Grueling Ironman Triathlon gives doc needed challenge

Dr. Charles Cox is a competitive triathlete, including nine Ironman Triathlon World Championships. Amy Alonzo Rozak/Union Democrat, copyright 2009

In other words, he had scaled the academy. But he wanted something more. He wanted to prove himself athletically.
 

 He had scant athletic experience. He had served as a runner and swimmer for a few undistinguished seasons during high school. In college, he played no sports.

Others might have taken up tennis or golf or another popular late-start sport. But there was a new sport that caught Cox’s attention. At that time, the late 1980s, it was looked at “as the toughest thing you could do,” he recalls.

Its competitors were considered “the world’s best athletes.”

It was the Ironman Triathlon.

“I picked something that seemed to be impossible,” said Cox, a clinical gastroenterologist who has an office in Sonora and also practices at the Silver Oak Medical Office in San Andreas.

The ultra-triathlon competition had started less than a decade before, in 1978, following an argument at an awards ceremony for a running race in Hawaii, according to Ironman.com.

At issue was the question of who was more fit: swimmers, runners or cyclists.

With the hope of settling the debate, one of the race participants, Navy Commander John Collins, and his wife, Judy, drew up a proposal: combine three existing races — the 2.4-mile Waikiki Roughwater Swim, the 112-mile Around-Oahu Bike Race and the 26.2-mile Honolulu Marathon — into one event.

Never mind that the bike race was typically a two-day event.

“Whoever finishes first we’ll call the Ironman,” Collins reportedly said, christening the competition.

Just 15 people were crazy enough to try the inaugural Ironman Triathlon World Championship. Twelve completed the race. The winner — and world’s first Ironman — took 11 hours, 46 minutes and 58 seconds to go the distance.

Cox, of course, did not start with a full Ironman. He began with a standard triathlon.

Now popular worldwide, the swim-bike-run competitions were then far from the mainstream. At Stanford, most competitors, unlike the clean-cut Cox, were “beach bum surfer guys.”

“It was nothing like what it has become now,” he said.

After swimming 500 yards, running three miles and biking 10 more in his first competition, he thought: “That wasn’t that bad.”   

In his second-ever triathlon, he came in first in his age group. New thought: “Gee, I could do this.” Two years later, in 1989, he qualified for his first Ironman World Championship.

Go to Ironman.com today, and you’ll find pictures of competitors in sleek helmets and corset-like sleeveless tops. There are categories for “IronAPPAREL” and “IronGEAR.” There is even a list of approved swimsuits, some with names like “Xterra Velocity 0.02++.”

It is a far cry from Cox’s first year. “I was in an old T-shirt and running shorts,” he said.

Then 37, he finished in a time he still remembers today: 10 hours, 7 minutes and 24 seconds. It was good enough for 254th place overall and 23rd in his age group.

Cox, now 57, has participated in a total of nine Ironman Triathlon World Championships. Three times he has finished in the top 10 in his age group, including a fourth place finish in 1990. That same year, he was the 72nd-fastest Ironman in the world.

But he has competed in many more than nine Ironman competitions.

To qualify for each of those world championships, not to mention prepare, Cox had to finish near the top in a Ironman qualifier during the year. At his peak, he was competing in three a year.   

At this point, he has actually lost count of how many Ironman triathlons he’s competed in. Again: He has lost count of how many times he has spent a day swimming 2.4 miles, running 26.2 miles and cycling 112 miles.
 

He does know it is “around 30.” That means that in competition he’s swam the equivalent of the Panama Canal, run from San Andreas to Salt Lake City, Utah, and biked from the Mother Lode all the way to Miami.

However, those distances hardly tell the real story. For an athlete training for the Ironman, every week is a private Ironman competition.

In a typical week, Cox said he swims about seven miles, runs up to 25 and cycles about 150. Then every few weeks, he does a competition simulation.

Add to that a weight-lifting regime and core-strengthening exercises. In total, he spends 15 to 20 hours each week training.  

Contrary to what you might think, the main training challenge, according to Cox, is not simply getting out of bed. It is doing too much. There’s a fine line between pushing yourself and self-sacrifice.

“It’s easy to overtrain,” he said.

Training to be an Ironman does not leave much time to be a family man. Cox, a father of four boys, is frank about that.

“All this I had to fit in somewhere,” he said. “There’s not enough time to do everything. There are sacrifices you have to make.”

Attending swim meets. Cheering at basketball games. Helping with homework. Sitting down to a movie. All these were, at times, casualties of those long mornings and evenings spent running hills, swimming laps and pushing pedals.   

“I missed a lot of things,” Cox said.   

“I wasn’t crazy about it at first,” said his wife, Charlene, who manages Cox’s Sonora office.

When Cox first caught the bug, he was already the typical overworked doctor, she said. Plus there were the boys, the youngest of whom was born a year after Cox competed in his first world championship, the first of five consecutive championships he would compete in. 

But Charlene eventually came to understand and respect what made her husband rise each day before daybreak to run miles for two hours, sometimes in the snow.

“He doesn’t do things halfway,” she said. “It’s all or nothing.”

Besides, there were benefits. The family frequently rented beach houses so Cox could practice swimming in the choppy sea water.

And travel took them to New Zealand, Canada and across the western United States, though Charlene notes, tongue in cheek, “the kids and I saw a lot more of all of those place than he did.”

The couple’s boys were not keen on seeing so little of their dad, but now they look back proudly on his accomplishments, she said. None, however, is a triathlete.

He says he’s been on the mend — not that it has kept him from training — since a 2007 bike crash that left him with broken ribs, a concussion and a punctured lung.

It was, incidentally, the only time he did not finish a race, said his wife.

Plus there is a long hurting knee. Thirty years of running marathons and doing triathlons has worn down his left knee, forcing surgery this April to repair his meniscus. It is still sore.

But he’s still hopeful about making at least one last trip to Hawaii. Maybe by 2012.

“I’m dying for it to get better so I can get back and run,” he said.