So, my sister convinced my wife that she should do her first triathlon ever. This is impressive, as while my wife is very athletic and generally places well in any road races she does, and has a great time, she gets so nervous that she doesn’t sleep for a couple of nights beforehand, and finds all kinds of excuses not to train. Of course, she then goes out and rips it up and laughs at how nervous she had been. Oh yeah, she just had our first child 5 months before the race.
Her training regimen was as follows: Run 3 miles at most twice a week. Take care of newborn. No biking or swimming, although she did watch the TDF quite a bit and bathed with our child daily.
As race day approached, the nerves start kicking in, and I start hearing every reason in the book why she shouldn’t do the race, but the most common and disturbing to me is “I’ve never swum .5 mile in my life and I think I’m going to drown.” This issue is causing the most sleep loss for both of us, as I am fully incapable of decipering the needs of an infant and am quite sure both myself and our child would quickly perish without my wife’s presence.
I told her “Look, let’s go to the lake, try swimming in my wetsuit, and if you really don’t think you can hack it then just bail on the race.” She keeps finding reasons not to try out the wetsuit, preferring to stress and lose sleep day after day as she imagines her impending demise. This has not been helped by my sister telling her “I don’t remember seeing anyone else wearing wetsuits last year.”
Finally, the day before the race, we have to go to the race site to register, and I convince her to go for a swim. She puts on the wetsuit, cursing me the whole time for getting her into this mess and complaining about what an idiot she looks like putting on a wetsuit that is too big for her in the middle of the summer. She jumps in and swims around for a while and comes back with a huge grin on her face saying “Are you sure this is legal? This is awesome!”
So, we get to the race site and she begins her pre-race prep. This involves donning the wetsuit, and then breast-feeding our baby while the waves in front of her go off. She still felt a little silly with the suit on, until the first 10 women in the elite wave came out of the water wearing them also.
She comes out of the water with the usual non-swimmer look of “that sucked but at least it is over.” and hops on the bike. Now, her bike was actually my spare bike, an inexpensive yet trustworthy Ironhorse roadbike with the seat lowered all the way down. She has her own bike, but it “just doesn’t fit as well as your blue bike.” She said afterwards that all she kept hearing during the bike was Phil Liggett’s voice saying “Look at her FACE! Look at her FACE! THAT is determination.” while she was reaching deep into her “suitcase of courage.” She also felt that her necklace swinging back and forth on the climbs made her feel Lance-like. (Damn, my wife is a poseur…)
She suffered through the run to end up in the top 50% overall. “Even if you are just competing to complete, you can’t coast during a race.” was her post-race analysis. Plus, she was pretty convinced that while she was racing I would either A) misplace our baby B) allow her to become horribly sunburned beyond recognition or submerged in the lake C) malnourished to the point of death D) All of the above. D was a significant factor driving her on during the race.
On the ride home, she says “next year, I’m going to actually train for this thing.” I’m thinking “this is fantastic.” but then my world comes crashing down when she says after a few moments thought. “Do you think if we lowered the seat on your Soloist it would fit me?” I instantly break out into a sweat and stammer “what? umm, errr, they, umm, have a problem with the, umm, seatpost slipping and umm, I’m afraid if I move it at all it will never stay in the same place again…yeah…yeah thats it…”
She still thinks it was cheating to use the wetsuit, but thinks cheating is preferable to drowning, and her and my sister are already planning their “girls only” group rides on Fridays. I couldn’t be happier or prouder…
I do lock up my soloist when not around though.
