Shawn Peters: No Pun Intended

True and Tri'd

On September 21^st, nearly a month ago, I swam a quarter mile in the Atlantic Ocean, then stripped off my wetsuit and rode a bike for 10 miles, and then chased it all with 3 miles of running on the beach. The entire process took one hour, twenty-two minutes and nineteen seconds.

Thank goodness it didn't take me as long to finish my first triathlon as it did to actually find time to write about it.

Part of the gap was because I've been busy, between work, buying a new house and now trying to sell my old house during the worst economic crisis since Herbert Hoover was in office. But the other reason I wasn't immediately ready to put fingers to keyboard about the triathlon is because I suspected it was a life-changing experience for me, but I wanted to take a little time and see if it really did change my life. 

As I wrote when I first decided to train for a triathlon, this process was as much about me testing my internal limits as it was about testing my body's limits. I mean, realistically I knew that my lungs, muscles and tendons had the ability to be active and exercising for 90 minutes in a row. I also had faith that training would make it my body more and more proficient to that end. But to choose to swim and bike and run every day for two months, when I have spent all of my adult life believing myself incapable of doing those things, let alone wanting to do those things… that was the challenge.

I had several hiccups along the way, ranging from bicycle pedals that fell off in the middle of a training ride to an abiding loathing of running to a near-drowning incident when I foolishly swam alone into the middle of a lake on a windy day. This last speed bump almost ended my mission in more than one way. For weeks, I was quietly terrified that the waves would keep me from making it to the far buoy or that I'd panic and have to pulled out by the lifeguards, never even getting a chance to bike or run. I worried, worst of all, that I'd quit, or not even get in the water.

I lay in bed plenty of nights unable to sleep, practicing my breathing, trying to convince myself that I could make it feel like second nature. Imagine if Sara had ever woken up to find me lying on my back, taking one short breath and then exhaling over a count of three over and over again while turning my head to the opposite sides. I'd be writing this from a rubber room.

But the evening before the race, something came over me. I have no idea what did it or how it happened, but when Sara, the kids and I drove into Hull and I looked out the window at the water rolling up onto Nantasket Beach, I wasn't afraid.

I was excited.

I wasn't thinking I might finish. I knew...

I slept the night before with the help of half an Ambien, but there was no tossing or turning. In the morning, I rode my bike with my father to the race, a mere two miles, just to loosen up. I met up with my best friend and training partner, Jon, and we got pumped up as we saw the glassy early-morning water. I got my transition area set up with my bike, helmet and gear, as well as towels, Gatorade, bike pump and sweatbands. And then, a half-hour before the race started, I put on my wetsuit and walked down into the water.

It was cold. Not arctic, mind you, but much colder than the lake I'd trained in and chillier than any of the days I did test swims in the ocean in the month prior. But as soon as I got in and let the water creep into the wetsuit through my ankles, wrists and neck, the shock subsided, and so I pushed off and stroked out towards the first buoy at the slowest, most comfortable pace I could find. This wasn't a true "warm up." It was more of an acclimation, and I wasn't alone. Dozens of experienced racers, including members of the elite wave, were doing it too. By the time I'd swum about 50 yards out and then back, I was ready.

The hard part then was waiting until my wave of the race began. I'd opted to swim with the "nervous and novice" swimmers in the final group to leave the beach. But as soon as the air horn blew and I entered the water with my fellow aquaphobes, I realized that I was not in the same "boat" as everyone else. I watched most of the racers in my wave tentatively begin breast-stroking or side-stroking out past the tiny breakers, and once I saw a clear path, I put my face down and started freestyling for the horizon. Next thing I knew, I had caught the group that had left 90 second before us, a flotilla of women over 45 wearing yellow swim caps. Feeling confident and strong, a weaved through them and arrived at the far buoy, taking the turn and then passing a good portion of the next wave in the process.

In fact, by the time I emerged from the water about 12 minutes later, my entire cheering section was giving me the silent treatment.  It turns out I'd passed my Uncle Marshall, who had left three minutes before I did, and all of our friends and family were waiting for him to come out, so none of them noticed me until I'd almost run by them on the beach. However, when they did finally see me, they cheered themselves hoarse, and I headed for the transition area.

The bicycle portion was tremendous, partially because I'd already finished the one event I was worried about, and partially because I'd left with the final wave, meaning I spent most of the cycling section passing people. Sara and the kids came out onto the course and cheered me on at the nine-mile mark, urging me on to sprint to the finish. I ended up finishing the course two minutes faster than I had in any of my training rides.

 

Finally, I transitioned to the run, and even though I was gassed and ran 30 seconds per mile slower than I'd hoped, I finished the race and shouted at the top of my lungs like I'd won the damn thing. I was tired, but five minutes and one large bottle of water later, I was fine. Not exhausted. Not utterly spent. Not sore. In fact, I rode the bike two miles home an hour later after watching my father earn his second-consecutive second-place medal for his age group, and I couldn't help thinking "Next year, I can do better."

And that's where the "life changing" element of this experience starts.

I'm not addicted to triathlons, but I know I'll try and do next year's, which means that training for it is now an annual thing, and to avoid starting from scratch each year, I'll have to stay in some shape and… heaven help me… run every now and again. In fact, I ran 4 miles yesterday, despite the fact that there's no race on the horizon and there were no Mongol hordes chasing me. I still don't like running, but I now like the feeling when I'm done, and that's a big step.

But the other, and more significant shift for me, was the fact that finished my training and the race, despite some adversity, and found a way to get past the fear and negativity… and enjoy it. In fact, I'd argue that the life-changing experience started the day before the race when I stopped worrying about the triathlon and instead, found a way to alter my perspective and emotions to the point that I couldn't wait for it. Since that day, I've tried to use that approach in other venues, including work, parenting, marriage and the effort to sell our house. I now know that there is very little that's "impossible." There's just stuff that will take a lot of hard work, resilience and patience to achieve, and if I can focus on how good it will feel when I finally get there, I might actually enjoy myself along the way.

Maybe that all feels like some Tony Robbins, "I'm okay, you're okay" crap, and to be fair… it is to some degree. It doesn't work for me every day and in every situation. But now, during the times when it doesn't work, I'm able to think of it as just a bad day of "training" and refocus my eyes on the finish line… or at least the next "transition area."

Scorn to Run

Why do I hate running so much? Many of the reasons are pretty common and predictable. I get bored, I get tired, I get sore and thirsty and blistery. But really, most of all, I blame Ruslan Polonovsky. 

When I was a tween and pre-teen, I thought running was okay. My father was an avid runner with several marathons under his elastic waistband, and by age nine or ten, I was able to run up to five miles with him on occasion. I even ran every year in the kids' version of the Organized Crime Track Club's Invitational run on Nantasket Beach, even though the race was really just a preamble to unlimited doughnuts in the back yard of our friends, The Shapiros. Yeah, I wasn't a runner, but I ran, even though I generally preferred playing basketball or volleyball or football or a sadistic tennis ball game called "butts up." 

But when I reached Lincoln Jr. High as a seventh-grader, all students were forced to run a timed mile several times during the course of the year as part of our P.E. class. The school had a 400 yard dirt track, so four-and-a-quarter laps of dusty torture was prescribed and the gym teacher would stand there with a clip-board and a stopwatch until everyone finished, writing down times and keeping an eye out for slow-movers who tried to claim they were done after only three trips around the oval. I was never one of the faster boys in this exercise. While the early-bloomers and freaks of nature zoomed around the track in an attempt to capture the Holy Grail of seventh-grade P.E. – running a sub-seven-minute mile—I was content to finish somewhere in the "eights." You see, I was one of the five shortest boys in my class, and even at my Smurfian size, I had notably short legs. All torso… that was and still is me. So with my dwarf-like legs, I never expected to run with the gazelles and future-steroid abusers, especially since many of them were the same guys giving me nuclear-wedgies at lunch. I was happy to be towards the back of the middle of the pack, well ahead of the burgeoning obese and the painfully uncoordinated. Finishing in the eights was respectable and even a little impressive in my estimation. And then Ruslan Polonovsky moved to town and ended up in my gym class. 

Ruslan was a Russian boy who had moved to the U.S. in the middle of the Cold War, at a time when "Red Dawn" had taught my entire generation to fear the Russians, but before "Rocky IV" had made us realize that we might be able to get along. Anyway, Ruslan was even shorter than I was, and although he spoke English, he was, by virtue of being new and foreign, less popular. Thus, the next time our gym class lined up to a run a mile, I thought I knew what was going on when Ruslan sprinted out to the front of the pack as soon as the whistle blew. "Silly defective defector," I thought. "You're not going to impress anyone when you're walking and sucking wind after 400 yards." But as I plodded along and watched the fastest group up ahead, I noticed that instead of slowing, Ruslan seemed to be speeding up. Then I realized that it was an illusion. Ruslan was just holding pace while the pre-teen jock elite started falling away. Was he one of those super-athletes we'd all heard the U.S.S.R. was engineering, or was he just that much tougher than us soft Americans after years behind the Iron Curtain? I wasn't sure, but I was certain of one thing. Ruslan wasn't showing any signs of slowing. 

Maybe I was transfixed by what was happening, or maybe I was a little pokey that day, but as I finished my third lap, Ruslan was right behind me, now sprinting with only a hundred yards until the finish. Not wanting to be lapped, I picked up my pace, but the diminutive Russian was already on me, passing me a few yards before his finish line, and I heard the P.E. teacher call out his time. "6:57!" The Holy Grail. I don't remember how hard I ran my final lap, only that it felt really slow and even with me sprinting, I finished a full two minutes behind the wee winner's mark. 

My spirit had been crushed. My excuses for not running faster had evaporated in a flurry of short, Russian strides. Shortly after that demoralizing episode, I hurt my back in that very same gym class. It took weeks before I was able to play any sports again, and by the time I returned, my back would tighten up after even a couple of laps. But more than that, my desire to run had disappeared, and I never even broke the nine-minute mile mark again. My old days of running in the eights had simultaneously become eternally not good enough and unreachable. 

What brought this all up was the fact that, as I've trained for the upcoming triathlon, I've gotten faster. When I first started, ten-minute miles were the norm. It didn't take long before I was doing three miles in just under a half-hour. Then, a week ago, on my 37th birthday, I ran a four-mile race, my first road race ever, and clocked about a 9:20 pace. A few days later, I went out to do a 3.3 mile loop in my neighborhood with the goal of running it in 30 minutes, equal to a solid nine-minute pace. I wasn't feeling great, fighting a cold that keeps ping-ponging between my head and chest, but I felt fast, and my stopwatch bore that feeling out. When I finished in 28:30, I was gassed. I'd gone as fast as I could without hurting myself, and the result was an 8:38 pace. 

I was back in the eights for the first time since 1983, and it felt great. It felt like the kind of number that healthy, semi-athletic guys in the late 30s should be running. Now for all I know, Ruslan Polonovsky is somewhere winning his age group in every 10k he enters, or he might be 300 pounds after discovering the glory of deep friend cheese in his late 20's. But he was with me out there on the streets of Holliston this week, and for the first time, I felt like I might be gaining on him. 

I'm not ready to love running, or even like it. But I'm ready to not hate it

The Wide World of Setbacks

"Setbacks" aren't always bad things. 

For example, when Sara and I recently had an offer accepted on a new home for the Peters clan, one of the things that made the property work for us was the fact that it was set back a good 30 yards off the road, which is important since it's a somewhat busy street. Now I'm not saying we're talking about the Autobahn, but our new street is the main route between our town of Holliston and the neighboring town of Hopkington. Admittedly, it's kind of like saying "Summer Catch" was the main artistic outlet for Freddie Prinze Jr. between "She's All That" and "I Know What You Did Last Summer"… but the point still applies. 

Having the house so far off the road, with a substantial, well-landscaped burm between the front door and the pavement, makes the new place feel secluded and protected. So that's the good kind of "setback." Of course, spending several hours a day going through the substantial "burm" of paperwork that comes with buying a new place, plus all the preparations that come part-and-parcel with trying to sell our own home, creates a different kind of setback when you're training for your first triathlon.

 Frankly, I didn't need any extra obstacles as the training itself had it's own set of speed bumps this past week. On Saturday, my training schedule told me to do a "brick." Now while that may sound like a drug term (and I think it is in other context) a "brick" in triathloning refers to workouts where you do multiple events back-to-back as training. Thus, I was assigned the task of riding my bike for 45 minutes and then immediately dismount and run for 30 minutes. 

Now to be clear, when I wrote "my bike" a paragraph ago, I was fudging the facts. I don't own a bike. Instead, I'm renting a Trek hybrid bike from a co-worker. Not knowing whether I'll ever do another triathlon and desperately looking to avoid having one more thing to move to the new house, I offered to rent the bike until the day after my triathlon, replace the professional "clip in" pedals with the flat kind, and make any repairs it needed in the course of my training. 

Good deal, right? I thought so too, until I was 7.5 miles into a nine-mile-loop on Saturday, well ahead of a 45-minute pace, and one of the new pedals I'd installed started feeling strange. Then it began feeling loose. And finally, at the bottom of a hill, it simply dropped off. I stopped and quickly tried to screw it back in with my fingers, a task akin to trying to preparing sashimi with a spork. After a few minutes of getting grease and metal shavings ground into my fingers, I tucked the offending pedal into the pouch I carry on rides, pushed the bike to the top of the next hill, and then rode home one-footed, using the other foot to kick the pedal-less crank as it went by. I still finished nine miles, and then went out and ran another three to finish my brick, but sufficed to say, it wasn't the most satisfying athletic experience of my life. 

I only felt less apt when I took the bike in to be repaired and learned I had screwed the pedals into the wrong sides. I didn't even realize that the two, apparently identical pedals had an engraved "L" and "R" on them. But if cycling snafu shook my confidence, it's what happened the next day that knocked it over and then kicked it while it was down. 

No part of this endeavor has more anxiety attached to it than the swim. As I've written before, I've never been a tremendously strong-swimmer and the idea of having to swim out in the ocean, without a tiled bottom just six-to-ten feet below, does make me feel like my ribcage is three sizes too small. To counter this, I've been swimming in a local lake instead of a pool, to get myself used to cloudier water, deeper water, and underwater foliage snagging arms and feet. I felt like it was working. But on Sunday, I went for my first ocean swim at Nantasket Beach, and it turned out to be a mistake of Gilliganian proportions. "The weather started getting rough…" 

Swimming in a lake may be better prep than swimming in a climate-controlled pool, but it's still smooth water, and there's no such thing in the Atlantic. As rain and high winds pelted down, my father (who has competed in the triathlon the past two years) and I waded through the froth until the water was up to our shoulders, and then we began swimming parallel to the shore, trying to stay outside of the crashing surf. But the storm was kicking up the waves, and taller waves break further out than smaller ones. Thus, the occasional rogue pushed us in closer to shore, taking us into the impact zone. Also, I started out trying to breathe to the side away from shore as I freestyled down the beach, in an effort to keep an eye on the surf and brace myself for swells. Instead, it just meant that I repeatedly turned to look and breathe as a wave crashed on my, giving me a bellyful of brine. Using a combination of crawl and a little breast-stroke, I made it 200 yards (half the distance of the actual swim on race day) but by the time I turned around, I couldn't swim back out through the waves to get back to the comparatively smoother water. I had to put my foot down… and stand. 

Dad, who had done a better job of staying outside the breakers, stopped with me to make sure I was okay. I wasn't. I was frustrated and doubtful. However, I did wade back out past the breakers again and attempt to swim back. That's when I realized that the return trip was against the current. The swell had actually been "helping" us on the first leg. I made it two-thirds of the way back before the waves and tide eventually forced me into water so shallow that I was kicking the bottom with each stroke. At that point, we got out of the water and walked the final 60 yards to where we'd left our shoes and headed back to my folks house just up the street. Dad assured me that if the seas were to be as volatile on race day as they were on Sunday, the race organizers would shorten the swim, and logically, I also knew that most of my issues had been caused by swimming parallel to the beach, in close proximity to the shore break. Swimming straight out on race day, I wouldn't have encountered any whitewater except the spray kicked up by the other swimmers. Still, I didn't finish my task, or even come close.

 Then again, I didn't quit either. I finished my bike ride with one pedal and I'd survived brutal conditions and kept swimming until I literally ran out of water to swim in. The bike is now fixed and ready to race, and on Thursday, I returned to the lake and swam right out into the middle of it for five minutes before turning around and swimming back to shore, a distance of about a quarter mile in smooth water. 

So it was a setback. We all deal with them. These were the first ones, which implies they won't be the last ones either. But that's okay. I'm pretty sure Triathlons are supposed to be hard. If they were easy, everyone would do them… or no one would do them.

I'll Tri Anything Once

A teapot is a teapot and even if you put flowers in it, it isn't a vase.

A frisbee is a frisbee, and turning it upside down and serving shepherd's pie on it doesn't make it plate.

A Scrabble tile with the letter "i" on it is just an "i" worth one point, even if an unscrupulous player flips it over and pretends it's a blank.

And thus, I am me, and so the fact that I have entered a Triathlon doesn't make me a "triathlete"... or even a "budding triathlete."

I imagine those of you who have spent any real time with me over the years will likely have the same reaction to the news that I'm entered in a race where the goal is to swim a quarter mile in the Atlantic Ocean, bicycle for 10 miles, and then run on the beach for another 3 miles, all in the span of a few hours.

"That's funny, because I've never seen Shawn swim/bike/run in the time that I've known him."

For the record, you not wrong.

To say I was a weak swimmer as a young man is beyond an understatement. Growing up, I'd rather have put my face in sausage press than in the water while I did the crawl. And I haven't ridden a bicycle more than a mile since I was 14 and peddling over the Sepulveda Pass because there were some Valley Girls from camp who reportedly didn't find me utterly unattractive. As for running, the last time I was excited about jogging was when Sara bet me I couldn't complete a two-mile run and she was willing to wager sexual favors on it.

Seriously.

So why the hell did I enter this thing?

Well, the triathlon does benefit the fight against cancer ( he subtly pimped while dropping the link to his fundraising page http://www.active.com/donate/tfnbt2008/ShawnPeters ), but I would be a portrait in duplicity if I claimed that was the main reason.

I'm doing it to see if I can.

There are so many times in life where I know I have ruled out things as being impossible, or at least too hard and improbable to try, without actually seeing if that was true. Many friends and family-members got the triathlon bug over the past couple of years, and I know I've said repeatedly, both aloud and to myself, that a Triathlon is exactly the kind of thing I could never do. It combines three activities I simply don't enjoy when they are the "ends" instead of the "means" to do something I enjoy more. Plus, there's the whole "endurance sport" thing that I have spent the better part of 37 years avoiding.

However, I'm now at a time in life where I am seeking a double portion of inspiration, with a side order of belief in myself. I want to have faith that I have a great novel or a witty one-man show or a less-edgy version of the Unibomber's manifesto in me. But before I can do any of those things, I think I need to prove to myself that I really have no idea what my limits are.

So rather than do something I'm a little uncomfortable with, I'm doing something I'm a lot uncomfortable with.

Over the next eight weeks, I'll blog about my training and what I'm finding out about myself along the way. I'll try to keep the "I'm really working on negative splits and reducing drag in the water" talk to a minimum, because that's not what this is about. I'll also spare you the "should I shave my body" internal monolgue because I'm still relatively hairless, so it's a moot point.

So check from time to time or subscribe to my blog's feed so you'll know whenever there's something new. And if you're so motivated, maybe fire off a few words of encouragement using Typepad's interface. (It's so easy, a writer could use it.) I'm sure I'll need them. Oh, one other thing. If I don't post for a week or two, I'm either being lazy or have drowned.

Let's root for the former.