DUATHLONS FOR DUMMIES:
PART DEUX.
For those of you with short attention spans or cannabis-addled memories, we last left our story just as race officials canceled the swim portion of the triathlon because people were getting a little skittish about swimming during a Level Five thunderstorm.
Athletes today. Absolutely no sense of adventure.
It may seem like a small thing to non-multisport people, but when the words “THE SWIM IS CANCELED” are blared across the transition area, it’s akin to canceling your birthday, shaving off all your hair, and shipping you to Vietnam. Everyone instantly becomes a duathlete, whether they like it or not.
Triathletes generally dislike the running portion of the race. I know there are a million triathletes—or at least the one or two who read this—gathering pitchforks and torches because they LOVE to run. To them I say: Write your own blog.
The aquabike people absolutely hate running because they specifically chose a sport consisting of zero running, one bike ride, and two swims. But the people most offended by the change are the actual duathletes, because now everyone present has been admitted into our deeply mysterious world without completing the customary background check or blood oath.
At every duathlon I’ve competed in, the duathletes are treated like a kindergarten class dropped off by a suspiciously short bus and allowed to participate only because somebody’s mother complained.
In a triathlon, everyone receives a swim cap, usually color-coded according to their division. The athletes are then herded—or, in the case of some Chattanooga triathlons, transported by bus—to the swim start. There, they receive instructions rivaling the planning of D-Day: water temperature, wave height, current direction, buoy colors, buoy shapes, emergency procedures, and possibly the location of the nearest embassy. Then they are metered into the water one at a time. Yes, sometimes they start in groups, but this is my story, so relax.
The swim course is marked by two or three hundred brightly colored buoys. People float around its perimeter on paddleboards and kayaks, ready to rescue anyone who develops a problem or suddenly remembers that humans are land mammals.
For the duathlon, we wander around for thirty minutes asking one another where the start might be.
Eventually, someone is told to wait behind a Buick—or a pickup truck, or possibly a dumpster—in a dark corner of the parking lot. Someone from the race will supposedly arrive shortly. That person then instructs everyone already wearing a bib—swimmers don’t wear theirs yet—to continue hanging around and looking confused.
The duathlon crowd mills behind the Buick in an unlit corner of the parking lot like a gang of criminals trying to work up the nerve to rob a 7-Eleven.
Eventually, the race-start guy rides over on a bicycle and explains that we should run through the parking lot, past the sleeping dog—the black one, not the one with mange—past the rock that looks like a cow, turn right at the cow that looks like a rock, and then come back.
Then he says, “Everybody ready? Three, two, one, go.”
When the real athletes became involved, they were less than enthusiastic about the hillbilly-esque run course. There were many questions concerning landmarks, distance, course markings, and the mental stability of the race promoters. Most of these questions ended with a confused stare and the word, “Really?”
The international-distance athletes were sent out first and told to complete only one bike loop and one loop of the final run. Why? Because Armageddon—in the form of death-dealing weather, raining frogs, and possible cracks opening in the earth large enough to give any Gerard Butler movie a run for its money—was scheduled to arrive around 9:00 a.m. Race officials apparently thought everyone leaving the scene of an impending lawsuit before then would be a good idea.
The sprint-triathlon athletes were released second and left the starting gaggle wearing deeply concerned expressions.
Next came the aquabikers. Apparently, they had confronted management en masse, citing feeble knees, nonexistent hips, religious convictions, and a general moral objection to running. As a compromise, they only had to run about a hundred meters to the far end of transition, climb onto their bikes, and leave. I don’t know how far they had to run after the bike portion, but it was probably from the porta-potties to the banana table.
The event was rapidly taking on all the precision and dignity of a three-legged race at a church picnic.
We duathletes watched in quiet desperation and did the math. It didn’t require much carrying of the three or dividing by two to determine that, although we were supposed to start at seven and it was now 7:35, we would return just in time to watch Jesus walk across the bay and announce the end of the world.
Officials dismantled the starting chute so it wouldn’t interfere when we thundered off as one confused organism toward the dog.
Or was it the cow?
When I run—or walk, shuffle, hobble, or sashay—I carry a queen’s metric boatload of arthritis. Knees, hips, elbows—hell, I have arthritis in my eyebrows. Consequently, neither running portion is necessarily my strong suit.
Actually, running isn’t even my weak suit, wetsuit, or zoot suit.
After the super-duper technical and precise “Three, two, one, go,” I took off with all the grace and speed of a bull with a brick tied to his nuts.
Halfway to the black dog—not the one with mange—I was huffing and puffing like a steam engine climbing the Rockies. Yes, I was the oldest humanoid in the pack, but damn. When you’re breathing so hard that the people ahead keep turning around to see who is dying behind them, you may have gone out a little fast.
I turned at the cow that looked like a rock. Way, way, WAY down the road, close to the misty horizon and just past Korea, I could see the floating mirage of the transition area.
Some little kid ran past me, then actually turned around and ran backward so he could tell me I was doing great. I occupied myself by considering the various forms of homicide I might inflict upon him if we ever met again, and just like that, I was six feet farther along the course.
I sprinted past an old lady shucking peas and felt thankful that my body had, in essence, given me the finger and checked out of the race. I thought it seemed early for a runner’s high, but it was certainly not too early for the false euphoria before a stroke or heart attack.
I’ve always said that when I die, I want to go funny. Dying soaked in sweat, dressed in a Technicolor full-body condom, with an aluminum pill case full of nitroglycerin hanging around my neck would have been absolutely hilarious.
Through the fog of self-induced delirium, I saw the transition entrance a few feet ahead. It was like the sweet nectar of the gods—or at least a strong Old-Fashioned with extra cherries.
It was on now. The pathetic seventh-place performance I had just produced on the first run was about to be vindicated.
I charged toward LoLa with the strength of an old man who had made himself look foolish, although exceptionally well dressed. I slammed on my helmet, buckled it, started the bike computer, changed into my cycling shoes, and sprinted toward the exit with LoLa frothing at the mouth—or drivetrain, or whatever bicycles froth from.
I cleared the transition in forty-three seconds.
I had secured the right pedal to the frame with a rubber band so the left pedal wouldn’t drop during the run to the mounting line and steal my first power stroke. Still running, I stepped onto the pedal, swung my leg over the saddle, and heard the satisfying snap of the rubber band breaking free.
There were about a hundred meters left after the mount before the first right turn toward the bike course. I clipped in on the first try, stood on the pedals, and began cranking hard. I passed the first two riders on the outside while completing that turn, made another right onto the road, and headed for the ten-mile loop.
Fort De Soto is a very fast bike course because it’s entirely on one road, with a turnaround at each end and an altitude change of a dizzying two feet. I dropped into the lower bars, or horns, or drop bars or whatever bike people want them called so you don't induce a seizure, tucked my knees and elbows in, then settled even lower. My knees brushed the insides of my forearms, and I floated on the pedals.
I was going to say “Passing on your left” quite a bit over the next thirty minutes.
As I tore through the course, I heard the irritating clunk of riders shifting while still having heavy torque on their chains, along with the frantic ticking of cross shifted drivetrains. Haughty cyclists like me hate those sounds the way a pilot hates hearing the engines of an airplane running out of sync. All I could hear was money being ground into metal filings.
I glanced at the computer and saw that I was holding more than twenty-one miles per hour into a quartering headwind. If I could maintain that pace without blowing out my aortic aneurysm, I was going to rocket past every child who had humiliated me on the run.
I shift gears the way I vote: early and often.
Sometimes you’re working too hard in one gear, only to discover that dropping down and increasing your cadence makes you faster with less effort. Other times, one gear is too hard and the next is too easy, so I switch between them: grind away in the hard one until my organs begin shutting down, then drop into the easier one and recover. It’s interval training for people who don’t understand interval training.
I screamed down the course—by my standards, anyway—accelerating through twenty-two, twenty-three, and twenty-four miles per hour. I was passing people like kidney stones and loving every minute of it.
I was in my element, or Scion, or whatever. The giant wall of black clouds on the horizon didn’t seem to be closing in, my heart rate hovered between 135 and 140, and there was no stopping me.
The road at Fort De Soto is rough as hell, so you have to choose your line carefully if you want to maintain speed. Sometimes the smoothest path is directly on the white edge line. Sometimes it’s in the center of the lane. Sometimes it’s on the double yellow line. Apparently, road maintenance there is based on the principle that no two consecutive feet of pavement should resemble one another.
Thankfully, I have a mirror built into my TriEye sunglasses so I can see if anyone is approaching from behind.
On this day, I didn’t need it.
I owned that course, and nothing was getting past me.
At the final turnaround, a group of riders was jockeying for position across nearly the entire road. As I passed a kid on the outside and announced my presence, he took it as a personal affront and stood on the pedals, cranking hard.
That merely delayed the inevitable.
I turned right into the parking lot, then left toward the dismount line. I unclipped and rotated the cleats forward so they wouldn’t accidentally reconnect while I was climbing off. I wrapped my left hand around the handlebar to keep from grabbing the front brake in midair, put my right hand around the rear brake hood, stood up, swung my leg over, and executed one of the best running dismounts I’ve ever done.
I actually received a little applause.
I passed two people walking their bikes through the gate and ran toward the spot marked by my red towel. All the way into the transition, my left hip and crotchular region murmured something about going on strike until my brain decided which form of abuse we were committing to.
I racked the bike, removed my helmet, changed shoes, and began limp-running toward the exit in fifty-three seconds.
Since my first race, I’ve worked on shaving seconds from transition. I’ve heard people say you can’t lose a race in the swim. Others say you can’t lose it in the transition. Whenever I hear either claim, I immediately consider the many different ways to say “horseshit.”
By that logic, I could lie down in the transition for a nap, stop for a soak after the swim, and still climb onto the podium at the end.
Unless I missed something in grade school—and the evidence suggests I missed quite a bit—seconds accumulate into minutes regardless of what you happen to be doing during them. At least that’s true within our present time-space construct. As specifically stated in the USAT rule book: All triathlons and duathlons shall be timed within the currently accepted Earth plane of the time-space continuum.
All of that is the long way of explaining why I run the 5K wearing my cycling gloves.
Yes, I’m the only one. Yes, I look ridiculous. But I’m old, and ridiculous is expected.
On long or recreational rides, I wear gloves with little pull straps between the middle three fingers. Those straps make the gloves easy to remove, but they also tend to snag on brake hoods, shift levers, and anything else capable of turning a routine ride into an orthopedic case study.
My racing gloves don’t have straps, which means they take time to remove. As the class has recently learned, time is made of seconds, and seconds are bad.
As I passed through the RUN OUT gate, I began to look less like a bowlegged cartoon cowboy and more like someone who understood the basic mechanics of running. Or, in my case, the mechanics of repeatedly falling forward and catching myself with the opposite foot.
The Fort De Soto 5K begins on the same route we had used while returning from the original 1K, after passing the cow that looked like a rock. Beyond that lies one more parking lot, followed by the packed-gravel trails winding through the park’s dunes.
The scenery is breathtaking. Usually.
On this particular morning, a giant black wall of Level Twenty-Five thunderstorms on the horizon, complete with a Studio 54 light show, poured a little cold water on the euphoria.
Because the first portion of the run crosses a parking lot, it breaks up the opening mile. Just as you become accustomed to tar-patched pavement fractures, palm-tree debris, parked cars, and civilian traffic, you’re suddenly out in the wilderness. It makes the race more tolerable, or at least provides several private places to die.
I checked my watch and discovered that my pace was about what you’d expect from a post-heart-surgery patient hobbling down a hospital corridor in an open-backed gown while pushing an IV pole.
I berated my hips for being the quitters they are and accelerated to a pace resembling a penguin wearing track shoes.
Naturally, the penguin was wearing cool running glasses. Penguins are famous for their fashion sense.
By the time I reached the first mile marker and only aid station, I was slithering along at a more respectable 9:30 pace. It was nothing like the 8:15 paces I had been running five years earlier, but I could accept it.
I grabbed two cups of water, dumped the first over my head intentionally, and threw the second directly into my face by accident. That’s why I never take Gatorade or Powerade at races. Running while hot, exhausted, and glazed in sticky fruit syrup is a game for the young.
I’m not sure how the twisted physics work, but the distance between the one-mile marker and the turnaround half a mile later is endless. It’s like taking a five-day spaceflight to Saturn, only to return five days older while everyone you knew is dead and their children are somehow older than you.
If the mathematics of that first half mile confuses you, the return trip to the same marker—now the two-mile marker—will render you apoplectic. The instant you turn around, everything stretches away: trees, people, sand, volunteers. It looks like the stars in a science-fiction movie when the spaceship enters warp drive, hyperdrive, or whatever drive allows Hollywood to ignore physics.
I have actually watched the two-mile marker move away from me while I was supposedly getting closer to it. Meanwhile, the volunteers held out cups and smiled benignly, pretending everything in this freak show was normal.
Shortly after passing the two-mile marker, I heard a small voice behind me. It sounded as if someone were trying to start a conversation.
There was no one ahead of me, and a quick glance behind revealed no one there, either. I became concerned that it might be God informing me that I was about to receive a two-minute slideshow of my life before checking out permanently.
Then I heard the voice again. It was female, with a heavy Spanish accent.
Well, I don’t have to explain this to you people, but right there I knew it couldn’t be God because everyone knows that God—like Jesus and Santa Claus—is a white male.
Then, just like that, a tiny, three- or four-foot-tall, impeccably dressed woman appeared at my left elbow and said something I decided could be answered with a laugh and, “You ain’t said nothin’ there, my friend.”
She was a very nice person and an interesting conversationalist—in the way someone might be interesting at a dinner party or while waiting for a traffic light to change. She told me she found running easier when she had someone to talk to. Every time another runner passed in the opposite direction, she waved and offered encouragement.
Again: very nice. Very friendly.
But the constant chatter began wearing on me like a humming noise when you’re trying to sleep. Except I wasn’t trying to sleep. I was trying to fend off cardiac arrest, and she was distracting me.
When we reached the cow that looked like a rock, I told her she obviously had plenty left and should sprint to the finish. I’m not sure what she said in response because she had already increased her pace and was moving away from me.
Still talking, her faint little voice receded like the remains of a nightmare dissolving at sunrise.
During the final stretch, I vacillated among three emotions: relief because I knew I would finish, self-loathing because I felt I could have pushed harder, and terror that the finish line was farther away than I thought and I still had enough time to screw everything up monumentally.
Visions of the banana I would receive as my sole reward for trying to kill myself danced in my head as I crossed the timing mat.
As usual, I forgot about the finish-line photographer. Once again, my race photo would make me look as though I had stepped out of the shower fully dressed and immediately been told my dog had died.
I envy the people who do something cool at the finish—jump into the air, flex, make a ridiculous face, or somehow look strong and vibrant. My finish photos look like the “before” image in an advertisement displayed in a psychiatrist’s waiting room.
In the end, I was genuinely pleased with the results. Out of roughly forty duathletes, I placed seventh in the 1K, third in T1, second on the bike, third in T2, and eleventh in the 5K, for seventh overall.
Not bad for an old man.
The foreboding skies had cleared, and—as always—I stood there euphoric on a runner’s high, with a finisher’s medal and a first-place age-group medal hanging around my neck. I felt a renewed determination never to stop competing in duathlons because…
…it was soooooooo much fun.
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