Suddenly I find myself surrounded by triathletes.
My neighbor finished his first tri on Sunday (Go Bob!) and another neighbor competed in the same race. RunningJayhawk swam, biked, ran and, as she described so perfectly on her blog, “kicked ass” Sunday in The Danskin Triathlon in Wisconsin. Danielle took home a trophy for her efforts in the Cornman Triathlon in Iowa. Then the weekly e-mail from my running group arrives to tell me that six of our Saturday-morning-run peers also completed a short-course triathlon this past weekend.
The swim-bike-run crowd seems to be popping up all around me like mushrooms after a spring rain.
I am often puzzled when my co-workers, or even family members, express surprise, a bit of shock or, frankly, look at me like I am a bit crazy, when I tell them I have just run 8 miles, 10 miles or maybe longer.
After my frustrating marathon DNF last fall, a good friend told me not to worry about it. He said he thought that I was just as crazy to have run 19 miles as he would have thought I was for completing 26.2.
In a world where so many people can’t imagine moving briskly for even a mile or two, I guess this widespread lack of comprehension about longer runs is understandable.
I bring this up because I feel some of the same mixture of puzzlement and awe when I look at triathletes. Pumping arms and kicking through a maelstrom of bodies in an open water swim, then, after surviving that, jumping out of the water to strap on a helmet and shoes to climb on a bike to log an ungodly number of miles and then, finally, go for a run – by which time the sun most likely is beating brutally down – now that is amazing.
That is just on race day. People who have the discipline to log so many miles on a bike, in their running shoes and in a pool to train for these events also are amazing. I checked out this triathlete’s training schedule on BuckeyeOutdoors and was nothing short of stunned.
These athletes all are so inspiring.
Hearing the war stories and reading blog reports of recent races has left me pumped up this week. It’s added a bit of energy to my early-morning runs. While I have no intention of rolling my more than a decade-old hybrid mountain bike into a tri, I am itching to sign up for a race. There are not a lot of other 5Ks or 10Ks this time of year in this area. The Komen Race for the Cure, though, is coming up in early August. I can’t wait.
My neighbor finished his first tri on Sunday (Go Bob!) and another neighbor competed in the same race. RunningJayhawk swam, biked, ran and, as she described so perfectly on her blog, “kicked ass” Sunday in The Danskin Triathlon in Wisconsin. Danielle took home a trophy for her efforts in the Cornman Triathlon in Iowa. Then the weekly e-mail from my running group arrives to tell me that six of our Saturday-morning-run peers also completed a short-course triathlon this past weekend.
The swim-bike-run crowd seems to be popping up all around me like mushrooms after a spring rain.
I am often puzzled when my co-workers, or even family members, express surprise, a bit of shock or, frankly, look at me like I am a bit crazy, when I tell them I have just run 8 miles, 10 miles or maybe longer.
After my frustrating marathon DNF last fall, a good friend told me not to worry about it. He said he thought that I was just as crazy to have run 19 miles as he would have thought I was for completing 26.2.
In a world where so many people can’t imagine moving briskly for even a mile or two, I guess this widespread lack of comprehension about longer runs is understandable.
I bring this up because I feel some of the same mixture of puzzlement and awe when I look at triathletes. Pumping arms and kicking through a maelstrom of bodies in an open water swim, then, after surviving that, jumping out of the water to strap on a helmet and shoes to climb on a bike to log an ungodly number of miles and then, finally, go for a run – by which time the sun most likely is beating brutally down – now that is amazing.
That is just on race day. People who have the discipline to log so many miles on a bike, in their running shoes and in a pool to train for these events also are amazing. I checked out this triathlete’s training schedule on BuckeyeOutdoors and was nothing short of stunned.
These athletes all are so inspiring.
Hearing the war stories and reading blog reports of recent races has left me pumped up this week. It’s added a bit of energy to my early-morning runs. While I have no intention of rolling my more than a decade-old hybrid mountain bike into a tri, I am itching to sign up for a race. There are not a lot of other 5Ks or 10Ks this time of year in this area. The Komen Race for the Cure, though, is coming up in early August. I can’t wait.
1 comment:
Thanks for the shout out :-) For me, this whole triathlon thing evolved out of not being able to run because of injury - so if you find yourself injured, it's the perfect time to start biking and running and then you might as well do a triathlon :-)
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