Triathlon! Are you nuts?

Swami's State Beach with my son

I was on a ride early last summer with my buddies from Mira Mesa Cycling Club. After about 20 miles, we stopped at Swami's State Beach, which is a local favorite for cyclists taking a break during long rides. It's a beautiful stop along the Pacific Coast Highway, named because of the ashram that Swami Paramahansa Yogananda built there overlooking the Pacific Ocean back in 1937. It's also one of the world's most famous surfing beaches.


My buddy Manny said, "You know, I'm thinking of doing a sprint triathlon later this year." And I told him "great! I'll come out and cheer you on."


He said, "I was thinking you'd go in it with me"


I said, "Triathlon, are you nuts?"


It's a funny thing about peer pressure. When Manny first mentioned it, any type of triathlon was just about the most outrageously unattainable goal I could come up with. Over the next few months, as he worked on me, it seemed less and less silly. I started running, just in case... I started swimming, just in case...


Swimming to me was jumping into a pool with one of those swim-up bars and sipping a margarita. In the summer, my wife, who was a competitive swimmer back in the day, began to give me "real" swimming lessons for competition. I couldn't believe how complicated swimming turned out to be! The first lesson was eye-opening. I had to re-learn how to kick, how to stroke, how to hold my head down, how to breathe. The first few tries, I just sank like a rock. Kicking wasn't as easy as I thought; I went backwards. Then I had to put it all together. I was like one of those HDTV broadcasts where the video and audio are way out of sync. Over the course of the next few months, I bought swimming DVDs, even got a swim coach for a day and I made some progress. I was doing about 200m without stopping, then 300m and finally reached 1100m in one go. I was dreadfully slow, but I thought I was almost ready.


On my birthday in October, my wife invited some friends over to celebrate the start of the hockey season. One of our friends, Diane, is a serious triathlete, having competed in various ironman competitions. She recently completed a bike ride from San Francisco to San Diego. She suggested I try the Tinsel Triathlon in Hemet, California in early December. She was all excited about it, and she even said she would do it again with me if I went in it. It was her first triathlon and she said it was easy and a lot of fun. I turned to Manny and I said, I'll do it if you do it... And he agreed. So the crazy idea of a triathlon at 57 years old became a done deal. After the sangrias wore off, I thought I'd done just about the dumbest thing, agreeing to do a triathlon.


So I had to start training in earnest. It was only two months away! I ran 3x a week, swam 3x a week and rode 3x a week. Confident about the biking part, I was still a painfully slow runner and an even worse swimmer. A couple of weeks before the Tinsel Tri, I traveled to New Orleans. You know what happens there. You can't resist the food. Running there was really only to keep up with the calorie intake and minimize the damage. I didn't swim either because of the cold weather. Then I got sick. I'd recovered enough a few days before the Tri and I resolved to do it. However, Manny learned he had to have shoulder surgery and was advised by his doctor not to swim, so he had to pull out.

Feeling the pain!

The Tinsel Tri is a short reverse sprint distance triathlon. That means you run first, bike second and swim last. The run is a flat 3 mile course, followed by a mostly flat 12 mile bike ride and then a short 150m swim in a pool. On the morning of the tri, the temperature in Hemet was 28 degrees... Fahrenheit. By the time we got to the start line, it as a balmy 38. Our friend Diane was giving me all sorts of tips on how to set up my transition zone while I was still wondering what the hell I was doing there. At the start line, she went to the front of the pack and I reluctantly followed. I wanted to be in the back. When the gun went off, everyone shot out of there like they were desperate to go to the bathroom. The pace was about a 7-1/2 minute mile. And I stupidly kept up, but only at first. I knew there was no way I could sustain that pace. As the 3 miles wore on, I got slower and slower, finally wearing out the toes of my running shoes while I toe-dragged myself into the transition zone at a 13 minute per mile pace. I took my time at the transition... Didn't really matter anyway, right? 

Start of the bike stint

When I got on the bike, I realized I felt pretty good, and I decided to try and make up the time I lost on the run. I hammered the 12 miles. It was pretty windy but I was making headway; I recognized the people I passed because they all passed me on the run. When I got back into the transition zone, I saw Diane sitting there and asked her what happened. She had already finished! To encourage me she said she'd do the swim again with me. Jeez, how does someone have that speed and stamina?


My second transition was about a minute quicker than my first. I had a couple of false starts because I forgot to take my socks off, then I forgot to take my helmet off. I was pretty delirious. I jumped into the pool, determined to use all my new swimming skills. Those all went out the window as I plowed head-first into someone's ass while my head was perfectly down in what I thought was pretty good freestyle form. Not wanting to stick my head in another person's butt again, my head came up, my legs dropped down and my swimming form went to hell. I could hear my wife on the sidelines yelling "What happened to your form? Head down! Arch your back!" and so on. Needless to say, that was the most exhausting 150m, having used more energy flailing away in the pool than propelling me forward. All the while thinking that about 900 sweaty people had jumped into the pool. I imagined that the pool had more sweat than water. After the swim, I spent more time showering off than I did in the pool.


In the end, I finished midway in the field. Apparently, although about 1,500 people signed up, only about 900 showed up and I finished solidly mid-pack in the mid 400s. My transition times were comical: My first transition was 3-1/2 minutes and my second was about 2-1/2 minutes. Compare that to the winner's times of 30 seconds and 17 seconds! It turned out to be a lot of fun though. Later on, Diane's husband Michael said to my wife, "You're now officially a triathlon widow." I don't know about that though. It was fun, but I'm not sure I want to beat myself up like that again. And this was supposed to be a super easy triathlon!