Make Your Body Move

I did something yesterday that I'm struggling to sum up in an adjective. Exhilarating? Difficult? Crazy? A bit of all those things, but the only word that really captures it is "triathalon."

Technically, this is what would be known as a mini-triathalon. You swim 400 yards, bike 12 miles and then run 3 miles. They have these things every Monday night in Lake Placid through mid-August. Last year I didn't find out about them until the day before the last one and I had neither run nor swam at all that summer. So I chickened out. This summer, although I'm not in nearly as good a shape as I was last summer, I did swim a bunch of laps and even ran a few times so that I could participate. I even did all 3 in succession once.

So here's the experience. Before we even get there, I look in the paper and see the results from the prior week. I know approximately how fast I can do this, about 10 minutes for the swim, 45 minutes for the bike and 30 for the run and about 5 minutes for changes. This puts me about 10 minutes behind that last person (out of 8) in my age group to finish. There were a few older women who were a bit slower, but that's it. I manage to convince myself that this would give me the 9th best time of all the many 50-59 year-olds in Lake Placid, which is pretty good. So I arrive for sign-up and there are about 150 people there, of all ages and mostly very fit looking. I sign up and they scawl a number on my arm and leg and give me a bathing cap with a number on it as well. Many people are wearing official-lookng triathalon gear and a bunch have wet suits (!) on. At this point it's about 45 minutes until the things starts, so I arrange my towel, bicycle and related equipment, and running shoes in neat (for me) little piles and then spend the next 40 minutes fretting.

I had decided at this point that I was gooing to be that guy in the Olympics who comes staggering into the arena 20 minutes after everyone else has finished and the crowd give him a standing ovation. My wife thinks that's funny and is very supportive of my going ahead and doing this.

So it's finally time to start. We begin with an open water swim. I like swimming in lakes, though the water is often cold. I do not, however, ever try to swim for distance and/or speed. I tried swimming for exercise a few years ago but gave it up quickly. I am, let's just say, a competent swimmer. I can swim. But swimming for exercise is the most boring thing in the world. Swimming is only interesting to the extent that the fear of drowning keeps your mind active, but if you're in a pool that fear vanishes much to quickly to sustain interest. The only exercise I like less than swimming is Stairmaster. Whose idea was this, to simulate walking up stairs? Who likes doing that? I always figure if I dislike doing something in real life, I'm not going to enjoy simulating the activity on a machine.

Anyway, off we go, 150 of us diving into the lake, which is not too terribly cold. I try to go out nice and easy, but with all the adrenaline of the start and the energy required to avoid kicking feet, I find myself pretty winded after 100 yards. This is not good. Swimming laps, you can always pause and take a breath as you turn. Not the case in open water. So I spend the next 300 yards trying to breathe. Now, not being able to breathe is interesting, so I'm not bored on this swim. I figured in advance that I could do breast stroke for a bit if I couldn't keep doing the crawl, but breast stroke is very slow, even if you're good at it, and I wasn't expecting to do 300 yards of it. So once the good swimmers clear out, I start doing the backstroke. It's easy to breathe when you're on your back, but it's hard to see, which is also not boring. I bump into one person, but mostly I notice that the dozen or so people behind me have observed what I'm doing and many of them start doing it as well. I keep churning away and after a very long 10 minutes, I find myself back on shore.

I'm wet and breathing very hard and my wife is cheering me on and random people are saying "good job!" and my daughter is yelling at me not to walk up to my bicycle because everyone else is RUNNING. I succumb to the pressure and trot. I dry myself enough to get my shirt and my bike shoes on and off I go.

Before I signed up for this, I was wondering what to wear. The guy who runs the events told me that triathalon shorts were best. They're like bike shorts but with light padding so you can swim and run in them. I was startled to find out that I had accidentally bought a pair of these a couple of years ago, thinking they were just lightly padded bike shorts. But in fact they are easy to swim in and not too bad for running either, once you get over the fact that you don't wear anything under them. This makes perfect sense, intellectually, but back in the day we called this "going commando" or "freesyle" and I never got into it.

The bike ride was fine. It's a variation of a route that I've done many times before. I know all the hills and know I can do them. There's a road that runs along the Ausable River for about 4 miles and it is probably my favorite place to ride in the whole world. So I'm loving it, but there's always a little voice in my head saying, "This would be great if I didn't have to run 3 miles when I'm done with this." I got through the ride, even the one hill that I despise (it ends at a traffic light so you climb climb climb and then you have to stop.

I arrive back, get words of encouragement and a kiss from my wife and put my running shoes on and I'm off again. I haven't run this route because I don't run. I used to run but I've gained a bit of weight and lost a bit of cartilage in my knees and flexibility in my muscles, so it's not really fun anymore. So all I know about the course is that it goes along the lake, which is flat, and then up Mt. Whitney Rd. I make the assumption that Mt. Whitney Rd. goes up, which turns out to be correct. It's a mile of steady uphill. The nice thing about this is that it's downhill coming back. I've always liked courses that are downhill for the second half. I actually pass 2 people during the run and one person passes me near the finish line and then I'm done.

It took me exactly an hour and 30 minutes (unofficially). The swim took 10 minutes, the ride took 45 minutes and the run took 30 minutes. My daughter is blown away by the precision of this and I'm pleased to have finished. I'm sore and tired but not beyond comprehension. And so I've done it. I didn't wimp out and I even didn't finish last.