I had a dream last night about a botched triathlon, a dream in the same vein, like the nightmares some people have I guess, called “dream panics”, about not being prepared in taking an important test, in college or law school, or med school, etc. Its test time in the dream, you are not prepared for the test, don’t know where the class is, but there you are, wondering and running around in a gibbering panic, and the whole nightmare is you trying to find the class but being unable to. Then, eventually, you are magically there in class, sit down for the test, and you have no idea how to answer the questions.
Well, I experienced a new one, which I will call a “Tri Mare,” a nightmare about a bad triathlon. I wonder if any of you have such things, subconsciously, and if they “go” like this, or have some similar elements.
This is a “tri mare.”
The triathlon race hadn’t started yet. In my “tri mare,” I remember watching the race people set out orange bouys out at some lake. While they were stringing out the bouys, some guy comes up to me, and says, “that shit is cold out there, real cold.”
The delay was a good thing, I remembered in my dream, because there was some time before the race started, and I had looked down at my feet and I have on brown dress shoes. I remember concluding, I simply had forgotten to bring my running shoes, and, that was that, I had to run and bike in these large, stiff brown loafers—because I had not brought any running shoes—and there was no getting around it.
Of course, I can’t find my bike. Have no idea where that is. This loss and the ensuing panic pervades the whole “tri mare.”
The interesting thing about “losing my bike” in the dream is that I was walking around asking everybody, “hey, have you seen my black Raleigh?” Everyone said, “it’s over there in T-1.”
I was then directed to a pile of bikes, stacked up high, where there was a huge hustle and bustle going on. And it seemed as if there were thousands of bikes all jammed up on racks and stacked, twisted together, and when I tried to pull my “black raleigh” out of a pile, someone would say, “hey man, that’s my bike.”
Eventually, I grabbed a “black raleigh,” and damned the consequences, and I remember that my bike wasn’t a Raleigh but was in fact, dark green. But I didn’t have time to worry about that, because it was dog eat dog trying to get a bike, because everybody else was getting all “the good bikes” in the pile.
So, now I had someone else’s bike. But, everybody has to have a bike in these things, so it was just his or her tough luck. It seemed in fact, as if that was the way everyone was getting a bike for this race, much like there would be a run at the bank. You just grabbed any bike you could get your hands on.
The announcer blew the whistle, time to get out to start the swim out at the lake. I remember swimming and getting kicked in the head. Then, out of the water, and on the black bike, with brown dress shoes. Slosh, slosh, slosh up the carpeted run way to the transition area. The shoes were wet and soggy, so I must have been swimming with the dress shoes on.
Up on the bike, I resolved that I could bike in the shoes, even without being clipped in, by keeping the clip side of the pedals up, and keeping a firm hold on the pedals with my sloshy leather shoes. During the bike leg, I remember thinking, I’m riding someone else’s bike. Poor guy, back there doesn’t have a bike. Then, I pass the guy who was riding my bike, and he was on the side of the road, and had a flat tire, and as I road past him, he said, “there you are you son of a bitch!”
The next thing was finishing up on the run, running in the brown sloshy shoes, and I friend of mine I was running with said, “I don’t see how in the hell you did this today, that was amazing.”
End of my “tri mare.”