Well, You Could Shave Your Legs

“How fast do you think you can do it?” your son asks of the Sprint Triathlon you’ve signed up for.

“They say that under an hour and a half isn’t bad for a first time,” you answer, not sure at all if you’ll even finish.

For years now, you’ve been swimming and cycling as a way to stay active since you quit ultimate, but essentially stopped running the day you said ‘no mas’ to the game. You loved ultimate, played it for half your life. Maybe all those games and tournaments are still in you. Maybe running will come as easy as it used to. Maybe you can crush this thing the way all those Olympians you saw in Paris last week did. You very much like living in a world of maybe.

“Are you training?” They ask.

“Are you ready?” They ask.

“Are you nervous?” You ask.

You made the decision to signup last October, so early the web registration wasn’t even live. As a rookie, you’re frothing in such a way it’s kind of embarrassing. But still, you like the idea of swimming, biking, and running. No, you like the idea of swimming and biking, and kind of loath the idea of running. What happened to the person who leaped after soaring discs, who trained by doing intervals on a track?

Time happened.

Age happened.

“We can get you back out there,” your trainer’s been telling you. He calls it reanimation. You call it pain. He’s got a whole web platform dedicated to just the right exercises to get you running like the wind. You call it just barely jogging. Still, you’re committed to getting out there. You think, it’s just a Sprint Triathlon, and not the whole shebang. Just a half mile swim, ten mile cycle, three mile run. Easy right?

“What’s your advice?” You ask an ultimate friend you know has run one of these before.

“Transitions?” he says. “Forgo the wetsuit.”

Forgo the wet suit!?! FORGO THE WET SUIT!!! That’s like saying put rocks in your backpack and wear it while swimming. You’re nothing but skin and bones, always have been. You sink like a stone, so your wet suit serves as a floatation device. No, we won’t be forgoing the wetsuit. Not this time. Not anytime. You love ocean swimming because salt water helps you float.

“Mary says put Body Glide on your legs and arms,” you tell your trainer.

“Yes, but if you’re serious, you should consider shaving your lower legs,” he says. “And rubbing them with crisco.”

What!?! And yet six and a half minutes of pitiful transition time later, you’re think twice about this advise.

“How did you do?” people ask and you think that if the results we’re posted in order of transition time, you’d have been DFL. Dead F-ing Last.

“It wasn’t the wet suit as much as the socks and shirt,” you tell another friend.

“Socks?” he shrieks. “Who said anything about socks? My Tri friends don’t wear socks.”

“Now you tell me,” you cry, defeated. You suddenly picture all of the times you’ve put on your socks getting ready to play, or to run, or just be. It never occurred to you NOT to wear socks, let alone that they would be a sticking point.

“And it must have taken me five minutes alone to get my shirt on,” you add. “It’s amazing how hard it is when you’re wet.”

“Even after you toweled off?” this same friend says. No, you didn’t towel off. This is a race, there’s no time to towel off. You didn’t shave your legs. You didn’t forgo the wet suit or the socks. You didn’t chose a shirt easy to slip on. In fact, you took a full six minutes and thirty two seconds to transition from swimming to biking, leaving your chances of breaking hour and a half left in the same heap with the goggles and cap you had not trouble getting off.

“Don’t worry, it’s not a race,” people said as you prepared. Who are they kidding? It’s timed. You have a chip on your ankle. They post the results. It’s a f-ing race.

When you limp home across the finish line, you wonder what happened to the dreamy feeling you enjoyed during the first two legs of the event. Sure, you feel proud to have finished, but mostly you want a mulligan on your pathetic transition and can’t believe the registration site for next year’s Boston Sprint Tri isn’t live yet.