I NAMED MYSELF AFTER A QUALITY I DIDN'T HAVE

People have asked 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 — before I had done a single triathlon. This site and everything that followed traces back to an arithmetic problem on an ordinary Saturday training ride.

One hundred miles

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

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. 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, and that I would be too.

So we started doing long Saturdays.

The Saturdays are where you find out

The races are where you show people. The Saturdays are where you find out.

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 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.

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 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 — 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.

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

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 — the way a man buys a suit two sizes too big and then goes and grows into it. And the reason it worked, 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.

"You'd better be good, then"

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 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. If he had laughed the right way I would have said never mind, it's a joke — and there would be no name, no bib, 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."

After that they called me Power almost immediately — 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, or 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 did not understand I had done

Everybody assumes the name is a joke. A pun, a bit, a great bib. I have let people think that for nearly two decades, because it is easier than the truth, and because the truth sounds ridiculous coming from a grown man.

The truth is that I was forty-one and had just been shown, in a room with a pen in my hand, that everything I could say about myself 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 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: "Will Power. That's not really your name." Over the next forty-eight hours about five hundred other athletes did not believe me either. One guy from Ohio shook my hand like I had already won something. "Best bib in the field," he said. "You better finish."

I want to tell you I laughed that off. I did not.

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.

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.