Brentwood's Theodore swimming, biking, running way around world

By CAROL STUART
For Brentwood Home Page
Brentwood resident Phil Theodore is a person who actually kept his New Year's Resolution -- and now five years later he's turned it into a quest to run an Ironman-length triathlon on every continent. Well, you’d think he meant every continent except maybe harsh, frozen, uninhabitable Antarctica – but he's already gone so far as to check into what it would take to run one there on his own.

“You can figure out how to do it down there but you need a crew to do it,” Theodore said. “There's not an organized event but you can do it. Absolutely -- I'll do something down there.”

Phil Theodore, center, competed in a full triathlon in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa.

Besides North America where he competed in Coeur d’Alene Idaho, Theodore has already checked off South America, Australia and Africa from his list. And he plans to compete in a 140.6-mile Ironman-length race in Nice, France, probably with his nephew, next year to knock off Europe.

He’s made 45-50 trips to China before and rarely seen the sun due to air pollution, plus water sources in Asia are often unclean, Theodore said. So he had decided to run a triathlon in Korea until delaying it due to the volatile nuclear reactor situation after the Japan earthquake.

“The reason why people do them is A) there's a physical challenge, but it's probably more of an intellectual exercise,” Theodore said.

The demographic usually consists of 35- to 45-year-olds in large part because of the expense of the sport. He figures it costs $10,000 in gear including a bike, $1,000 to enter, plus travel expenses.

Theodore has been swimming, biking and running his way around the world, choosing destination events for a vacation as part of the challenging adventures. He was hooked after deciding over a glass of wine between Christmas and New Year’s a few years ago to complete an Ironman triathlon and signed up online for a triathlon on the island of Florianopolis in southern Brazil.

Three-mile hike to the top at Leadville, Colo., 100-mile trail race.

The view at mile 22 in Leadville, Colo.

An Ironman-length race consists of a 2.4-mile swim (often in the ocean), a 112-mile cycling portion and a 26.2-mile run (full marathon distance) at the end. It takes around 10-12 hours to finish, he said.

“The interesting thing is after you do it, you always think there's no way in Hell I'm ever going to do this again,” Theodore said. “And the psychology of it is -- you can ask anybody that does this -- within the next 24 hours of doing that, you're online signing up for the next one.”

From triathlons to ultra-endurance

And besides running several 70.3-mile half-Ironmans as tune-ups to the longer races, Theodore says fellow endurance athletes typically migrate to ultra-distance events. They’re often “triple-Type A” uptight types who end up needing the endorphins from workouts that keep them from being grumpy, he said.

A member of the Brentwood Endurance Athletes Team, Theodore completed a 100-mile trail run in Leadville, Colo., this summer as part of a series of five ultra events in which he has now done two. He had tried the 100-mile event last year didn’t finish due to injuries at mile 72. This time he finished in 29 hours, 21 minutes, with his goal to be under the official cutoff of 30 hours.

 “The average altitude is about 11,000 feet, and you traverse basically three mountain peaks, and you go over two of the larger” mountains in Colorado, Theodore said. “On the race course, you peak out to about 12,600 feet. You get altitude, changing climates (from 80 degrees to 30 degrees and snow), all sorts of things to contend with during one of those races – which is really why you do them.

“There's a lot of strategy involved, and a lot of thought has to go into it. You can't brute-force a race like that, you have to train pretty hard.”

Athletes also don’t sleep during the race, and Theodore had a four-person crew including two pacers who picked up at mile 50 until the finish line.

“Because you're running into the middle of the night, bad things can happen,” he said.

Kids cheer on dad.

For the past three years, Theodore has been commuting every Monday morning from Brentwood to work in Denver (“there’s worse places to be than Denver,” he joked.). He and his business partner help turn around companies that private equity firms buy in distress sales and then sell off.

In preparation for the Colorado 100-mile rugged trail run, he rented a house in Leadville and didn’t return home for a number of weekends so he could sleep at high altitude. Staying at least 30 days out in high altitude allows the body to acclimate and produce more red cells that push more oxygen to the muscles, relieving lactic acid and allowing you to “push your body harder, longer, faster,” he explained.

The second reason behind many who compete in triathlon is to live a healthier lifestyle – and that was Theodore’s goal.

 “When you sign up for one of these events you train literally for 6 to 9 months in advance,” he said. “It gives you a target and puts you on a regimen so that you're motivated every day to get up and work out …  You can't really put on a lot of weight when you're riding a bike or when you're running because you’ve got to carry that weight with you.”

He compared gaining an extra 10 pounds to picking up a 10-pound turkey from the store and running with it for 26 miles “and see how that feels. It forces you really to stay in shape.”

“I think people reach that point in their life, where they have their kids, their careers are on track, and they're looking for the next challenge,” he said.

The swim start in the Indian Ocean in Perth, Australia.

Shark weakness

Besides risks of injuries training or running the events, there are other big challenges in most of the Ironman triathlons Theodore’s completed – sharks!

In Brazil, the first triathlon he ran, the area has the highest fatality rate of shark attacks in the world, Theodore said. That’s because the bull shark will hit you and take you down into the water 50-100 feet instead of a “hit and run” bite like a tiger shark.

“I'm scared to death of sharks, I don't like swimming in the ocean,” he said.  “… So when I was doing a training swim there with a bunch of pros at 7 o'clock in the morning, a school of porpoises swam up within 10 feet of me, and I thought it was a shark … I made a fool of myself -- I panicked and swam toward the beach.”

His Ironman race in Australia took place in Perth, a beach community on the west coast of Australia akin to California. Theodore said you swim 1.2 miles straight out alongside the world’s largest jetti – or dock.

“You swim out to the end of that, and they actually have helicopters sitting out there to police the area, because it's great white territory, great white sharks, which isn't too cool,” he said. “And so you swim really close to the dock going out so if you hear the horn, you get your buns out of the water.

“You swim with a pack. You know the old saying don't get separated from the pack; there's a reason why you don't want to get separated from the pack there.”

70.3-miler in St. Croix, Virgin Islands, included bike ride in mountains.

Kangaroos spotted in Australia.

London during early-morning run.

Trail ridge in Leadville, Colo.

His race in Africa was on the Canary Islands off the west coast, where trade winds blow that kids learn about in history class that were used by explorers sailing from Portugal to the Caribbean.

“So you've got the trade winds and the currents. I never really appreciated or understood what a trade wind was,” Theodore said. “… It was literally a 30-mph wind that blows 24 hours a day, so if you can imagine riding in that. And they are volcanic islands, so there are lots of mountains to climb …

“A lot of the professionals (cyclists) go and train there, because it's very hot, it's 90 to 100 degrees in the wind that's 30 mph and climbs that are really tough. So that's why I picked it out because it was the hardest one on the circuit. We thought it'd be a pretty cool place to go.”

Theodore finishes half-Ironman event

Different kind of weekend warrior

Theodore said he had always been active in sports, playing in soccer and basketball leagues around Nashville.

“Those beat you up, because for the exercise you do there you're going side to side, start to stop, and can beat the crap out of your knees and joints,” he said.

“When you're doing the Ironman, you're just going forward all the time, you're not zig-zagging and beating up your body as much as you would -- tearing your ACL when you come down on somebody's foot on the basketball court, or somebody slide-tackling you at Crockett Park.”

Theodore usually competes in triathlons with younger guys in their late 20s: “I usually challenge them, kind of the old bull vs. the young bull. Right now I'm batting a thousand.”

Originally from upstate New York, he moved here to work for the firm now called Price Waterhouse and then got his MBA from Vanderbilt,

“You'd be surprised at the number of triathletes that are in Brentwood,” Theodore said.

Ashley Whitney, the swim coach for BEAT who works out of Williamson County’s Indoor Sports Complex in Brentwood, won a gold medal with the U.S. Olympic team. She “trains a lot of people in the pool, which is usually everybody's Achilles,” and the ISC even offers a triathlon class.

Theodore said there’s a big community of endurance athletes in the area –“a bunch of adventure seekers.” One of his pacers in Leadville, for instance, had previously climbed the Grand Tetons.

He recalls setting that resolution five years ago, when he didn’t know any triathletes or anything about the events.

“I was just sitting down, having a glass of wine, looking out and saying what I wanted to get done,” he said. “It seemed very daunting at the time to do an Ironman, but I have to tell you doing the Leadville 100 trail run is like doing back-to-back-to-back Ironmans. It’s that hard.”