It has been ages since I’ve written anything that isn’t on Strava or Instagram; so long in fact that I’m not sure I’ll even finish this and post it. My life is no longer the same, having met an amazing human being in the most unlikely of places and joined forces with her to recreate both of our lives. It is a joy to be in this place, and I am a grateful man.
In all of my athletic endeavors I have had to work to overcome the biggest obstacle of all: I’m not athletic. Not naturally anyway. I work very hard to get very modest results. I’m not complaining; just stating the facts. I love looking up average results for men of my age, whether it be in Powerlifting, my former pursuit, or now in Endurance Sport where I spend my energy and effort, and finding myself to be right around average to slightly below it. I recently looked up the average 10K time for recreational runners my age and cried out to Leenie, “Yes! I’m average!” Running is hard enough as a sport, but my passion is for something three times as big: Triathlon. I won’t bore you with my decades long love of the sport, and incredible admiration and honest astonishment of the abilities of triathletes at the highest levels. Suffice it to say I tried to Tri when I first learned of it back in 1992 and what eventually caused me to give it up was what I still struggle with today: Swimming.
I never swam as a child, or ever really. In 1992, I tried to learn to swim from books and could not get to the point where I felt I could competently enter a Triathlon of any distance and succeed. Inspired by my daughter, I have once again entered the fray as a rising Senior Citizen and have now completed 2 Sprint Triathlons. While I’m proud of the efforts I’ve made and I can frankly state I teared up a bit crossing the Finish Line at my first race, the swim continues to be my bogeyman. With the help of Effortless Swimming I’ve been able to learn how to actually swim a proper Freestyle, and when it clicks, it is a wonderful feeling. However, it doesn’t click often enough and continuous swimming without rest periods at the wall remains the challenge.
My mindset is shifting (slowly) from being competitive to just relaxing and doing this for the love of it vs. trying to achieve anything in particular. I’m not going to win, I’m not going to make money doing this, and no one is going to invite me on their podcast to discuss my training and results. Nonetheless, improvement is a necessary component for me to find satisfaction and perhaps even joy in doing this. Improvement is agonizingly slow though, and while it’s there in the data, it isn’t there in my mind in the same way. Comparison is the thief of joy, I believe someone said, and while comparing oneself to others will clearly rob one of the possibility of joy as there is always someone better, comparing yourself to yourself can also be an insidious way of making yourself unhappy in the pursuit. But let’s face it, sport is about competition and competition is about comparison. There’s no escaping it. We want to be better than we are now, we want to be better than other people doing the same thing, and some of us want to actually win. I’m firmly in the complete vs compete group, but that doesn’t make me immune from the desire to see better results.
For the first time in my life, I have real support for what I’m doing. It’s invigorating and powerful to experience, and it both drives me to improve, and provides a safety net when I feel I’m not. My next challenge is a big one and knowing I have a support network with me makes it seem possible. I have set my goals on completing a 70.3-mile Triathlon race later this year, which sounds completely absurd and makes me question my sanity. But there it is. A 1.2-mile swim, 56 mile bike and just a half-marathon to finish the day. The swim of course, frightens me, but it is a point-to-point, current assisted river swim that should be wetsuit legal on race day (based on water temps) and that’s the only thing making it seem possible in my mind.
I have often joked that I’m in such good health, I may never die. I mean, what would kill me? I’m now fairly convinced I’ll either drown or get hit by a car. Let’s hope neither happens anytime soon.
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