Triathlon, pt. 1

I'm not sure what hooks other people into doing triathlons. For me, I was roped into doing my first one late spring of last year. It was a small-town sprint triathlon with a short 500yd pool swim, a distance which Laura assured me I could manage even though that entailed completing ten whole laps. (At once!)

Being a pool swim, the race started a small number of participants, two to a lane, in each of multiple waves. Only after one wave completed did the next wave start. Through what I suppose was a random draw, I was in the first wave, and that gave me barely enough time to cram my bike and gear between two adjacent spots in the transition area, realize that I had left my goggles in the car and had no time to get them, and to jump in the pool in time for the starting whistle.

I surprised myself by finishing those ten whole laps without taking a rest break at the end of the pool, which I think about doubled my previous personal best for farthest swim ever, though by the time I crawled over the pool's edge dizzy from my exhausting thirteen-minute Herculean effort, most of my fellow first-wavers were already far away and on the bike. I discovered, over in the transition area, that putting on socks and shoes is difficult when the world is spinning all around, but strangely riding a bicycle is not difficult in that condition, and I entered the bike course with the advantage of possessing a significant adrenaline rush from having nearly drowned, which is how I described any attempt at swimming in those days.

The bike course was empty because most of the race's participants were still in the pool area waiting for their wave to begin, but after mere minutes of hard riding I passed several of my first-wavers. That adrenaline was still being pumped, and I effortlessly rode fast. (It turns out that the beginning of the bike course was downhill.) Indeed, I was riding so fast that a police siren came up behind me and stayed on my tail as if to pull me over. Was this a race with speed limits? Then the source of the siren, a motorbike, came up beside me and the rider, who was the only bike course referee for the race, politely informed me that I missed a turn a few hundred meters back and that I had to turn around and rejoin the course. So I did, and I had the privilege of passing again several of the same first-wavers who made the turn when they were suppose to. I suppose that if that referee had not just so happened to be at the right place at my wrong time and to have seen me miss that turn, I'd probably be somewhere in New Mexico right now.

The bike course was a two-lap, 15-mile course. It had one notable climb on it, a hill with about 200ft of vertical ascent and a high single-digit gradient—the kind of hill that I train on often a few miles away from my apartment in central Phoenix. I zoomed up and over the hill, down the descent, and around the rest of the first lap, losing no more than several seconds as I proceeded to make three more self-detected wrong turns on the mostly empty course. On that hill climb during my second lap I passed another rider and gained the escort of the motorbike referee, who by then had taken to preceding the first-wave leader. Then at the bottom of the descent, during the hard right turn, I surprised the referee with my bicycle-turning skills by nearly crashing into his motorbike from the rear. I then rode smoothly and quietly for the rest of the course and did an endo over the handlebars into the transition area, landing on my feet and catching by bicycle neatly behind me. I quickly racked my bike, changed my shoes, and entered the run course with still over the half of the race participants still in the pool area waiting for their wave to start.

The 5km run was eerily lonely. Everyone was behind me and out of sight, and I was afraid of missing another turn and running all the way to New Mexico. I had the fear belonging to the guy out in front, occasionally looking over his shoulder and wondering if he's about to be caught. At least, I didn't feel fast on my feet, but I crossed the finish line first with still no one in sight behind me. I waited around as seconds became minutes became about ten minutes, and then the next guy crossed the finish line. And that's my story of how I crossed the finish line first in the first triathlon I ever competed in.

Of course, I didn't really finish in first place. The event was chip-timed, and two other guys from later waves beat me with faster total times for the course, and they beat me by a sizable margin both. In fact, if you were to add to my time the margin between the first place result and my third place result, the total time would have ranked 25th place. I squeaked in to 3rd place.

The anomaly for my 3rd-place result was that my split results were: 109th for the swim, 3rd for the bike, and 4th for the run. Mathematically, that doesn't seem to make much sense, like a series of positive numbers adding up to a negative sum, and especially so when considering that that 109th-place swim was the 6th worst swim among finishers in the race. I went away from that triathlon thinking that (1) the swim portion isn't important in a triathlon and (2) I got lucky. It turns out I was right about one of the two.