How I Became A Triathlete
Thursday, July 29th, 2010
This whole blog is about being an average working Joe attempting crazy athletic adventures. A while back I decided that the whole story doesn’t make too much sense without stepping back to figure out how it all started.
Let’s start back in elementary school real quick to give some perspective.
Just like most kids, my mom tossed me in the local soccer, baseball and basketball leagues. Unfortunately, I was about half the size of all the other kids and SUCKED at soccer, baseball and basketball. The whole hand-ball coordination thing was just not my thing. I stuck with little league for a while because all my friends were on the team, but it was more of a test of my mental endurance than my baseball skills.
I was the tiny kid stuck in right field picking daisies and not even paying attention to the score because I hated being there. The one time I made solid contact with the ball, it was a laser of a line drive. But it went foul. And almost took out my coach standing on the first base line. That was my one “hit.” At the end of the season I won the award for most walks. I was a joke.
Basketball was no better. Having awful hand-eye coordination and always being at least six inches shorter than all your classmates makes it pretty hard to become the next Lebron. I almost scored a basket once. Almost.
The one thing I was good at was running.
Running the mile fitness test in middle school
When I got to high school, my mom refused to let me become one of those kids that came home from school at 3pm and played video games all night. She forced me to pick a sport for every season. She didn’t care what it was, she just wanted me out of the house, being active and making new friends after school.
Freshman year cross country
Since ball sports clearly weren’t my thing and the one thing I really loved about middle school gym was the annual mile run test, I went with Cross Country. I knew a few guys in the team from Boy Scouts and jumped right in. They introduced me to people that would change my whole high school experience and I never turned back. Over the next four years, I went from the skinny, shy and nerdy kid who could barely run two miles to the guy that was the captain of the winningest (is that a word) athletic team in the school and bringing home bad ass conference championship trophies. Sure, I still was skinny as hell and looked like an albino Ethiopian, but that was fine.
I was running. Running was me. All was right in the world.
Cross country in the fall, indoor track in the winter and outdoor track in the spring.
I went from the quiet awkward kid to the captain of the team. I wasn’t breaking any state records, but the team we built went deeper than any other in our conference and we started to build a little running dynasty at my High School. It was all about being a part of something bigger, and more awesome, than yourself. Our team rocked.
My senior year was a major turning point. I switched from “that tiny quiet kid” to the captain of the team and leading us to another championship. While living four years of pure running was great, I was burnt out. I was a six foot tall, 140 pound stack of ashes. It wasn’t the end of my athletic career, but there was some twinkling of more endurance sports to come. I just needed to get off my feet for a while.
I broke away from my pack of running friends and dove in to the pool, literally. From seeing a flier at the grocery store that I worked at for a local triathlon and watching Kona on TV, I started to think “hmm, maybe I’ll do one of those some day.” To get there, I figured out that I needed to learn to swim freestyle. Joining the winter swim team quickly became the next step in my athletic career. Plus, it meant hanging out with cute athletic chicks in bathing suits six days a week. In High School, 90% of the decisions I made revolved around girls, so this was a pretty easy call. It was well worth having to rock the speedo.
I swam. It was fun. I almost drown at first, but slowly got faster and faster.
College came, and I was still burnt out on running. I had no desire to pick up my racing flats and go back at it. Instead, I focused on school, pizza and cheap beer. On top of that, I realized that college chicks, unlike High School girls, didn’t like 140 pound toothpicks. I started hitting the weigh room hard. Over the next four years, I ended up gaining more than 50 pounds, losing 100% of my running fitness and picking up myself a pretty cute girlfriend. Things were changing fast, but it was all in the right direction.
Still with that twinkling of triathlon in my eye, I asked for a road bike for my 21st birthday and I got just a little closer to being a multisport athlete. Cycling kicked my butt at first, but I didn’t give up and took my bike to class whenever I could to get faster and faster.
Once I had my undergrad and grad degrees under my belt, I decided to finally take the step to complete what had become a race six years in the making: my first sprint triathlon.
I floundered my way through the swim only to battle back and forth with a 300 pound, 60-year old man and a 15 year old girl in cheerleader booty shorts on the bike. Humiliating. The run? It was clear that I was nowhere near the hard core single sport athlete that I once was, but I made my way to the finish.
Holding back vomit, I remember Sam meeting me at the finish line and asking “How do you feel?!”
All I remember saying is “SO HARD! Let’s do it again!”
And that is how I became a triathlete.
Tags: cross country, Ironman, Running, swim team, triathlete, Triathlon | Posted in Cycling, Ironman, Life, Running, Swimming, Triathlon | 12 Comments »
