He lives with these questions from the time he wakes until the moment he dozes off at night. Answers are elusive and when he seizes upon one that makes sense it spawns a dozen more imponderables..
Bill Greineisen does things most of us cannot and will not do. Many of us will never consider trying to do even once in our lifetimes what he does as a matter of course. Few of us even understand why he does these things, that is, until you sit and talk to with him, absorb the strong flow of commitment coming out of him and hear him say, what is probably obvious.
“People, a lot of them, anyway, really think I’m a little off,” Greineisen said the other day in Volcano, “but here I am, at 62, still feeling like a little kid.
“I don’t think it’s crazy, I think whatever it is, we all have this inside, but for whatever reason, it’s hard for people to sort of stumble onto this.”
We are talking about running, bicycling and swimming, the three-discipline IRONMAN competition, like the world-famous one in Kona over the weekend. Greineisen has done Kona and he will probably do it again, maybe several times, but this year he has a goal just over the sunset from Kona that will occur in central Mexico over 10 days.
Here’s why is Greineisen different from the rest of us. If you were asked how long it would take you to swim 24 miles, would you have an answer? How about bicycling 1,120 miles or running 262 miles?
Greineisen knows exactly how long it will take to accomplish all three of those milestones. He will do it before the month is out, in 10 days in the Deca IRONMAN, which is, yes, 10 IRONMAN competitions in 10 consecutive days. Who would do such a thing? Thousands are headed to central Mexico from all over the world, paying an $1,800 entry fee for the privilege.
He’s intrigued by the possibilities and what he might learn about himself, which seems to be at the heart of his passion for these long distance events. He is an ex-Marine who was ready to get out, stationed in Camp Lejeune, N.C., when he was offered a deal that sounded good. If he re-enlisted, they’d send him to Hawaii.
He was a Contact Water Survival instructor, which is to say he taught troops, in full gear, how to jump out of a helicopter or airplane and land safely in the water. He fell in love with the islands, has been here for 22 years, living in Volcano these days.
Greineisen kicked back when he finally retired, grew a beard of sorts, let his hair go long and one day looked down, realized he weighed 230 pounds and he didn’t like what he saw. He always thought it would be cool to run a marathon, so he decided to work on the weight by training for a year and ran the Honolulu Marathon in 2006.
For him, it wasn’t all that difficult. He trained himself, started out easy, got up to a mile run, then five and after a few months he was doing 13-miles runs and actually enjoying it.
You could say he took the plunge. He competed in a frigid IRONMAN in Coeur ‘d Alene, Idaho, he’s done 15 IRONMAN competitions and a year ago he did a double IRONMAN outside of Tampa, which is, as it says, double everything. Five-mile swim, 224 miles on the bike, all leading to a 56-mile run and here came those questions.
“That was pretty difficult,” he said of the Tampa experience, “you really learn a lot about yourself. After 30 hours with no sleep and it’s 4 o’clock in the morning and you have more miles to go, the questions that come to you are challenging; it’s in those times you need to find out what your body and mind are capable of.”
By Greineisen’s calculations, this long-distance stuff “is about 70 percent mental, you have to keep remembering that, sometimes.”
At times like that, two hours before dawn, having run 50 miles, six more to go, when the real questions, the tough ones, the loud and oh so persistent questions. come at him like some mythic beast, preying on his exhaustion.
He would have never guessed the intensity of the reward for completing the event, but he got a taste in 2008 in his first Half-IRONMAN competition. He found a guy to help him train, he wasn’t sure he was ready but he completed it all in around 13 hours.
“Each of these events has a lifetime of memories,” he said, “the half-marathon was a real confidence builder. You meet people you would never imagine meeting, from completely different walks of life.
“There is a universality of some kind that brings us together in these events. You learn so much about yourself, you see others going through it. At the end, as you hit the last mile or so, the emotions flood in — its like every emotion you ever experienced rushing in all at once — you are ecstatic with accomplish and belief in yourself and at the same time there’s a sadness because all you worked for is coming to an end.”
He leaves this week for Mexico for several days of training and then 10 IRONMAN competitions in as many days.
He will return, inspired, questioning what to do next.