Everything Past Iron

NONFICTION

By Kerri Goers

It was a corner room with walls at odd angles, making the bed and adjacent chair a tight fit. The walls were painted a generic tan with peach undertones, the bland institutional color of hospitals, prisons, and schools, sold in bulk and one shade off from cement. The bathroom had a commode in the shower, metal handrails along the wall and next to the toilet, and three pull cords for emergencies, which struck me as excessive and then alarming.

I sat in an oversized plastic upholstered recliner. My husband, Eric, lay on the bed, exhausted from a night in the emergency room and eighteen hours without food. His head was turned toward me, and I watched the violent percussive way his chest rose and fell, out of sync with the pulsating carotid of his neck. Loud beating rotors of a Life Flight drew my attention to the small window of our room. I watched the helicopter’s shadow flutter over the building. The beating rotors grew faint. Eric slept – oblivious to it all. He was in atrial fibrillation: a fast irregular beating of the atrium that is out of sync with the ventricles of the lower heart. It’s an inadequate heartbeat that doesn’t allow

for proper filling or emptying of the heart. So, there we were, in the cardiac unit of the hospital, my forty-nine-year-old husband and me.

Eric is an Ironman. He competed in the 2015 Ironman Wisconsin at the age of forty-four. He completed the 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride, and 26.2 mile run in eleven hours, twenty-seven minutes and one second. It was a good time; the winner completed the 140.6-mile course in eight hours, fifty-nine minutes, and fifty-nine seconds. I ran the Chicago marathon in 2009 and that alone took me well over five hours; I wasn’t paying attention to the time. I was trying to get to the end; cross that line and stop the forward motion of hours.

Out of 2,990 entrants, Eric placed 278th overall. He told everyone the Wisconsin Ironman was a “one and done”. He had no desire to do it again. He met his goal: a finish in under twelve hours. There was no reason to wonder if he could do it faster or race smarter next time; he had already done his best.

Iron is an interesting element. It is the most common element on Earth and can be fired into hard metal at 1500 degrees Celsius. When I think of iron, I think of its metal form, something strong and unbreakable. Iron is silver, shiny, and appears to be almost reflective like the shards of a shattered mirror. In some instances, it’s smooth; in others, like mountain granite — jagged and rectangular. The abbreviation for iron is Fe. Its atomic number is 26 and it’s located in Group 8 and Period 4, on the Periodic Table, where it’s surrounded by violet manganese, technetium, ruthenium, precious rhodium,

and cobalt for which the color is named. Iron is essential to the functioning of most lifeforms. In humans, it’s necessary to the formation of hemoglobin, a component of red blood cells vital to the transport of oxygen to tissues and organs. It’s also elemental to energy production. We carry four grams of iron in our body. Too much is toxic.

We had been in the hospital before, in the emergency room, where they performed cardioversion: a synchronized shock to the heart that resets its rhythm. That was less than one month ago. We thought he would have another cardioversion and go home like our previous visit. They explained that, although Eric thought he knew when the atrial fibrillation started, he couldn’t be completely sure. The best course of action was to admit him. He wasn’t on blood thinners; a CT scan would show if clots had formed. The significance of this was that clots could be dislodged with cardioversion, causing a stroke in my relatively young husband. We hoped the atrial fibrillation was an isolated occurrence; obviously that was not the case. We asked about risk factors and triggers. They replied: heart disease, high blood pressure, sleep apnea, obesity, family history, alcohol, and as it turns out, endurance athletics. Eric’s father’s atrial fibrillation started in his late forties. Eric has been an endurance athlete for the last thirty-five years.

When my friend Jenny heard that Eric was going to be competing in the Ironman, she volunteered to help us navigate the day. She lived in Madison and was a seasoned Ironman spectator.

“Who is coming? Did you make t-shirts?” she asked.

I’d never attended an Ironman and the only planning we’d done was to secure a hotel room in downtown Madison, four blocks from the starting line. Signs? T-shirts? Support crew? Clearly, I was out of my element and failing the job of supportive spouse. Eric’s previous races hadn’t been family affairs. He went, competed, came home, and filled us in on the highlights. Still, I should have understood this was different. This was the race of all races, and I hadn’t given any thought to my part in the day. Thank God for Jenny.

On race-day Eric and I woke sometime before 5:00 a.m. The Capital building was lit with spotlights and the night was starting to lighten into dawn. He packed his bag and the two of us walked down to the parking ramp next to Monona Lake where the athletes were gathering, marking their numbers in permanent marker on their arms and legs, and putting their wet suits on. There was no wind, a good sign.

At 7:00 a.m. I stood watching thousands of swimmers move across the lake, their pink and green swim caps blurred by the spray of water rising into the air, an eerie mist created by their many arms plunging over and over into the lake. Eric emerged an hour and twelve minutes later, ran up the cement parking ramp to the transition area, and moments later passed by on his bike.

Not long ago I listened to a Radiolab podcast about elements while in my car.1 The host, Jad Abumrad, was

1 Radio Lab/WNYC Studios “Elements,” March 25, 2021. (http://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/episodes/elements)

interviewing Derrick Muller, the creator of the science and engineering YouTube channel Veritasium. They were talking about stars, the formation of planets, of energy, and of iron. They explained that particles that slam together lose mass and that lost mass is emitted as energy. Evidently, this is what the sun is doing: combining protons and creating the energy which we experience as sunlight. Light is former mass.

Apparently, this is what stars do. Derrick said, “Stars live by this process of sticking nuclei together, going from smaller nuclei, making bigger nuclei. The heavier the star, the more the smashing and bashing they can do in their core, and the bigger and bigger nuclei they can form.” But I guess there are limits. Jad and Derrick said six-billion years ago, a giant star, bigger than our sun, was busy making energy. It was smashing and bashing, making carbon, making oxygen, getting bigger and bigger. But then Derrick says, “there comes a point where sticking nuclei together no longer gives you energy…Once you’ve formed iron, if you’re a star, that’s the end of life as you know it.” Jad and Derrick said iron was incredibly stable, “the most stable nuclei in the universe” and that “you can’t force any more energy out of them.” I remember turning onto the drive that leads to the hospital when Derrick said, “Which means you have a core which is no longer going to give you energy.”

I met Jenny and the kids in time to watch Eric pass by on the first loop of his bike leg. He cleared Old Sauk Pass Road, took the downhill on Timber Lane and was beginning his ascent. We were in brilliant positioning. The uphill climb slowed him down and gave him the opportunity to see us and gave us an opportunity to find him among the mass of near identical

racing kits and aerodynamic helmets.

Our children were six, eight and fifteen. The younger two were easily lost in a crowd. Prior to the race, I took a photo – a close up – of each child and printed them onto 24 by 36 inch poster board. My Dad made wooden frames to mount on the back, for stability, with wide wooden handles at the bottom of each. I made large speech bubbles and plastered them to each sign. The youngest’s sign said, “Go, Dad Go!” Our middle daughter’s sign read “Wow, fun, wow” (a favorite saying of my husband’s college cross country coach). Finally, our high school son, who ran in both cross-country and track, had written, “I can go faster than that!” I called them our bobble head signs because they bobbed up and down when we waved them. The signs were a surprise to my husband. He found us easily, as he was nearing his fiftieth mile. His stomach was upset so I ran next to him, passing over Imodium that he tossed back with a squirt of Gatorade. Then he was gone, and we left to have lunch at Chipotle for a couple of hours before catching him at the end of his second lap.

We were able to intersect his path four times on his 26.2mile run, bobbing our heads and cheering him on. Then we moved to the finish line and watched him cross. The transition from running to walking was jerky, his feet hit the pavement in staccato, then he started to shake and vomit. After Eric cleared the medic check, I took him to our hotel, peeled his racing kit off, and ushered him into a hot shower. It was a long time before the tremors ceased and he could eat anything. One and done.

The feat of the Ironman makes a strong impression when you have spent a twelve-hour day watching it unfold. Twelve hours. I can drive to the state of Colorado in that length

of time. He spent the whole of it in motion, in exertion, expending energy.

The CT scan showed no evidence of clots; Eric could have the cardioversion and go home later that evening. He would need blood pressure medication, an antiarrhythmic, and a blood thinner. We were told he would need to come back to the cardiology clinic the next day. Then somehow, we found ourselves standing on one side of the hospital bed facing off with the electrophysiology cardiologist on the other. He said a nine-mile run was not moderate exercise. It was strenuous exercise. I understood why he said this. It would be strenuous exercise for me. It looked like it would be strenuous exercise for him. I thought of the bike mileage Eric did the previous morning and bit off a laugh. Eric on the other hand was not laughing. The cardiologist told him to give up all competition. Eric didn’t respond. He was pale and his lips were compressed into a flat line.

“But he exercises on a regular basis. A nine-mile run is not really long or strenuous for him,” I said. The physician turned his head to look at me, tipped his chin up, peered at me through his eyeglasses and down the length of his nose. It was condescension.

“I’m telling you what needs to be done. You will do what you will do. I can’t make you do anything.” He thought we were combative. But the ultimatum was thrown at us without any conversation about what that meant for my husband — how it would affect his quality of life, his friendships, and his general happiness. I stopped talking. There would be no conversation, no discussion.

Jad said, “But what happens to the star? Does is just become a big hunk?” I sat in my car listening to the two men banter back and forth. They explained that the star would collapse, gravity would take over and the “dead iron core” would start to pull “everything back in…aluminum, oxygen, carbon, magnesium, silicon-.” These things would rub together and get incredibly hot. Then Derrick said, “All of a sudden you get the super nova…Here’s the beauty of the super nova, in the ridiculously excesses of energy that are there in the super nova, right? In that ridiculously huge explosion, the biggest in the universe, there is so much energy there that actually what happens is that you form these nuclei which would not form under any other condition…Including like gold, including the gold in your wedding ring. They need that ridiculous excess of energy to form.”

There were big boom side effects. Then Jad and Derrick said what was left after the supernova was a field of debris which clumped together and began to form the early planets: the planetesimals, then Earth, and then us. “So you’re saying this is the birth of everything past iron?” Jad said.

“Yeah,” Derrick said, “exactly, exactly.”

During the Ironman, I walked past the long line of cars parked on Valley View Road and noted the bumper stickers: white ovals with 140.6 or 26.2, or 13.1 in bold black font. There were no units of measurement, no “mile” behind the numbers, but other athletes know these numbers correspond to the Ironman, the marathon, the half-marathon and so on. It appeared that every car on the street had been branded with a sticker. There was one sticker that stood out: “0.0”. I crouched

down next to the bumper for a selfie, laughing at its defiance in the face of such athletic hubris.

As I stood in that hospital room, the image of that sticker came back to me – black and white and stark – as clear as if I was holding it in my hands. I thought it would be a slow burn, a gradual fade. How does one go from 140.6 miles to 0.0 so quickly? Eric’s a supernova and I wonder, What is everything past iron?