This story starts with your humble author stepping out of the shower in a Best Western hotel in 2005, looking in the mirror and noticing that his stomach distended beyond what a reasonable person would assume to be a healthy girth. This was not good and later I discovered that it was 243lbs of not good. There were no two ways about it, I had become FAT. I hadn't always been fat, in fact there were a few points in my life where a person might say that I was fit. Too many chicken wings, too much buffet dinning and not enough exercise will, apparently, turn a reasonably fit human being into a gelatinous mass.
It occurred to me over my Denver omelet that something should be done about this unfortunate development. Then over hash browns it occurred to me that I should participate in some sort of sporting event that I would have to prepare for as a means of addressing the this growth between my sternum and my waistline. Then I became distracted by the meetings I had scheduled for the day and when I returned to the subject at lunch, (a club sandwich if you must know) I decided that thing to do was a triathlon. I have no explanation as to why a triathlon instead of a 5k run or a bike race or any number of other athletic contests I could have tried, but a triathlon was the event for me. (Since then I have done a great deal of thinking on the question of "why triathlon" and I will pontificate on that at a later date but let's not muddle this story with a bunch of historical presentism).
I knew how to ride a bike, although I didn't have one at the time, and I knew how to swim, or at least thought I did, and I had played sports in high school and junior high so I knew it was possible for me to run.
The first thing I did was find myself a book that would tell me what I needed to know about triathlons. The book I selected was Eric Harr's "Triathlon Training in Four Hours a Week". It's a good book and I've since recommended it to other novice and would-be triathletes. One of the things I learned in Harr's book is that training for a triathlon involves more than just going swimming, running and biking. Apparently, there are these things called intervals and drills that one must do and these workouts need to be done in certain "zones". More on all this later.
The bike problem was solved by my brother who had a mountain bike in his garage he loaned me. Its a older bike made by Trek with the inexplicable model name of "antelope". Antelopes are quick, nimble, graceful creatures. The "antelope" made by the good people at Trek was a heavy beast that would have been more aptly named "rhinoceros". I'd push that bike up and around Mt. Tabor (and extinct volcano in SE Portland for all you non-Portland types) with the alacrity of a hung-over three toed-sloth. I was heavy, the bike was heavy and I really didn't know how to ride it properly or even fit it right. As it happens, starting out a bike training with steep hill climbs is not the way experts recommended to acclimate the body to riding and as you'll read later, the experts know what they're talking about.
Next came the swimming. I had taken swimming lessons as a kid and knew the basic strokes. In fact I even knew enough to once help save a drowning elderly man on a snorkeling excursion in Hawaii (not nearly as cool as I make it sound). But I had never swum laps before. Swimming laps is not the same as mucking about in the hotel pool. Turns out, it actually requires cardiovascular fitness.
I found a beginner swim workout in my triathlon book and thought I'd give it a go. The first step was to warm-up with an easy 300 yard swim. At somewhere around yard 63, I decided that perhaps the backstroke would be a better option as I would have more access to oxygen, a commodity that I was in sore need of. For the next month or so, I deviated from the swim workouts in my book and instead would swim the front crawl stroke until I had exhausted myself and then flip over and finish my yardage doing the backstroke with a little butterfly stroke mixed in for good measure. I'm not sure what athletic trainers would say about the swim strategy but it seemed to work and in two months I was able to swim my distance in the front crawl. Not fast mind you but I got it done.
The thing about triathlon training is that you can't focus on one of the three disciplines at a time, you need to work on all three simultaneously. So while I was splashing my through the pool in the mornings or during lunch, I was running in the evenings and afternoons. My first runs were tectonically slow and I'd finish them dizzy and light headed. I ended up seeing an asthma specialist because I was concerned about wheezing when I'd first start running. Turned out that asthma from earlier in life had damaged my lungs and I needed an inhaler before I'd begin my workout. Being properly medicated made a huge difference in my running and I eventually got my distance up to 5 kilometers.
With my training underway I began to look for a race to participate in. After all, I was three weeks into my training and the author of my training book said I could be a triathlete in six weeks. Since I only had a mountain bike I decided that I would do an off-road race. I found a race I thought would be perfect for me, little did I know...
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