I NAMED MYSELF AFTER A QUALITY I DIDN'T HAVE

People have been asking me for nineteen years whether Will Power is my real name. It is not. I gave it to myself in the spring of 2007, on a bicycle, at forty-one years old, six weeks sober and about forty pounds into a hundred-pound problem — before I had done a single triathlon. This site, this whole catalog of books, and everything that has followed all trace back to an arithmetic problem on an ordinary Saturday training ride.

Here is the actual story, which I have never told properly until now.

One hundred miles

I joined a charity cycling team in 2007 and signed up to ride a hundred miles at Lake Tahoe.

I need to convey how that number lands on a person who has never done it. If you are a cyclist you are reading this thinking a century, sure, that's a Saturday. If you are not, you have no frame for it at all.

Here is the frame I have used for twenty years, because I live in the northeast and everybody here understands it instantly: it is Connecticut to Manhattan. And back. You leave your house, you go to New York City, you turn around, you come home — under your own power, in one day.

The first time somebody explained a century ride to me, I did the arithmetic and concluded it was not a thing a person did. It was a thing a person claimed. Then people I had shaken hands with the week before told me they would be doing one in June, in the mountains, at altitude, and that I would be too, and that we should probably start doing long Saturdays.

So we started doing long Saturdays.

Everything I know about myself, I learned on a long Saturday

Not the races. The races are where you show people. The Saturdays are where you find out.

A long training ride has a shape no other endurance activity has. The first hour is pleasant. The second is genuinely lovely. Somewhere in the third hour you stop having a conversation, because the group has strung out and everybody is in their own head. And then there are three or four more hours, and there is nothing in them. No crowd. No clock that matters. No finish line. Just road and legs and the arithmetic of how far you still have to go — a number you are not allowed to think about and which you think about constantly.

Running hurts more per mile. Cycling hurts longer. The thing cycling does that running does not is that it gives you time. Hours of it. Fully conscious, aerobically comfortable, nothing to do but turn the pedals and be alone with the contents of your own head at a heart rate low enough that the head keeps working.

I had spent the previous fifteen years making sure I was never alone with the contents of my own head. And at forty-one I put myself on a bicycle for five hours at a time, on purpose, every Saturday, for months.

Nobody told me that is what I was signing up for. I do not think the people I was riding with knew either.

The name arrived in the middle of the arithmetic

I want to tell this accurately, and accurately means without a scene, because there was not one. It did not happen at a finish line or in a moment of crisis. It happened in the flat gray hours of an ordinary long ride, doing sums.

I was thinking about the hundred. Specifically about what it was going to take to get a man my size — because I was still a big man, twenty pounds down and still a big man, and I would be a big man on race day and every race day after it — to keep pedaling for a hundred miles in the mountains.

And the answer that came back was: will power.

Not talent. Talent was decided at birth and I had been handed a different envelope. Not speed. Not a body. The thing that was going to get me to a hundred miles was the same thing that had gotten me off a bus at Parris Island and up the wall of a swimming pool twenty-five yards at a time.

Then the second thought, which arrived directly behind it and which I have never been able to fully account for: that's a name.

I named myself after a quality I did not have

This is the part that nineteen years of people asking me if it is my real name has obscured, and I think it is the most revealing single fact about me.

Not a quality I had. Not a nickname somebody gave me because they had watched me do something. I had, at that moment, an unbroken forty-one-year record of not having it. If you had assembled the file in the spring of 2007 and been asked to name that man, will power is not the phrase you would have reached for.

I picked it because I needed it. I picked it the way a man buys a suit two sizes too big and then goes and grows into it. And the reason it worked — and it did work, ferociously, for the better part of two decades — is simple enough. I put a claim on the outside of myself, in public, where other people could see it, and then I made it true, because the alternative was walking around under a name I had not earned.

That is either the smartest thing I have ever done or the most elaborate trap I have ever built for myself. I have had nineteen years to decide and I still go back and forth by the week.

The first time I said it out loud

I was standing over my bike in a parking lot with a paper cup of coffee, and a guy I had been riding with for two months asked me a completely ordinary question.

"What's your last name again? For the sheet."

And instead of my last name I said, "Put down Will Power."

He looked up. "Put down what?"

"Will Power. Two words."

There was about a second and a half in there where I could have taken it back. I remember the length of it exactly. He was going to laugh, and if he had laughed the right way I would have said never mind, it's a joke — and there would be no name, and no bib, and no license plate, and no books.

He did not laugh. He wrote it down. Then he said, without looking up:

"You'd better be good, then."

The very first person I ever tried it on got there in under four seconds.

After that they called me Power almost immediately. Not the full thing — just Power, the way teams do, a syllable somebody shouts across a parking lot at six in the morning. And I liked it more than I have liked most things. Everybody I rode with had an identity that had come from somewhere. They had swum in college. They had been a runner since they were fourteen. I had been a heavy kid, a heavy Marine, and the slowest man on a cross-country team.

Power was the first athletic identity I ever had that I did not have to be fast to keep.

What I actually took off that mountain

Lake Tahoe sits at six thousand feet, and the ride goes up from there. I finished it at somewhere around two hundred and twenty pounds, at altitude, on a course with real climbing, ten months after being a man who could not run to the end of his own street.

But the finish is not what I remember.

There is a point in a long climb at altitude where your body files a formal complaint. Everything narrows. You are not looking at scenery, you are looking at four feet of pavement in front of your front wheel, and your entire world becomes the next revolution of the crank and then the one after that.

I was in that place, well up a mountain, well into the day, and I noticed that I was not suffering.

I mean, I was suffering. Physically it was terrible. But I was not unhappy. I was, in fact, more purely content than I had been at any point in the preceding fifteen years. Grinding up a mountain at four miles an hour with my heart at a hundred and sixty and no thoughts in my head at all except one Beyoncé song playing on a loop.

And a small, quiet, extremely unwelcome part of me said: you should probably look at why this is the only place you feel like this.

I told it to shut up. I had a mountain to get up.

What I did not understand I had done

Everybody assumes the name is a joke. It plays as one — a pun, a bit, a great bib, the kind of thing that makes a stranger laugh at an expo. I have let people think that for nearly two decades, because letting people think that is easier than the truth, and because the truth sounds ridiculous coming from a grown man.

The truth is that I was a forty-one-year-old who had just been shown, in a room with a pen in his hand, that everything he could say about himself had a date on it from twenty years earlier. So I got on a bicycle and gave myself a name that was an instruction, the way you write something on your hand before a test.

Be this.

And then, because I am who I am, I put it on a race entry form. A form generates a bib. A bib gets read by strangers.

Thirteen months later I was standing at athlete check-in at Ironman Lake Placid, and a volunteer looked at the bib before she looked at me and said, "Will Power. That's not really your name." Over the next forty-eight hours something like five hundred other athletes did not believe me either. They asked if it was a nickname. They asked if I had changed it legally. More than once, completely straight-faced, they asked if I was some kind of motivational speaker. One guy from Ohio shook my hand like I had won something already. "Best bib in the field," he said. "You better finish."

I want to tell you I laughed that off. I did not. I felt it land somewhere it should not have been allowed to land.

I thought I had picked a name. What I had actually done was hand the job of holding me to it over to five hundred people I had not met yet — and once you have done that, you do not get to quietly stop. Not ever again.

That is the whole deal, and I signed it without reading it, on a Saturday, on a bike, going up a hill.

Nineteen years later

Fifty-eight triathlons. Four Ironmans. More than three hundred finish lines. Two hundred and forty-three pounds down to two hundred, and then back up past where I started, and then back again. Volunteers at aid stations still shout use that will power at me, nineteen years after I made it up on a hill, and it still works.

Whether that was a name or an instruction or a debt is the question the whole book is about, and I am not sure the book decides it either. But I can tell you what it cost, and I can tell you it was still better than where I started — and for twenty years, that trade was the only math I trusted.

Once a Triathlete: A Memoir of Addiction and the Price of Will Power is listed on Amazon under the pen name Will Power Byron — the name that has been on the race bib since 2007.