NEW PALESTINE — In tests of human endurance, every athlete will hit a psychological wall at some point. Dominic “Nic” Montani smacked into that wall at mile 17.
His ankle twinged, and Montani worried for a moment that it might be broken. He dismissed the thought, gritted his teeth and ignored the pain. He was good at ignoring pain.
An Iron Man triathlon starts with 2.4 miles of swimming, followed by 112 miles of biking and is topped off by a full 26.22-mile marathon. The conditions weren’t cooperative with any competitor in the Louisville Iron Man triathlon Oct. 21. After waiting for hours in 45 degree temperatures and a downpour of borderline freezing rain, when the athletes plunged into the choppy waters of the Ohio river that morning, the water actually felt warm.
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]Click here to purchase photos from this gallery
When some of the top triathletes in the world found themselves unable to overcome the upstream current, race officials were forced to delay the race’s start for an hour and shorten the swim portion to about one mile. It didn’t make things any easier, Montani said.
But he was determined to knock off another item on his bucket list. So on he pushed.
Montani, a New Palestine-based veteran marathoner and endurance athlete, had an additional obstacle to overcome: A strained ligament in his right ankle, an injury he sustained a week before the race.
At mile 17, Montani said his world got dark. His friend and training partner, Antonio, had fallen behind after crashing his bike on the slick roads. Montani had watched competitors fall out on his left and right all day, dropping from exhaustion and hypothermia.
He thought back to his family and friends who supported him during the long months training for several hours every day. Throughout his racing career, he didn’t slow down after completing his first marathon in 2009. He didn’t slow down when he qualified for and completed the Boston Marathon last year, a challenge he knew he wanted to complete before he died.
In April 2010, still toward the beginning of Montani’s long-distance running career, he was shot in the leg by a man illegally target shooting across a roadway on County Road 100S. In that moment, Nic feared the rifle bullet had pierced his femoral artery — he thought he was going to bleed out, he said.
He didn’t. And one month of rehab later, Nic still wasn’t ready to slow down. He got back to running.
Nic Montani had brushed off a bullet wound. A little ankle pain wasn’t going to make it happen, either; mile 17’s psychological wall wasn’t going to stop him that day, he said.
Pushing through the pain, he strode out the final 9 miles and moved past the finish line in 11 hours, 22 minutes, and 42 seconds. He finished the marathon portion in 3 hours and 58 minutes — two minutes under his goal time of four hours.
“I had in my mindset that I was going to do it,” Montani said. “It didn’t matter what was going to happen that day. I was going to finish.”
Show of strength
Montani is an operations manager at Eli Lilly and Co. Antonio Navarro, the same friend who finished the race after crashing his bike, met Nic at work and has been training with him for years. His friend is always in a positive mood and accomplishes anything and everything he sets his mind to, he said.
Training for a triathlon, especially an Iron Man triathlon, is an enormous time commitment, Navarro said. He had to help Nic budget his time in order to get squared away with his boss at work, with his family at home and with his buddies come training time.
Montani said his training regimen consisted of two-a-day workouts six days a week. Each day was different, but it usually concluded with a few hours of biking and running. He had to adjust his training schedule during two business trips earlier this year, but he was able to get a good workout in at the hotel pool, he said.
In the days leading up to the race, Navarro and the members of Nic’s training group had concerns that he wasn’t going to be able to run, he said. But run he did.
“He was in serious pain at mile 17, but he knew he was determined,” Navarro said. “He was going to finish. He’d already sacrificed so much.”
“Once you finish, your sense of accomplishment is so big, that you feel you want to do it again,” Navarro said. “ You forget about all the pain you went through, and you just want to repeat it. Nic really showed me how tough he was that day.”
Remembering what it’s for
Whether it was tackling his first Iron Man triathlon or the Boston Marathon before it, Montani said pushing himself out of his comfort zone is the whole point of competing.
Obtaining the unobtainable is the reason he races, he said.
“I wanted to do this before I get too old, because I don’t want to be one of those guys who regrets not doing it,” Montani said. “Or what if I get injured at some point in the future and can’t realistically do it?”
“It seems daunting when you look right at it, but if you take it slow, as long as you keep moving, you can do it,” Montani said. “You’ve got to get the training in, be focused and regimented. But it’s doable for almost anybody. I did it on a 12-year-old road bike, not one of those fancy tri bikes you see most of the pros on. Anybody can do it and go out there on pure grit and willpower.”
Yet the most challenging part of completing a marathon or a triathlon isn’t the race itself. It’s figuring out how to make time for the people you love while training for it, Montani said.
Within the toughest challenge, however, lies his key to success. He surrounds himself with supportive people who remind him what he’s running for.
An image comes to Montani’s mind when his body begs him to stop moving during a race. When Montani is getting splashed by freezing cold currents, when lactic acid burns the muscles in his legs as he pedals past a mile marker, when he feels like he can’t take another step and there’s still miles ahead of him, Montani thinks of his daughters, Avery and Gabi.
He pictures the smiling faces of his daughters, 9 and 5 years old. He imagines them cheering him on as the clock keeps ticking. And then, Nic realizes that nothing — not freezing rain, not strained ligaments, not even bullet wounds — could ever stand a chance of stopping him.
“I strive to just prove to myself that I can do something that doesn’t seem obtainable,” Montani said. “I just want to show them that if you work hard enough, you can achieve anything. That’s my biggest focus and reason for doing this.”
