South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Hyde: Florida man running 10 ironmans in 10 days
10 triathlons. 10 days. How far can one athlete push himself?
This is a story for dreamers, for schemers, for those who dare push themselves to the outer limits of what is humanly possible, out where mere mortals don’t tread, all the while eating a donut. Or a Pop Tart.
Or maybe he’ll eat beef jerky if that’s the only thing available, as it was at one race.
“You eat anything to get in the system fast,” Kenny Brighton said.
Brighton, 35, is a normal guy leading a normal life about to try something utterly abnormal. He’s planning to do an Ironman triathlon on a self-styled course centered in Deerfield Beach on Tuesday — 2.4 miles swimming, 112 miles cycling and 26.2 miles of a marathon run.
He’ll repeat that Wednesday.
And again Thursday. And again ... Over 10 consecutive days, Brighton plans to do 10 Ironmans. That’s 1,400 miles of swimming, cycling and running. Why would anyone try that? Because he can — or thinks he can. If his body holds up. If his mind doesn’t lose focus. And, well, if he doesn’t fall asleep on the bike.
“When you’re sleep-deprived, the
bike can lull you to sleep,” he says.
In many ways, this is the best kind of sports story, the one that isn’t about winning or losing, money or celebrity, but simply pushing yourself to rare heights. On the other hand: You know how Einstein said doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity? Here’s another definition. It started so innocently, too. Brighton was a good athlete — “not great,” he said — at Deerfield Beach High School. A swimmer. A water-polo player. He became a weekend warrior as an adult. When a friend was running a half-marathon, he joined him. He enjoyed it.
“The next logical step would be a marathon,” he said.
You can pause here to ask: Logical to whom? But, OK, he ran a marathon. That led to a next step he wondered if was even possible: Running a 50-mile event. And then he completed a 100-miler. And he did an Ironman. And more marathons.
Somewhere in all this he heard about an event that has five Ironmans on five Hawaiian islands. He wrote to enter the event scheduled for last summer. He learned that as part of the event’s 10-year anniversary the event involved 10 Ironmans. He still entered.
Brighton had moved to Gainesville two years ago and began training 30 hours a week for the event. That meant getting up at 3:45 a.m. and exercising for a few hours before his job as head of philanthropy for the Chordoma Foundation, which provides support and research for a rare cancer.
Weekends meant more extensive workouts. That meant waking at 1:30 a.m. When the Hawaiian event was postponed to this month because of the pandemic, he stayed with it.
“We found out my wife (Ali) was pregnant and due in July,” he said. “Later, in the pandemic, the race was pushed to July in the week after our daughter would be born.”
That was a game-changer. “Ali lets me get away with a lot, but that might’ve been pushing the envelope,” he said.
Rather than waste two years of training, Brighton decided to do the 10-day event in Deerfield Beach where he had support and could lay out a good course. Ali supported it. His parents, Ken and Kathy, opened their home to be the event’s headquarters.
He’ll swim in a pool at the Deerfield Beach Aquatic Center where Brighton swam growing up and once worked. He’ll cycle up and down A1A in Broward and Palm Beach. The marathon is on a fivemile loop by his parents’ home.
Friends will run or cycle with him on various stretches. His coach, Lukus Klawitter, is coming in from North Dakota, and will help him retain a focus that’s opposite of most triathlons where you want a good time.
“My goal is not to go fast, to not spike my heart rate and to finish each day as unaffected as I can,” he said. “You want to go fast enough to maximize sleep but not finish to fast where you put too much stress on the body and go into the next day exhausted.”
Brighton enjoys fitness and a good goal, but the motivation is more than that.
“I like the lifestyle,” he said. “I think I am my best in my day-today life — best husband, best employee — when I have a goal that forces me to be extremely structured and manages my life. I appreciate doing these events because of the impact on me.”
That said, he’ll tone everything down after this event. Training like this isn’t sustainable on the body, he said. Some salute his craziness. But then it’s all relative. A movie was made about an triathlete named James Lawrence doing 50 Ironman events in 50 states in 50 consecutive days.
He’s now doing 100 Ironman events in 100 days.
“No interest,” Brighton says of that. “At all.”
He then adds: “But if this is a cakewalk, you never know.”