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When I decided to do a triathlon, the sport I was most confident about was swimming. After all, I swam competitively from 4th grade through college. What was 400 yards in the water for a triathlon when my best event used to be a mile? Never mind that fact that I’m going to be attending my ten year college reunion tomorrow, I’ve had two kids, and let’s just say that I’m not quite in the shape I was in when I was 22. Did someone break out of a nursing home, steal my metabolism, and replace it with theirs. Oh, yeah I was dropping this subject.

When feeling confident about my swimming, I should have remembered an important lesson that I learned repeatedly from my college and graduate entrance exams: despite the fact that I performed worse in geometry than any other math classes, I consistently did better on the geometry section of a standardized test than on any other math section. When I say that I performed worse, I don’t mean it was an A- nestled amongst a bunch of As. I think I only ended up with a C because my teacher didn’t want to have to have me in his summer school class. Because I struggled so much with it, I spent the bulk of my standardized test studying time brushing up on my geometry skills.

I took a similar approach to triathlon training. Because running is the weakest of the three sports for me, followed by biking, I spent more time practicing those two. You can imagine my surprise when swimming turned out to be the toughest leg of the actual triathlon. It didn’t help that I have never in my life swam competitively with so many people in the pool. Talk about currents! There was also a pile up of swimmers, and someone swam right over me when I was caught in a traffic jam. Ever been in a public situation as a parent and really had to fight the urge to not tell everyone to calm down and perhaps take a timeout to collect their thoughts? That’s exactly how I felt. I didn’t think the officials would look too kindly upon a mass timeout for the whole pool though called by yours truly, particularly if I turned to the person who swam over me and said “That is 3! Timeout !”

I went for a swim this evening and I realized that once again, I had been neglecting my swimming. Since my next triathlon has lengthier running and cycling sections, I have been devoting my time to increasing those distances. Let’s also be frank. The swimming happens first, so I’ll have the most energy when I swim. I will be most tired when I finally get to the run, but I can crawl to the finish line if I need to. In fact, while it may not be appropriate to take a little breather on the side of the road while running or biking, there’s no rule saying I can’t do it. I also doubt that anyone is going to interrupt their own race to say anything to me. However, I realized tonight that I might be, do I dare admit it, a little scared about the swimming. There are going to be even more people in this event, but thankfully it will be in open water meaning more space. As I eyed a couple kids in life jackets, I came to one definite conclusion: enough procrastinating. I need to get in more swim practices, and I need to take a deep breath, swallow my pride and go and get a triathlon wet suit for the extra buoyancy. Yes, it won’t be pretty, yes some of them are called Orcas, yes I probably will resemble an Orca, but I’ll be in good company. Hey, a really good swimmer and experienced triathlete I know told me that even she wears one. Phew. Plus, I realized that if everyone is wearing a wetsuit, no one should be able to tell which one is me. Right?

by Alex Elliot

Photo graciously provided by hidden side, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved