Deciding to Tri

So here’s the thing. This blog was supposed to go live three months ago. And here I am, the big event looming Goliath-like a mere seven weeks in front of me and I’m only now posting. It’s not that I’ve had nothing to post about – I’ve been training my verging on-turning-40 ass off, when not being hampered by child illness or lack of precious time and the like.

It’s my indecision which has held me back. I wanted the blog to look pretty so took three months agonising over blog wall paper, layout and colour of font. In the end I was so fed up with my inability to make a decision I just bloody posted. I hope my readers will be so enraptured by the prose herein, they won’t have time to notice the wall paper looks like grandma’s yellowing drawer liners. And is most probably in the wrong font size.

Decision-making is not a quality of mine. I umm and ahhh. I relish the input of those close to me so ask them what they think. I ask more people what they think. I ask my mother, sister, husband. Then I ask them all again.

Which makes it all the wilder that it took a mere five minutes to decide on doing this triathlon. A brief chat with a stranger in the women’s changing room at my local swimming pool. Something ignited in my belly as she explained she was in training for a triathlon. I stood towelling my hair and sparks flew. I’d scrambled home and begun the process of signing up for the event before the indents from my too-tight goggles had had a chance to fade.

You see I’ve been transfixed watching tri-athletes for years. Swimmers plunging into London’s River Thames, kicking up fury and white froth before emerging seal-like from the murk, mounting bike, water still glistening on their skin, powering on peddles, skidding here, spectacularly wiping-out there and then shedding the bikes like a snake-skin for that final, pavement-pummelling show-down on two feet to the finish line.

‘I’d love to do something like that,’ I’d say at that point. It was pure fantasy of course. Life then was 20 packs of Marlboro Lights and pints of cider and black. Sometimes for breakfast.

But then fourteen or so years ago, I had to grow up. And through that particular (and still on-going) process, those bucket list contenders – the ones which had been squashed so far into the recesses of my mind, they were barely recognisable – found light again.

I ditched the ciggies and started running 5km road races, then 10 km’s – then even took on a half marathon. My body was besieged by injury and general WTF-ery. But I dug in, bought some Thera-bands, Googled the hell out of ‘popliteal bursa injuries’ and invested in proper running shoes.

But as for triathlon, no. It was something for those ‘other-wordly’ athletes - the kind who ask for heart-rate monitors as birthday gifts - not for a would-be like me. Besides, I had my babies close together and my body went on exercise strike as it knuckled to a whole different kind of work.

Meanwhile ordinary people I knew – those who eat donuts and drink wine - started doing them – my sister, an ex on Facebook, a working mother-of-two friend. I started asking serious questions. Like how do you find a swimsuit which straps down your boobs for the run? And how do you dry your toes while manoeuvring yourself onto a bike? And is it really okay form to pee in your wetsuit?

Seeds were being sown. I just needed the right time – and place - to plant them. I had babies close together – if I wasn’t growing a baby, I was producing milk for one or surviving on molecules of sleep. My body was needed elsewhere.

And so it was that after just five minutes with a half-naked stranger in the changing room I was propelled to sign up for my first tri, this little beauty right here.... http://www.montauklighthouse.com/events.htm

The event was as good as in my backyard, no one has required my breast milk for over a year and I’ll figure out a way to dry my toes. Just five minutes was all it took for this indecisive girl. Well, fourteen years and five minutes to be exact. Not bad. Don’t you think? No, really, what do you think?....