First published in the TriTown Transcript May 17, 2019
By Esther C. Baird
Regular Readers know that I like to think of myself as a fitness enthusiast. But there is a gap, possibly a chasm, between my aspirations and the actual reality of being 45 in a body that isn’t always on board with my plan.
This was abundantly clear the last two months.
“I’m training for a mini-triathlon, you know, just a shorter version of all the events, that’s what a mini is.” I explained when I got my 20 year old mountain bike tuned up, and dusted off my swim cap.
Psst… that’s not a real thing. Clueless wannabe over here. It wasn’t until two weeks before the race that I realized there was an actual name for this event—the Sprint Triathlon, or a Sprint Tri if you’re cool, which… let’s move on.
I believed, at a minimum, I could survive each leg, which meant a 1/4 mile swim, a 12 mile bike ride, and a 5k run. But it was a whole different thing to do all three sports at speed, in the rain, on a cold day in New England. (I just assumed that would be the weather, and guess what? I was right!)
For example, here’s something I didn’t know: biking shorts, though small, are physically impossible to pull on over a wet bathing suit while sitting in a gravely parking lot on a muddy towel.
Also a little know fact: trail running in the rain is all about the mud. Mud makes everything an exciting mystery. Is the puddle six inches deep? Two inches? Is there a hidden root, rock or northern alligator under the thick black goop? It’s a new level of endorphin rush when, after swimming and biking, I wondered if I might fall into a rarely mentioned Massachusetts tar pit and be fossilized until a future excavation.
“But our family rule!” My daughter exclaimed when I told her I’d signed up. “Bairds don’t bike. It’s our thing!”
She’s right, it is a family rule, along with not eating lima beans or brussel sprouts. But sometimes I secretly eat brussel sprouts, and, I mean, I own a bike. I hadn’t fallen since an unfortunate incident in the Netherlands almost 30 yrs ago when, as the windmills spun lazily in the distance, I not only fell, but also caused my not-yet-husband to crash.
It was a long time ago, but it left an impression.
So I practiced, and I practiced biking the most. Near the actual event date I began to do brick training. That’s a fancy technical triathlete term for practicing two or more of the events back to back. It does not involve bricks. I’ll refer you back to the ‘cool’ point above, and let you imagine the ways in which I might have misunderstood the term.
It was the bike-to-run transition that undid me. Each time I hopped off the bike and sent the ‘run’ signal down to my legs, they flat refused. Instead I clomped like Frankenstein with straight, stiff legs that felt like they were totally detached from my body and full of sand. If the biking didn’t kill me, my lurching zombie gate was going to alert doomsday peppers to shoot me with a crossbow, or whatever kills zombies these days.
I also practiced the swim-to-bike transition over at the YMCA and drew looks when I ran out of the pool, threw clothes over my swim suit, and squelched into the cardio room. Sprint Tris don’t help with popularity. Lesson learned.
But there were so many lessons. There were outfits, and transition areas, and food choices that all were new to me. I figured things out in real time as the whistle blew and we started. The learning curve was steep. Just like the first turn in the bike loop. Ok, it was a gentle slope upon further inspection after the race, but it was steep in my heart.
And yet a little over an hour and a half after the whistle blew, I found myself on the final stretch, on the campus of Gordon College, running through a swirl of cherry blossom petals and across the finish line. It was like a movie (if movies are super painful and smell bad).
It was so much harder than I thought it would be, and yet way more fun. With such a steep learning curve I basically have to do another one just to put all that knowledge to use… right? Call the reality chasm a mud puddle and now I’ll know to jump right over it.