Sports

Swim, Bike, Run, Puke, Medal & Conquer Demons

How I learned to swim, and oh yeah, to not to give up, during training for my first triathlon.

Last month I completed my first sprint triathlon, and even got a medal. As the "unathletic one" in my family, this may be the greatest sports-related accomplishment of my life to date. How, and why, did I end up voluntarily jumping into the Great South Bay on a brisk Sunday morning at 5 a.m.?

I first saw a poster for a triathlon training program at Fitness Incentive last spring and it caught my eye because I was in the market for a new challenge. Since I began working out for fitness and health in my early 20s I've always pushed myself to get better, even if better was relative to my own compromised innate athletic ability.

After I gave birth to my daughter two years ago, running and going to the gym were mental lifesavers. I tried out a spinning class on a whim to see if it would be a good workout. It was, and I got hooked on spin, which led to an impromptu decision to do a century bike ride. I bought a road bike and found that I loved riding.

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Then, after 10 years of running recreationally, I finally did my first official race, a 10k in Central Park, in June. I had always assumed I was way too slow to bother entering a race, but it was fun and discovered I was only moderately slow. I wasn't a turtle, but I wasn't Kenyan, either. I was a Kenyan turtle. So no longer a race virgin, when I again saw those posters go up this summer, I knew I had to do it.

The swim worried me but I thought because I vaguely remembered liking to swim as a kid, and because I was in good shape, I could just wing it. I gave it a whirl at the Babylon Village Pool. I was completely out of breath after 50 yards. That couldn't be good: for the race we had to swim eight times that distance.

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When Bob McKeown, the coach from South Shore Tri Coach, who led the program, first saw me swim, he said my form was all wrong. My lack of innate athletic ability then became a problem, because no matter what he said or showed me, I couldn't translate instruction into physical actions (if I recall correctly, this was what derailed my junior high softball career).

But Bob didn't lose faith in me and gave me remedial swimming help. The extra help I got from the program was probably the reason I was able to do this at all. Triathloning has a reputation for being impenetrable: there are all these weird rules, and this thing called transition, and you have to buy fancy gear, and a wetsuit, and it's expensive, and the people are competitive and scary and you have to wake up at 4 a.m. With the group setup, we had people who were going through it with us, and we had all of Bob's expert knowledge on what to wear and how to train.

I did slowly get better at swimming, but only in the pool. I had a lot of anxiety every time we did an open water swim. I kept panicking and stopping. It was a mental block I couldn't get over. Bob said he thought I could place in the race which was exciting, but also nerve-wracking. What if I tried my best and I still wasn't good?

The week before the race Bob scheduled a full run-through of the race at the actual race site. It was supposed to make us feel confident before the actual race, but I completely panicked in the water and it took me 15 minutes to do the swim portion, treading water and hyperventilating. I hysterically cried for the remainder of the "race," so disappointed in myself. I seriously considered dropping out of the race. Was I going to fail after all those weeks of juggling babysitting and arranging and rearranging my schedule to accommodate two workouts a day? Drop out after buying all this gear, and telling everyone about the triathlon?

We had one more open swim before the race, and I decided to ditch my wetsuit, thinking that it was contributing to my anxiety. I had a good swim without the suit and was relieved to have done the distance without stopping. Now I just wanted to get through the race without needing a beta blocker.

The morning of the race, I wasn't that nervous: I had already conquered my biggest obstacle. The race went well but in the confusion of it all, I had no idea if I was actually doing well. On the run I kept passing men and didn't see too many women, which was a good sign (one of the best times to look around and see only dudes: in a triathlon).

I ended up finishing second in my age group. Bob may have some crazy story (and photographic evidence) about how I ran across the finish line and puked practically on his shoes, but assuming that even happened, it was only because I swallowed a bunch of salt water, woke up at 3 a.m. and didn't sleep the night before.

But it was all worth it in the end, if only to know I hadn't given up, and I had done what I wanted to, what I knew I could do, all along.


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