Almost inevitably, I’d fallen into a triathlon stage, a near mandatory passage for someone like me — middle-aged, unaccomplished at any specific sport, afflicted with an equipment fetish and in desperate need of new ways to underperform. Why be good at one sport when you can be unimpressive at three?

OK, so I (finally) got through all that. Just as a reading comprehension check, here's what I got out of this, please feel to correct me if I got any of this wrong:

Former jock football player who misses glory days of beating the crap out of people without the threat of felony lawsuits falteringly meanders through sports in search of a means of self validation.

Jock spends inordinate quantities of time doing this; evidently neglecting his strangely patient sugar mama wife who nonetheless sees fit to support his man-child existence.

Jock discovers endurance sports.

Jock learns that endurance sports are hard and that you have to try really hard to win them.

...

so, um...

I guess the take home lesson I learned here is that having an unusually patient sugar mama wife = for teh win.

Jure Robic, the Slovene soldier who might be the world’s best ultra-endurance athlete, lives in a small fifth-floor apartment near the railroad tracks in the town of Koroska Bela. By nature and vocation, Robic is a sober-minded person, but when he appears at his doorway, he is smiling. Not a standard-issue smile, but a wild and fidgety grin, as if he were trying to contain some huge and mysterious secret.

Robic catches himself, strides inside and proceeds to lead a swift tour of his spare, well-kept apartment. Here is his kitchen. Here is his bike. Here are his wife, Petra, and year-old son, Nal. Here, on the coffee table, are whiskey, Jägermeister, bread, chocolate, prosciutto and an inky, vegetable-based soft drink he calls Communist Coca-Cola, left over from the old days. And here, outside the window, veiled by the nightly ice fog, stand the Alps and the Austrian border. Robic shows everything, then settles onto the couch. It’s only then that the smile reappears, more nervous this time, as he pulls out a DVD and prepares to reveal the unique talent that sets him apart from the rest of the world: his insanity.

Tonight, Robic’s insanity exists only in digitally recorded form, but the rest of the time it swirls moodily around him, his personal batch of ice fog. Citizens of Slovenia, a tiny, sports-happy country that was part of the former Yugoslavia until 1991, might glow with beatific pride at the success of their ski jumpers and handballers, but they tend to become a touch unsettled when discussing Robic, who for the past two years has dominated ultracycling’s hardest, longest races. They are proud of their man, certainly, and the way he can ride thousands of miles with barely a rest. But they’re also a little, well, concerned. Friends and colleagues tend to sidle together out of Robic’s earshot and whisper in urgent, hospital-corridor tones.

‘‘He pushes himself into madness,’’ says Tomaz Kovsca, a journalist for Slovene television. ‘‘He pushes too far.’’ Rajko Petek, a 35-year-old fellow soldier and friend who is on Robic’s support crew, says: ‘‘What Jure does is frightening. Sometimes during races he gets off his bike and walks toward us in the follow car, very angry.’’

What do you do then?

Petek glances carefully at Robic, standing a few yards off. ‘‘We lock the doors,’’ he whispers.

When he overhears, Robic heartily dismisses their unease. ‘‘They are joking!’’ he shouts. ‘‘Joking!’’ But in quieter moments, he acknowledges their concern, even empathizes with it — though he’s quick to assert that nothing can be done to fix the problem. Robic seems to regard his racetime bouts with mental instability as one might regard a beloved but unruly pet: awkward and embarrassing at times, but impossible to live without.
‘‘During race, I am going crazy, definitely,’’ he says, smiling in bemused despair. ‘‘I cannot explain why is that, but it is true.’’

The craziness is methodical, however, and Robic and his crew know its pattern by heart. Around Day 2 of a typical weeklong race, his speech goes staccato. By Day 3, he is belligerent and sometimes paranoid. His short-term memory vanishes, and he weeps uncontrollably. The last days are marked by hallucinations: bears, wolves and aliens prowl the roadside; asphalt cracks rearrange themselves into coded messages. Occasionally, Robic leaps from his bike to square off with shadowy figures that turn out to be mailboxes. In a 2004 race, he turned to see himself pursued by a howling band of black-bearded men on horseback.

‘‘Mujahedeen, shooting at me,’’ he explains. ‘‘So I ride faster.’’