Why Tri?

At some point, someone asks the question: why do you do triathlons (or how did you get started doing triathlons)? The short answer: I started doing them because I wanted to see if I could do one, and I keep doing them because I enjoy doing them (although during the run I sometimes wonder). The long answer is a bit more complicated.

The long answer begins in June 2006. At this time, I was overweight and unhappily married. How overweight? I weighed between 215 and 220 pounds and it was not muscle. How unhappily married? I filed for divorce at the end of June.

Beginning the divorce process was the turning point for me. To deal with the stress, I began walking my dog. I also was not eating as much. As I started walking and not eating as much, I began losing weight. By December 2006, I was just under 200 pounds.

Between December and March 2007, my weight loss had leveled off. I wanted to lose more weight and recognized that I needed to do something different. I decided to start weight training. Because I had never weight trained, I hired a trainer. I first met with the trainer in April 2007.

Before the training began, the trainer made me do a fitness test, which involved running a mile, push ups, sit ups, and a flexibility test. My results were pathetic. I still remember the mile run. It took me about 12 minutes to run the mile, and I was exhausted at the end. I can even remember my heart rate at the end of the run: 199. The other tests were not much better.

When I hired the trainer, I did not realize there would be a cardiovascular component. After the fitness test, the trainer wanted me to walk briskly at least every other day. By briskly, she meant keep my heart rate above a certain number. At first, I was so out of shape that it was easy. After a month or so, it became harder to reach the number from just walking. Thus, I started to run a portion of the walk. Gradually, the walks became more running and less walking.

By June 2007, I wanted to have a running goal. For the goal, I decided to do something that I had never done before, a 5K run. Having decided to do a 5K run, I needed to find a run. I knew Highlands Ranch offered 5K races so I went to the HRCA website to see if there were any upcoming races. I found one. I also saw that HRCA offered triathlon races.

When I looked at the distances for the swim, bike and run, they seemed doable: 500 yd swim, 12 mile bike, and 5K run. Until then, I had not known there were different distances for triathlons; I only knew about the Ironman distance, which just seemed crazy to me. Thus, I had never thought about doing a triathlon. When I learned there were much shorter distances for triathlons, completing a triathlon seemed like a goal that was possible to accomplish.

I would have signed up to do a triathlon that year except there was one problem: I didn't know how to swim. Although 500 yards didn't seem very far (ha, ha, ha ... little did I know), I was fairly sure that I needed to learn at least the basics of swimming before trying to do a triathlon. So I decided that I would set a goal of doing the HRCA Tune Up Triathlon in June 2008.

My first swim lesson was towards the end of September 2007. It was awful. When I signed up for swim lessons, I thought a half-hour wasn't a very long lesson. After the the first lesson, it was about 25 minutes too long. Swimming was so hard for me that I would have given it up after the first lesson if not for the fact that I needed to be able to swim (or at least be able to have some forward motion in the water) to accomplish my goal of completing the Tune Up Triathlon.

Until May 2008, I was still unsure about whether I would be able to do the swim. It was only a couple of weeks before the Tune Up Triathlon that I finally believed that I would complete the swim.

June finally came, and I raced in my triathlon. When I finished, I had completed something that I had set out to do almost a year earlier. It felt great. At that point, I guess I was hooked.

Since then, I have done things that I never would have contemplated a year ago. For example, I had planned to only do triathlons with pool swims in 2008. Somehow, I got talked into doing an open water swim triathlon in 2008 and found that I enjoyed swimming in open water. I liked it so much that I did a second open water swim triathlon in 2008.

This year, I'm looking forward to stepping up in distance. I'm a little nervous about the longer distances but I'm sure it will be fine. And when the race is over, I know that I will have a smile on my face.