Thinking of a kid named “Tyler”

I was just walking away from putting Jason Gunter into the water for the swim start at last weekend’s Ironman World Championship when my Blackberry alerted me from my pocket.  It took me awhile to dig out the phone.  A couple year’s ago, when I was in a similar handler role at Kona, I forgot about the Blackberry in my cargo pocket.  Let me just say that salt water and cell phones do not make a good combination.  So this year, I had double-wrapped the phone in a couple of ziplock bags.

I pulled out the phone to see the message.  It read: “Tyler Copley has accepted your friend request on Facebook”.  The irony of the moment sent chills down my body.

Tyler Copley was a teenager from Atlanta who was also a single leg amputee.  Tyler lost his leg as a result of cancer.  I was fortunate to barely meet him and his mom, Connie, about 18 months ago.  Tyler was mostly affiliated with another great organization based in Atlanta, the Rally Foundation.  Rally serves the needs of children with cancer and has raised millions of dollars towards children’s cancer research over the years.  Their founder, Dean Crowe, is not only a personal friend and mentor to me with my efforts at Getting2Tri, but she’s also one of those rare champions who leads by example.

A couple months ago, I was meeting with Dean to talk about “non profit stuff”, as we like to call it.  We talked about the linkage between Tyler and our two organizations.  Tyler had reached out to G2T concerning his interest in training for a triathlon.  We had a couple of conversations and had begun putting some plans together.  Sadly, my organization was never able to work with him.  Tyler’s cancer came back and he lost his courageous fight with the disease a little over a year ago so we were never able to fulfill his dream of doing a triathlon.

My conversation with Dean that particular meeting in August drifted to talking about Tyler.  Dean told me that she had made a promise to the young teenager to do a race in his honor some day.  She said, “You know, Mike, I need to pick a half-marathon race to run for him.”  Without missing a beat, I said to her, “Dean, why don’t you do a triathlon.  Isn’t that what Tyler would have wanted anyway?”  Initially she shrugged off the notion of a triathlon but when I mentioned to her the idea of doing a relay team with two other participants…then she was suddenly running out of reasons to say “no”.

Dean and I loosely worked out a training plan and picked the Lake Lanier Sprint triathlon on October 4th as the targeted race.  She would have plenty of time since the race was roughly 2 months away.  Dean decided to do the swim portion on her relay team.  The distance at the triathlon would be 4oo meters.  Dean worked with a masters swim coach, Pete Farren, from the Concourse Athletic Club as well as participated in a couple open water swim practices.

Many times throughout the course of Dean’s preparation, she would email me or text me or call me saying, “You know, Tyler is up in heaven right now laughing and smiling about this whole thing.”  And I truly believe she was right about that statement.

Dean displayed what I’ve seen time and time again from other able-bodied athletes who race in honor of someone else; when we get tired or feel like giving up, racing for someone or something greater than ourselves makes all the difference in the world.  I am very proud of my friend, Dean Crowe.  She raced with great pride, finishing her portion on her team without any problems, and more importantly, lead by example as well as fulfilled a promise she made to a teenager when his days with us had become limited.  Dean is one of those magical leaders who actually walks the walk, or, in this case, “swims the swim”.  I encourage you to spend some time looking over her organization’s efforts and mission.

A few weeks later, I was looking over some Facebook pages and found that Tyler’s page was still active.  In fact, many of his high school classmates continue to leave messages on his Wall, even beyond his death.  I had made a friend request to his page a couple weeks before I headed out to Hawaii to support Jason Gunter and Jason’ Fowler.  Connie Copley, Tyler’s mom, maintains his Facebook page in his memory.  She was the one responsible for accepting my friend request to Tyler’s page.  Ironically, her approval came on the morning of the most famous triathlon in the world; the Ironman World Championship.  She said later that she doesn’t know why she happened to open Facebook that particular morning to approve the request.  Something told her to “do it” that day.

Coincidence?  Absolutely not.

You see, I believe what Dean said many times over and over during the course of her training.  Tyler is up in heaven smiling down on the world of triathlons.  And even though Getting2Tri was not able to fulfill his dreams of doing a triathlon while he was with us, Tyler is making his mark on the triathlon community…one race at a time.

Thank you, Tyler   We miss you.

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