Another update, and understanding better what the heck is going on.

It has not exactly been the greatest few days, but I thank you all for your love, support and well wishes... as one friend put it, we already have the theme for next year's Lake Placid: "Back from the dead". Yea, real funny.

It's been a tough time, lots of things to wrap my head around, but I'm not exactly good at the moping, sad thing. Losing West last week put me near the brink and after Monday, I was feeling pretty low. Scared, but also disappointed and humiliated. Talking with Eric, friends and family has definitely brought me around. I'm not sure I'll ever let go of that irritation and upset of not getting to do those last 10 miles, what would have been a bit over an hour of racing. What would have been a new PR on the Placid course. The what-if's are awful, but I think they serve a purpose. You need that upset, you need that feeling of letdown to wake you up and make you take stock. My father always says you learn more from your failures than your victories. It's only natural that the more racing you do, there are bound to be a few bad days in there. Guess that's the hitch. It wasn't a bad day, it was a great one.

As soon as I got home on Monday, I went directly to my Doc. He started what will be a slew of tests over the next few months. As thankful as I am to the volunteers up at Ironman, my Doc is certain they were a bit over-zealous. A combination of electrolyte imbalance and caffeine overload proved a dangerous (and as my doc noted, potentially fatal) combination. That combination caused irregular heartbeats, causing my heart to beat at a rate much higher than my 202 max heart rate, so when the EMT's took my pulse, my heart was beating so fast, they couldn't feel it. Their attempts at CPR and shocking will leave me bruised and sore for months because of the damage they did to the soft cartilage in my chest.

I've been ordered off caffeine, which I don't ever really have. I drink one cup of tea in the morning, but that's it. I've used caffeine pills with great success at many other races, but I've never used as much as I did at Placid. I usually take 1/2 a pill at certain increments starting on the bike, and I was feeling like I needed more of a jolt, especially when I began throwing up and feeling the chills on the run. It was the wrong decision and negated the broth and gatorade I was taking in.

Still waiting on the bloodwork to come back, but we did an EKG on Monday and I'm scheduled for an Echo-cardiogram and Halter test, which we'll do in a variety of race environments.

This would have been my 7th Ironman finish and while I'm emotionally chafing about what happened, in the overall scheme of things, it is just a race. Time moves one way, so the what if's are no good. All I can do is get healthy and race again...race smarter.

Maybe the point of it all is to get me to appreciate the good. My charity races this year have been huge successes, my consulting business is going full-bore with 4 new jobs, Luna is growing up, Sam and I are getting closer by the day to our one-year anniversary and I have the most amazing family and friends I could ask for. There has been so much good this year, that I refuse to let the bad parts overshadow them. Isn't that how we move on? We accept those things we cannot change? A dislocated knee at St Croix stunk something awful, but I recovered and came back in time to race Ironman. I'll recover from this too and that 10:40 time I was after will be mine in Florida this Fall.