BACK FROM THE BRINK
Not long ago, Lionel Sanders was begging a coke dealer to take a credit card. Now he’s one of the world’s top Ironman triathletes.
“He likes to do everything very well. He wanted to be the best at partying too.”
DOUG SANDERS LIONEL’S FATHER
WINDSOR, ONT.— The room is small and irregular with bright yellow walls, and it is jungle-hot. From left to right, a drum set, a music stand, a space heater, a racing bike on a trainer, a treadmill and a humidifier are all crammed together. There is a small window, shut. There is a metal book case, topped by a computer screen. On the screen is a picture of the world’s greatest triathlete running next to Lionel Sanders. Lionel Sanders has been on the bike for nearly two hours, pumping away. Everything in the room is sweating. He is suffering. He is happy.
“I mean, initially I was running away,” says Sanders, 27. “Going from one addiction to another. Absolutely. A healthier addiction.”
Sanders is a top-10 Ironman triathlete, the youngest in the top 25, and the only one, as far as we know, who not five years ago was begging a cocaine dealer to take a credit card. You have a problem, the cocaine dealer told him. That was the night before he put the belt around his neck and looked for somewhere to hang it from. That was the second-last relapse. There was one more.
On this day, Sanders is taking it easy. Two intense hours on the bike, a focused hour in the pool, another hour on the treadmill. He trains almost every day, and the hard days are so much longer than this. At 5-foot-10 and 165 pounds, Sanders is perfectly, ungodly powerful — as former short-course Olympic gold medallist Simon Whitfield puts it, “Lionel can hold wattages for hours that I couldn’t hold for 15 minutes.”
Sanders’ coach-slash-advisor, Barrie Shepley — who is from the same tiny town of Howell, Ont., which still doesn’t have a swimming pool — says: “What he is is a monster engine with a humongous heart in terms of desire, and there are still seven letters in the alphabet that he doesn’t even know exist. There’s a ton of upside. His engine is in the top three in the world that I’ve seen in the last 35 years.”
This modest rented bungalow is kept neat, and the bookshelf is divided into sections: Performance, Sports Stories, Fiction, Spiritual, Self-help, Philosophy and Poetry. That’s the work of Erin MacDonald, his fiancée, a dental hygienist. “The only room he cares about is that one,” she says, pointing to the bright yellow room.
When Sanders was a kid he would run, and he was good at it until it started to feel like a job. He started smoking pot in high school — that, he thought, was fun. He’d smoke up before cross-country practice, and walk once he was out of sight of the coach. He could suffer when he ran, though. In university he trained with the cross-country team but wasn’t on it, partied, tried to do it all. He made the honour roll in first year. He felt aimless, and purposeless.
He got into cocaine in second year, because it was there. And he started down the slide.
“I wasn’t doing drugs because I wanted to escape, or anything,” he says, cheerful, through his bristly beard. “Then it got into, I was not happy with my life, and the reality, and I was doing those things to either feel, or to escape the feelings I was having. You eventually have to start saying, well how can I get high? I don’t have enough money to do that. I need to get high, though. And that’s when you started to get pathetic, as I started to get.”
“He likes to do everything very well,” says his father Doug, in the weathered voice of a survivor. “He wanted to be the best at partying too.
“The most difficult part is realizing we were powerless. He’s come a million miles in a very short period of time.”
Sanders and his fiancée left Friday for Hawaii, where on Oct. 10 he will race in the Ironman world championships in Kona for the first time. It will be a big moment, but not the biggest one. The biggest ones have already happened.
“This sport saved my life,” Sanders says, his eyes clear.
“We got extremely lucky,” says his dad. “We know that.”
The room keeps sweating, even after Lionel leaves to get something to eat.
In Lionel’s version his father was yelling, don’t do it. His father says he heard a commotion over the phone and heard people yelling that same thing, and that his own heart was trying to claw its way out of its chest in the middle of the night, and he was scrambling to get dressed when the line went dead and his phone rang again. He heard Lionel’s voice say, Dad, it’s OK. I’m not going to do anything bad. It’s OK.
“I’m begging these guys to sell me cocaine. Because they’re my friends, and they didn’t want to, because they knew I had a problem,” says Sanders. “And at that exact moment, I pocket dialed my dad. I had no freaking idea. I never pocket dial people, never.”
The road to that moment had been a dark one. Sanders quit university, and plummeted. His self-esteem fell. Anxiety took hold. He worked at a call centre for a month but couldn’t handle talking to people; he started doing projects for ELance, an online freelance site. He taught himself to type so he could do transcription, and felt his mind blissfully empty as he tapped away.
Every addict has stories; Lionel does, too, and tells them with disarming honesty. The time a guy asked him for a light on a street corner and he asked if the guy had cocaine, and they ended up popping some pills the guy had in his pocket. (“I don’t even know what they are. Probably MDMA.”) The time he and a buddy were at a Tim Hortons and he started thinking the government was coming for them and he started hallucinating about the world moving in slow motion and their tongues turning yellow and peeling like snakeskin. He was sober, that time.
“Eventually the conclusion I came to was that maybe I had some kind of methamphetamine-induced psychosis,” he says. He says he had a grandfather who spent some time on anti-psychotics. Maybe that was a part of it.
The time he woke up in detox after trying to jump out of a moving car — that one was just hard liquor, because hard liquor always brought out something bad — with a face bruised from trying to smash the window with his face, after which he threw up and pissed himself and passed out. He decided he would stay in detox, and his family was relieved.
There was the time he called his ex-girlfriend and hurled the angriest words he could at her, and told her he’d kill himself, and the next time he saw her he biked after her into a parking lot and she told him that if anything happened to her, her family had saved the messages.
“That added to the shame,” he says now. “I think she was worried about her safety. At that point, I knew I was getting into some very bad places.”
And then, the night after he asked the coke dealers if they took credit at 8 a.m., when he found himself standing alone on an Adirondack chair in a garage with the belt around his neck, drunk, stoned, hating himself, hating what he had done. “And then the idea of my mom popped into my head, because she would always say, ‘I’m so sorry, whatever it is I did that caused all of the stuff for you,’” Lionel says, his cadence slowing down. “Because she always blamed herself. And that’s kind of when I realized that if I did this, if I did this right now, my mom’s never going to be able to live a normal life again.”
He stepped off the chair. He tried solitude, silence, being alone. He stayed inside for almost all of six straight months, clean. And one day in 2009 he decided, I’m going to train for an Ironman. It was a strange light bulb moment — he had to Google Ironman. He still doesn’t know where it came from. Shepley told him in high school he should try triathlon, but whatever.
He found a race in Louisville. Sanders remembers telling his mom, “I think if I devote myself to training for this race it will change me, make me a better person, give me discipline, make me feel better about myself.” She gave him her credit card for the entry fee.
He started working out in the middle of the night, so he didn’t have to see anyone but the all-night gym clerk. He’d bike there, run and bike and swim for four hours, go to bed at 6 a.m. He recorded every workout in a log book, with notes. He worked hard for a month at ELance and saved up for a bike, for $1,000. He found an all-night grocery store, and would shop there at midnight and drag the cart home behind his bike, attached by the bike chain. He started to feel better.
Still, it wasn’t a straight line. The day after the first relapse he went to live with his dad, out of the city. “He tried to teach me how to be a real person,” Lionel says, and he papered his room with a plan for every day until Louisville. The day after the second relapse, the night of the pocket dial, New Year’s Eve 2011, he told his dad he wasn’t going to do cocaine again. He just knew it, he says. It sounds unbelievable, you say. It sounds like a movie.
Sanders agrees, 100 per cent. He doesn’t understand it, either. But he’s trying to.
The funny thing is, Sanders doesn’t really know what he’s doing. Everything is an experiment. He finished 52nd in Louisville with his bargain bike and a swim stroke that looked like drowning, and Shepley noticed. He won little triathlons, though, ran running races, duathlons, whatever. He trained so hard, and his body could take it, and craved it. Sanders wondered if he could really do this, but he kept trying.
He got his first race paycheque in 2011. Big day.
“$1,250,” he says. “And I remember because Erin and I had our first date not long after and I needed that cash. I bought an outfit with it, I took her to the casino, I was living the life lavish, and The Keg. The Keg! Are you kidding me? I’ve never eaten at The Keg in my life.”
He outran Andreas Raelert, the word record holder for the Ironman, at Muskoka in 2013 and figured wait, hold on. He won halfIronmans, or 70.3s, with ease, despite emerging from the water at the back of the pack. He came out of the water last at the 2014 70.3 world championships, was 11th after the bike, and finished fourth, behind giants Fredeno, Javier Gomez, and Tim Don. Had he swam as fast as the slowest of those three, he would have finished second, and not by much.
“I crossed the line and I’m like this little kid in a candy shop,” Sanders says. “Like, hi guys, how are you guys doing?”
But he still makes mistakes, all the time. Sure, he ran with the great Jan Fredeno for five kilometres after catching him on the bike at Oceanside — Fredeno, the German who pipped Whitfield at the 2008 Olympics, and Oceanside is where the picture on the computer monitor comes from — but he also went to Galveston this year and didn’t properly hydrate, and by the end of the run he had lost almost 10 per cent of his body weight and his feet were blue. How does a pro not know how to hydrate? His swimming stroke is still a work in progress, but the lifeguard at his training pool says that when he started swimming there three months ago, “He was a slapper. He slapped the water a lot. He still did a complete circle with his arms. He’s gotten a lot better.”
“Running works like try harder, you go faster,” says Sanders. “And swimming is try harder, for me, go slower. My best swims I’ve ever done have been the easiest swims, like I don’t even feel like I’m doing anything. I go to the pool and there are 12-year-old girls who can annihi- late me at swimming.”
He only figured out that he should train in the heat a few months ago, like everyone else, so he started sweating in the bright yellow room. He only noticed he was overtraining when he got the flu two weeks before a race, and had two easy weeks before racing and feeling great. He doesn’t know race strategy — he just goes, and sometimes blows up. Shepley advises him, but Sanders is determined to figure out this stuff on his own. Process.
The mistakes have led to a down year compared to 2014, when he won race after race. Still, he’s one of the 55 pros at Kona. It doesn’t seem real, does it? Can he really be the natural?
Sanders laughs and says, “This year I think I’ve kind of helped my cause by not doing very well. Obviously, I’m anti-drugs, completely. So if you think I’m doing this because of cheating, then you’re free to think that. I don’t care.”
Shepley says: “The beauty is that it’s there. When he couldn’t afford a 16 kilogram bag of Corn Flakes — he would eat one for weeks — he was putting out 300 watts on the bike. If I had to put my house up on the line that this kid is 100 per cent clean, I wouldn’t even blink.”
His mother Becky smoked for 20 years, was diagnosed with emphysema, and took up running. She completed an age group Ironman at Mont Tremblant this year. Good genes. “She is built for distance,” says Sanders. “The longer it goes, the better she gets.”
She could have been an athlete. Her son is.
The why . . . that’s more complicated. Just as Sanders doesn’t know why drugs pulled a happy but purposeless boy into the dark, he’s not sure what fuels him, not really. Peter Reid, Canada’s greatest Ironman, was told by his parents to get a real job, and he has told people that the day his father apologized, his motivation slacked. Sanders says that’s not what his furnace burns. But he doesn’t know what’s down there.
“I don’t know if I am trying to find anything anymore,” he says. “I know I’ll never go back to the place, because I don’t want to. It’s so bad. It’s not who I am anymore.” He still drinks a beer now and again, and there are some wine bottles in the kitchen, but he never wants to get drunk. He craves control.
And he needs this now. He took three days off last week and got jittery. But he says he’s not running and riding and swimming away, anymore.
“I want to grow,” says Sanders. “I don’t want to have that negative attachment. A lot of people assume I have that negative attachment.”
Instead, he says, he’s trying to find something else. Limits. Something beyond those limits. You have to love this to punish your body for hours, every day, and he says it’s made him a better person. He doesn’t get as angry anymore — there was that time in Hamilton when he and Erin were trying to put down peel-and-stick tile in the kitchen, and it wasn’t working, and he went up like a volcano. That’s mostly gone.
“I want to feel it all,” he says. “I used to want to become a monk. Like that was my thing, towards the end. I wanted to leave here, when I was starting to come back towards regular life, I guess you would say. And my mom said to me, you don’t think that’s a cop-out? Like to live in a monastery or something? And now I do think that internal peace — you want to achieve internal peace in the most hustle-bustle place. But all the distractions, and all that stuff. You want to achieve internal peace and centredness. It’s true.
“From a philosophical standpoint, though, I think what I’m trying to do — I’m just trying to be content with movement, and stuff like that. And this. What’s happening. Just peace. Internal peace.”
He was a happy kid. He loved his parents. He loves his little sister, Asia. He is happy. But there is something buried in him. Not long ago he was training with the door open a crack, and Erin filmed it on her phone, and on the tape, he roars. He lets out a geyser of anger, and then after a few seconds another one. That’s not unusual. Anyone can roar, in the currents of exertion.
And then he begins to weep, great wracking sobs, even as the pedals keep spinning. It hadn’t happened before, and hasn’t since.
“I didn’t feel bad, I didn’t feel good,” he says. “It was pure emotion. There’s no way to describe it. It was overwhelming. And the only way I knew how to dispel it in my body was cry.
“There is something deep, deep inside, that I don’t know if the word is bothers, but drives. Like very deep that I can only access — it certainly comes out of races and that sort of thing. I can’t describe it. There’s something there, though. Like, it made me cry.”
He remains a mystery, even to him. In two weeks, Lionel Sanders will stand in front of Kailua-Kona Bay with the other best 54 triathletes on Earth. He will take a deep breath, and will think of the path he has taken to that place, to the jungle heat. And he will leap into the water, and do far more than try not to sink.
“I don’t know if I am trying to find anything anymore. I know I’ll never go back . . . It’s not who I am anymore.”
LIONEL SANDERS