Guest Blogger: "August Filet Chimes in on the Prairieman Triathlon"

August Filet has a couple of remarks concerning the Prairieman Triathlon last Sunday. It's a long one but well worth the read.

If our intrepid blogger won’t gloat, then I will gloat in his place. Mr. Tuesday Pants, aka PW, aka Manuel (don’t ask) scored third place in his age group in the Prairieman Sprint Triathlon last Sunday. Congratulations, fair sir. And for those who would believe that a sprint triathlon is simply a 90-minute workout (or an 81-minute workout in this case), I submit for your approval:

--A 500 meter swim is essentially a 10-minute mass fistfight between 100 blindfolded jocks. I’ve heard the expression “a washing machine of arms and legs,” but that does not communicate the unintentional violence of the thing. Elbows crack heads, feet kick faces, bodies struggle over other bodies. In one case I distinctly felt a hand grab my shin from underneath me. I’ve started calling that my The Lady of the Lake moment and until now have no credible scientific theory to explain it. But if you participated in the Prairieman last week, and if you happen to be reading this, and if I simply swam right over you … my apologies. You see, it’s hard to see: swimming goggles stay permanently and impenetrably fogged until they are kicked outright from your face. Until then, in this brown-green lake water, that strange, orange, fuzzy thing in front of you might be your extended arm, or might be a competitor’s jersey.

--The first transition is a wet quarter-mile barefoot run up a boat ramp and across a parking lot. Sure, you can wear “tri shoes” but that would mean you would have to, you know? Swim in them? Even the retailers don’t recommend swimming in your swim shoes. And there is so much to remember in such a short period of time that you are sure to forget something: your Vaseline? Your Cliff bar? Your race number? One thing the race production will not let you forget is your helmet, which along with your road bike has already been inspected twice in 48 hours.

--The 16 mile bike ride is one of the most grueling 1-hour workouts imaginable, except for those that are preceded by the 10-minute water brawl. Race production marks your right calf with your age, and there is little as disheartening as watching those numbers get bigger as other riders pass. First the ankle-biters, then the thirty-somethings, then the retirees, then the geriatrics. Then your entire crotch goes numb from the impaired blood circulation and only then does a friend pass you, saying “Seven miles to go!” When there is really only about 4.

-- The second transition finds you losing a cycling shoe, or crashing into a Port-a-John, or simply daydreaming about food. By this point you have burned nearly 1,000 calories, which a beginning runner will go through in his first 10k, and your run hasn’t even started yet. So while that plate of pasta the night before may have seemed excessive, you’re already working on a 200 calorie deficit and haven’t strapped on your Nikes. And on the subject of shoes, why am I only wearing one again?

-- During the 5k run – while your blood sugar readjusts and the circulation returns to your legs – there is still the issue of glycogen. In short: you don’t have any. Yet you need it for short-term muscle function, which might explain the exceedingly odd sensation of your bones doing all the work. The pounding doesn’t hurt like it does during training, which you refuse to accept as a bad sign. You pass a few people, and now pass a few more. OK, we’re good. Now it seems the training has paid off. You pass a couple more. Take that! Mr. 22 Years Old! A quick check to the watch, surely you’re more than half-way through this thing. But what’s that? Wait! Wait! Ein minutem bitte! That’s the one mile sign about 200 yards up. Oh, the humanity!