the same years I was standing on podiums. Third at Madison. Second at Cranberry, twice. A national championship qualification at sixty. My first outright win of any kind arrived at fifty-seven.

That is not a decline narrative and it is not a comeback narrative either, and I think the reason those are the only two stories anybody tells about aging athletes is that the real thing is harder to say.

You can be getting better and getting smaller at the same time. Better because everyone else left, and because you finally started lifting, and because decades of showing up is worth something no talent can buy. Smaller because your hips are running out of ballots and you have finally started counting them.

I want to be precise about one thing, though, because it would be easy to claim wisdom here and I have not earned it. I did not find balance. My capacity fell to meet my restraint. Those are not the same thing and they produce identical training weeks. A man who has learned to want less and a man who can no longer physically get more look exactly alike from the outside — and, if I am honest, they feel fairly similar from the inside too.

The battles got smaller. The people are still on the other end.

Here is what it actually looks like now, and it is much stupider and much better than it sounds.

We are out on a trail. There is a green bench up ahead, maybe four hundred yards, of no significance to anybody. I call out: the Battle of the Green Bench. And then four grown men with a combined age well over two hundred years, most of them with mortgages and adult children and one of them with a surgically repaired knee, sprint to a bench.

It has happened at a fire hydrant. It has happened, on at least one occasion I am prepared to defend, at a squirrel. There is a Battle of the Last Half Mile and a Battle of the Hill Nobody Likes and a Battle of Getting Back in the Pool in January, which is fought alone and is the hardest of them.

This morning at three-thirty I sent a photograph to men who no longer train with me. A cup of coffee, in a mug from Ironman Lake Placid, because that is the mug I reach for. The caption said: the Battle of the First Coffee.

Two of them answered. One of them at that hour, which tells you something about him as well.

There is a self-pitying version of that paragraph and it would be a lie. It is not sad. It is the best part of my week.

The question I did not expect to be asking at sixty

I am still in touch with most of them. That is the part the melancholy version leaves out. The friendships did not end when the training did — they changed shape. I know what happened to those people's knees and their kids and their jobs, and they know what happened to mine, and none of that required either of us to be on a bike at six on a Saturday.

Which raises something I would put to any athlete currently deep inside a group like the one I described:

If the friendship survives the sport, what exactly was the sport for?

For about fifteen years I had the causation backwards. I thought I needed the sport in order to have the people. What actually happened is that the sport built the people, and then the sport left, in ones and twos, over five years — and the people stayed.

If I had understood that at fifty, I would have made some different decisions about my hips.