In the beginning...

I started doing triathlons in the spring of 2005.

Like most newbies, I had the bulk of my “experience” in running. I ran competitively in high school and college, albeit a good amount in smaller doses (I was a high jumper with a running problem). After graduating from college, for the first time in nearly a decade, I suddenly found myself in a lull, with nothing to satiate my desire for competition.

Running is man’s most basic form of transportation (and running shoes are a lot cheaper than springing for a wetsuit or a carbon framed bike), so it was easy making the transition to running distance races after college. Ironically enough, running would quickly become the part of triathlons I despised the most (due to my penchant to vomit on the final stretch of every race I’d participate in, without fail, in front of friends and family).

Cycling was a bit of a different story. Nearly everyone rides a bike as a kid, right? During summers throughout high school and college, I also rode my bike to work every day. The five mile morning commute quickly disintegrated into an all-out hammer fest, as Pete and I literally raced cars and each other through our hometown, and arrived to work completely spent before our day had even begun. The pain and suffering of riding a bike at an all-out effort is, at least to me, much more bearable than slogging through a run at race-pace. I fell in love with cycling during this time, and the evolution from mountain bike to road bike was rapid. The first big purchase I made out of college was a road bike. Within eighteen months, I’d sold it to my brother and spent the remainder of my life savings on a bike that weighs as much as most newborns. It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made…right up there with saying no to drugs, avoiding unprotected sex, using my right to vote, and not running the water while I brush my teeth. If you have the means, I’d highly recommend it.

Swimming is sort of like that second cousin you saw every couple years growing up. You’d always have a blast hanging out, until he started to fry ants with his magnifying glass. Years later, you’d find out he was currently serving 5-7 years for domestic abuse, and had several paternity cases pending.

I don’t really remember where I was going with this…

Oh right, swimming. Outside of those kids who spent their summer breaks being harassed for wearing a banana hammock on the swim team, most of us consider “swimming” to be jumping into the waves at the beach for 10 minutes on a warm summer day, or enjoying a cocktail at the cabana bar while dipping your legs in the deep end of the pool. But once you’ve experienced the bliss of waking up at 6am to swim 2000 yards in a 25 yard long pool, you will never again think of “swimming” by any of the aforementioned metaphors. It’s tedious to practice, and it’s arguably the most difficult of the three events. If you aren’t swimming with the right form, then you won’t get better or faster. And there’s the added bonus that you may drown if you don’t learn how to stay composed while hundreds of other people are swimming furiously around you in the middle of the ocean. Basically put, it’s not exactly the way you’d want to start a race if you were to create your own event…brutal intensity from the moment you hit the water, and a heart rate jacked through the roof by the time you get on your bike.


So the logical question would be: “Why would you want to subject yourself to this kind of lunacy?!”

Why not? For a borderline masochist, there are few hobbies that afford the participant the opportunity to abuse oneself for such long periods of time. I could have a horrific day at work, but by the end of a hard run, it’s a distant memory. Then there’s always the reactions you evoke from others; “Hey, I’m going for a bike ride…see you in four or five hours.” If you ask any triathlete, or any endurance athlete for that matter, you could get a hundred answers to the “Why?”. But the one constant that is true for almost every one of them, is that there is a tremendous amount of satisfaction in knowing you can accomplish something that most other “normal” people would consider insane. Frankly, if you don’t unleash a little insanity into your life every once in a while, then you’re wasting oxygen for someone else.

“Get busy livin…or get busy dyin.” – Red, The Shawshank Redemption

Welcome, and thanks for joining the insanity.