Well, I realize I shouldn't be writing a post about the triathlon I just completed. Why? Because it's self-important. Boring to hear about. Really boring to hear about. Maybe other sports have interesting tale to tells, but what can you say about a triathlon? It was long. I swam. I biked. I ran. I felt tired.
As my favorite triathlon joke goes (and there aren't many), when an athlete was asked why he didn't want to do a triathlon, he said "because I don't need to be the best at exercise."
And, as I said in a previous post, The Onion has already put me in my place:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/im-truly-sorry-for-this-but-youre-about-to-hear-al,28995/
But, who cares. I'll bravely forge on anyway. If you read long enough, I'll use the phrase "cube of urine" at some point. That's something.
So here goes. With headings!
Two Numbers
Triathlon officials write
two numbers on your body. They use
a heavy black marker to write your race ID on your right arm, and your
age on your left calf. I like the
arm number a lot—it's like a temporary tattoo of athletic coolness. Mine started to fade right away, and the next day I was tempted to keep filling it back in with my own marker so people would notice it weeks later, and I'd get to say “What? This old number? I’m a triathlete you see . . .” Kind of like leaving your lift-ticket tags
on your winter coat so people know you went skiing.
The age on the calf is another story. When I was biking most people
passed me up. The bike portion is my weakest
event, mostly because I ride a
used steel bike I bought from a guy in Lowell (the Peoria of Massachusetts)
while $5,000 bikes zoom past me.
I also neglect a lot of bike training because it’s my least favorite part. And I just might not be
good. So as people passed me, I
would immediately look at their calves to see how old they were. I'd be thinking “Dammit! A 57
year-old woman that just passed me” or “How can that 68 year-old man be so
damn fast?”
Triathlete or Homeless Person
So I really run a low-budget triathlon
operation. Take my water
bottles. Lots of serious
triathletes have some sort of complicated set-up where a hose runs from their
water bottles up to the handle bars, and then said hose sits right in front of
their mouth as they lean over to ride, and they only have to dip their head to
take a sip, expending almost no extra energy. I, on the other hand, bought two Aquafina bottles. When I
wanted to take a sip of water, I had to unscrew
the cap, hold it in my hand, lift up the bottle, drink, put it back in the
rack, and then twist the top back on.
Then I lost the cap so the water started splash all over me with every
bump.
I asked my friend who drove me there
if I was the only person in the entire race who was competing in cut-off shorts,
and she said absolutely, which made me more than a little proud. My running hat was an old, smeared baseball cap with a drawing of a knife through a skull, and the words “Death Before Dishonor” (for some reason). My shirt had the sleeves cut off. My shoes were blown-out.
I may not have won the race but I did
look the most homeless.
Still Young
In case you're in your forties and you think think you’re old, you’re not. A whole slew
of fifty, sixty, and seventy somethings were
crushing it on this course.
Energy, stamina, strength, muscle tone—it’s all still available to us
for decades to come. It's just in the doing. And if you don't do it, it doesn't get done.
A Cube of Urine
Triathletes love to talk about the
minutia of triathloning. They can
argue for hours about the best place for your thumbs on your bike handlebars
to reduce drag. Or how dark your
swim goggles should be on a sunny day.
Or how many millimeters your heel drop should be in your new running
shoes.
But mostly they want to
talk about urine. About how you
can pee in your wetsuit on a long swim, because it warms you up. Or how you pee on the long bike ride
(very common), but it's hard because working muscles lock
up your bladder and it’s hard to let go, so you have to wait until you
get to a big hill which provides a long downhill coast, and then you can stop your pumping legs and try to relax and see if you can get the urine to flow.
I’ve never done either of those
things. I’ll stay just this other
side of being a serious triathlete thank you very much, since it means I never
have to pee myself.
But urine did cross my mine in this
race. Let me back up for a moment. One of the problems in a
long triathlon is dehydration and sodium depletion. The triathlete has about two hours of racing in them before they need to fill the tank with more fluids and calories and salt. There’s all kinds of ways to get
this done during the race, from solutions in your water bottle to special goo
you squirt in your mouth. I prefer
shot blocks, which are gel/gummy cubes you can eat while biking. This time I chose the lemon-lime flavor
because it has an extra dose of sodium, which I knew I would need on a
hot day.
So there I am, biking away on a 28 mile
course when I feel my tank start to empty, so I pull out my first shot
block. I open the wrapper, squeeze
out a yellow cube, and pop it in my mouth. A warm, salty, gummy, squishy, yellow cube. It was impossible not to think that this
is what eating a cube of urine might be like.
White People Enjoy the Fall Colors
This race was in the Myles Standish State Park, and I can't imagine a
better place for a race: New
England trees just turning into their fall colors, the pond placid and pristine
and cool, the biking on smooth roads with nary a bump, blue
skies, the ideal temperature (70s), running on narrow paved paths through
woods, hills big enough to make it interesting but not so big that it kills you
. . . on and on.
Oh, Right, I Have a Body
It’s hard to explain why one is eager to start the triathlon on race
day. It’s three-plus hours of
aerobic exercise, and most of it experienced in a state of mild to extreme fatigue.
But for me, the race feels like
stepping back into my body. Most of us neglect our corporeal selves, since it’s so
easy to live in a world of intellect, words, memory, anxiety, planning,
thinking, reading, etc. Living from the neck up and forgetting everything below
it. Or maybe it's like you’re always 3 feet away from your real body, forgetting it’s there, but still
thinking all your thoughts. But when you do a triathlon you step back into your body and feel every part of it, a reentry into every last cell you have.
I figure most people only remember they have a body when they get sick, which makes your physical existence seem like a nasty necessity. But triathloning is more about the body as celebration--the joy of movement, the five senses registering, all your systems hitting on all cylinders. And then there's the fatigue. The glorious, gratifying fatigue that comes after a day's hard work. It's exhaustion as companion, a companion I truly miss when I'm not training.
This is what you want when you get into your forties. The biggest age demographic in most
triathlons is 40-45, the classic mid-life crisis range. But it's not that surprising: when you're a fortysomething you're aware of your own mortality since life is about half over, but you're still young enough to have a
functioning body. Death is in view but you've still got a lot of time left. So you take up
triathloning to make it count.
The War
It’s pretty fun to see your mind wrestle with your body. When you’re a young athlete, the only thing that
holds you back is your own will, since your body can handle most
anything. When you're forty-three it's your body that holds you back with all kinds of injuries, even though
your will is ready to do much more.
And then your body starts to protest late in a 3 hour race. When I was running my right foot went
numb, and my left ankle suddenly started to throw out searing jolts of pain. But I just ran through it, and it all
went away in a mile or two. But
it’s like my body was saying “hey!
What are we doing?! I don’t
want to do this. Stop! Here’s a numb foot and a painful
ankle. Now stop already! What? You’re still running?
You’re not going to stop?
Sigh . . . O.K., O.K. I’ll cut out the foot trouble. Just get this thing over with as soon as possible.”