Tricurious

A note, this being the first post of this blog: this is a blog about training for my first triathlon, or perhaps more accurately, about becoming a triathlete. The term "tricurious" was "coined" (in my world, at least) by Todd Colby, an enormously talented Ironman, poet and humorist whose blog can be found here.

I feel great because I'm wearing the uniform of greatness: spandex. Proper exercise attire is so readily available these days, especially around here, yet if one sees a person running down the street wearing it, it still seems to convey a seriousness of purpose. Not all of us have a seriousness of purpose (hi!) and the outward communication of one through polyester fibers that have the ability to wick is sometimes all we need to get one. I wick, therefore I am.

The landscape around here changes quickly. Give the vegetation a week of rain followed by two weeks of hot sunshine and it will explode in growth out into the paths so that you feel it is hanging on to you, clinging to you, when you run by, and if you're tired, it will seem to be saying, "Don't go, Liz, stay here awhile with us thistles." And the grass will have turned from green to yellow, and itchy to the touch like hay. And it's only June. Drive inland on a hot day and you'll see everything above a certain elevation is yellow now, and the temperature will rise nearly 20 degrees as you drive. What does 100 degrees feel like in the historic town of Clayton, CA? Like 80 degrees in New York City. Watching the changes in the landscape is one of the great gifts of running: nature observer is one of a runner's bonus qualifications.

All triathlon training plans seem to marginalize running, as if running is so natural to all of us that we don't even have to bother to specifically train for that part of the race. The reality is that everyone does, and should, and runners especially probably have a hard time casting off their preferred sport in favor of the anaerobic torture chamber that is swimming and the knee destroyer that is cycling. But what's happened to me so far is that I have no interest in doing anything but swim. I swim in a strangely shaped outdoor pool at Strawberry Canyon, one of Cal's five pools. On one side of the lap swim area are children who like to peek at people underwater. They are part of Cal's summer swim camps. In between sets a swimmer may hear a kid say, "Can we play dive for horseshoes?" to her counselor, or "Can I hug you?" And on the other side are Cal students, mostly girls in bikinis just going for a short dip before returning to their towels on the grassy area next to the pool. The lanes are an annoying length: 33 1/3 yards, or 30 meters. I'm not a fan of odd numbers, being terrible at math, and every workout at this pool seems to end in an odd number. But nestled up in the hills, away from the rest of campus, this is the best pool, even if it must be shared with dozens of other people who know this secret.

It's week three and I'm already overdoing it. I was supposed to be training for a sprint triathlon but I enjoy volume too much to restrain myself. When I get to the end of a swim workout I don't want to leave, as if my body still remembers swim workouts from high school and how quickly they went from impossible to easy. This is not to brag: a body likes to exercise, and the low-impact nature of swimming means that it's a quick ascent to in-shape from out-of-shape -- much quicker than with running. Once a workable freestyle technique is mastered, one that feels natural to your body, swimming comes easily. Your body will need less and less rest to recover. It is miraculous what five seconds can do for a swimmer. Rest five seconds between 100s and each subsequent set feels like the first one all over again. And the water feels so comforting, not like riding a bike into the wind or running up a hot, dusty trail so steep that mountain bikers need a special type of bike to ride on it.

But the reason why the triathlon is one of the fastest-growing sports in this country, and maybe even the world, is because we never have to definitively figure out which sport of the three we love best. It's a dance. We get to do different things every day. We get to change our minds. We can hate a sport for a couple of days, and refrain from training in it, and then grow to miss it, do it again, and maybe even become obsessed with it for a couple of weeks. It's playing the field, but in a way that relieves stress, rather than causing it.