Aggie Flashback with Army vet and former A&M LB Mark Dodge

Key quotes from Mark Dodge interview

“About a year ago, a real close buddy of mine challenged me to do a sprint triathlon, and I finished it and completed it. Me being a guy that doesn’t really sit on the sideline, I go all in with everything I do. I kind of spent some time, and I figured with my athletic ability and the platform that I’ve got – a friend of mine presented the opportunity to raise some money for a really good charity. I just jumped at that opportunity, and it turned out to be a life-changing event. The triathlon has really become a part of me now to where I’ll probably be doing it for the rest of my life.”

“You’ve got to have a lot of support systems to do a triathlon, for sure, but more specifically, Iron Man triathlons. When you get to that distance, the training is critical and it’s very long. Going through that training was a lot more difficult really than anything I ever did in football or the military. It wasn’t necessarily the physical part of it. It was the mental part of it. It was being out there on Saturdays and Sundays away from my family for eight to ten hours training all day long that just wore on you. It’s a really difficult thing to do, but if you don’t have a support system to do that – it’s critical.

Starting this whole deal, I had to hire a coach. I didn’t know how to swim 10 months ago. I couldn’t swim 25 meters. I’d swim 25 meters in the pool and just about drown. I had to hire a swim coach. I did about six lessons in the pool, and then it’s just about repetition. It’s getting in there. I probably work out, depending on peak training, ten to twenty hours per week, depending on what was going on. It was tough. You really have to balance life, and you have to be really disciplined on time management to be able to get the workouts in. It really was an amazing thing.

As you guys know, I suffer from PTSD, and I was on medication for a long time. Going through the triathlon community and developing the friends that I have and being able to go out and do the physical exertion, it has completely changed my life. I’m not on any more medications. It really was a godsend to get into this. I’ll be continuing to do it. I’m going to do the half-Iron Man in Austin in November, so we’ll just keep on going.”

“There are several different distances. You can do sprints, which are pretty short. A triathlon is just any completion that’s swim-bike-run. That’s really the main thing. The Iron Man distance is where it gets really tough. It’s a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride and a 26.2-mile run, all consecutive. So, it’s a long day.”

“I’ve kind of pulled back from Iron Man distance and have focused on the half-Iron Man distance, because I can still maintain my family and still – with a new kiddo on the way – focus on taking care of the more important things and still get enough training in. Down the road, I definitely think I’ll jump back into the full distance and try to make it back to that level. It’s very difficult. It’s funny when I go back to College Station now, I don’t think anybody recognizes me. I think I weigh 188 pounds.”

“I want to say ‘thank you’ to you guys and to TexAgs for all the support and giving me a platform to reach out. Really, I want to say ‘thank you’ to all the Aggies that supported me through prayers or through donations. Without you guys, I wouldn’t have been able to achieve any of this. It’s so special to be part of a network and community like the Aggie Network and have people that have your back in all situations. I just want to say a sincere ‘thank you’ to you guys and everybody else there that’s supported me. It really is just unbelievable. I hope I can represent you guys for as long as I can, the best I can.

Save the Children is a really awesome charity. I didn’t really know a lot about them until after I got started, but they did so much work locally here in the U.S. with disaster recovery and education and security. It’s just an incredible thing that they do. A lot of stuff that’s going on overseas right now in Syria with all the displaced kids – they’re over there right now making sure they’ve got food, making sure they’ve got security. It’s really important to me, just coming from growing up the way I did with a single mother who really didn’t have a whole lot and gave the skin off her back to make sure that I could do the things that I could. Just seeing those kids – hopefully if I can give one of them an opportunity to go to college and better their own community, that’s the best I can do in life.”

“I’m actually filing for an LLC and then a 501(c)(3) to start a program to help military veterans with PTSD going through the same thing that I suffered through. We’re starting the program to where we can help maybe 8-10 of them and build a program to where it’s repeatable to really help people. A lot of programs out there for veterans are more social and some of the bigger ones – I don’t know how effective they are at really reaching the actual patient and reaching the actual veteran. The suicide rate is just horrible these days with veterans suffering from this, and I feel like there’s an opportunity to combine endurance sports and build camaraderie and build team.

Once you have that team and you’ve sweated together and you have that closeness and unity, then you can open up and be able to, hopefully, get some structured therapy. We’ve got a lot of different programs here in San Antonio that we can use and people here; combat stress therapists that I’ve spoken to that really have excitement about this program. The combination of that sport and that unity and developing that and then putting together the structured program, which no other programs are doing out there like it – I’m working on that right now. I’ve got some other people helping me out. It’s a new one.”

“I’ve read in the past that physical fitness and sport is really proven to help mental illness and PTSD, specifically. I was not going into this thing at all thinking this was going to help me, in particular. As I got out on the bike and as I started building relationships with some of the teammates that I’ve been training with, some of them have the same issues and one of them is a prior marine. Just developing this camaraderie with them, in particular, really opened up a bond where I could talk about my issues more so than I ever had in the past. It just opened up this door to where I could finally get some of this stuff off my chest.

A lot of the programs that we have – ‘Wounded Warriors’ and ‘Red, White and Blue’ and all these other programs – they have programs kind of like Alcoholics Anonymous where it’s an open-booth session, but nobody does anything to where you actually build the relationships prior to going into these discussions and these therapies. For military, a lot of veterans won’t even admit that they have PTSD. They still act like it’s frowned upon or looked down upon. I feel like if you combine these different aspects, it’ll really help some people. Like I said before, if I can help one person, I feel like I’m doing my job. I feel like with myself and the example that I have and where I am in my life with this issue, the only thing I can do is to help somebody else, maybe give them the same opportunity that I had and let them go through the same process. Nobody else combines these programs, so I feel like it’s the right thing to do.”

“When I was in the military and even at A&M, I didn’t have the issues that I had afterwards. It wasn’t until I graduated and lost that sense of unity, that camaraderie, that team atmosphere that I’d always been around. Once I got out of that and into the corporate world and corporate environment where it was very, very competitive, it was all individual, you against me. That’s when the issues really started to peek in, and I had a lot more nightmares. I was going through a lot of the anxiety and a lot of the paranoia stuff that goes with it. I struggled so much, a couple years ago, I ended up going to see a therapist finally. That definitely helped. It got me at least on medication that would kind of level me out. I didn’t have the highs and lows.

Then this triathlon stuff started, and I could see – it was a slow process over the first couple months, but as I started really getting into it, I started building these relationships and being able to be open with these people. It just started clearing up my life almost entirely. I’m blessed to have been able to have been put in that position and have so much benefit in myself through this triathlon, through this Iron Man. It’s an emotional thing going through that kind of an event, but it sure is pretty amazing. I think this program that we’re working on will really benefit the people, and hopefully, it’ll grow big enough to where it’s outside of San Antonio and it’ll help as many people as it can.”

“Going through an Iron Man, you hit a lot of walls. I remember at Texas just getting in the water. Getting in the water for the 2.4-mile swim with everybody, with all 2,800 other competitors – that took a huge step for me, just because some of the races I’d had before had really rough swims. That was a big challenge for me. On the bike, I had a big wreck when I did Iron Man Florida a month before this. Getting on that bike, going through that process and making sure mentally I was prepared – then the run is always the worst.

After you finish that, you’ve got 26.2 miles to run. You’re fighting your body the entire time. The first lap, I felt pretty good. My nutrition was going well. The second lap, my body just started pretty much giving up. My knees were starting to swell. My back was hurting. My core was just absolutely torn up just from breathing and having your heart rate at 150 beats per minute for 12 hours. It tears you up. It literally tears your body down. It’s just a matter of how far you can push your body. You’ve got to be able to mentally put yourself in a position to where you can focus on something other than the pain, what is in the moment right now. You’ve got to find something else to focus on. That’s the most important thing. It is really, really, really tough.

The really cool thing about Iron Man is really anybody can do it. In football, you’ve got to have a certain set of physical attributes to get to those high levels, but in triathlon, you’re on the same field or the same course as the professionals. They’re faster than you. They do it differently, but you see a lot of people out there with different body types. The whole thing is just setting a goal, going out there and being disciplined and going through the process. It doesn’t matter where you are physically, anybody can do it if you give yourself enough time and go through the right process and go through the training. So, it’s awesome to see those people.”