The Start Line

This weekend I race my first triathlon and I am terrified. I have wanted to do one for years, but wanting it and being able to train for it were never the same thing, and my body would not let me anywhere near a start line. Anyone who has read along for a while knows about the health issues that knocked me about a few years ago. What you may not know, unless you used to listen to BYOD podcast, is that I have also had two complex shoulder surgeries, and ever since I have not been able to swim front crawl without my shoulder telling me what it thinks of the idea.

So swimming was the thing in my way, and I had made my peace with it. A triathlon was for other people, the surgeries had closed that door, and I should be grateful for the running and cycling I could still do. It is a strange thing, giving up on something you never actually tried, but that is what I had done.

Then I got injured again at the start of this year and couldn't run. Rather than sit and feel sorry for myself, I threw everything at the thing I had spent years avoiding. I built the muscle my stroke needs to hold together, worked through a stretching regime I hated every minute of, and swam through far more pain than I should have. The shoulder started to behave, and the swimming I was so frightened of stopped being the problem.

What is left is the fear of the unknown, and that is harder to train away than any shoulder. I have done the open water swimming, the biking, the running, and enough brick sessions to know my body can cover the distance. Training is the easy part, you turn up and put the work in. Racing is something else, with other bodies thrashing about next to you, a clock that does not care how you feel, and a version of me who wants to go too hard too early and has ruined plenty of races doing exactly that.

When I cross that line I will have done something I always thought about and never believed I could, and that would be enough. The problem is it is not an ending, it is a beginning, and it points straight at an ironman. The pain waiting for me down that road frightens the hell out of me, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

It will not stop me though, doing hard things is the whole point for me and always has been. I love type 2 fun, the sort you hate every second you are in it and treasure the moment it is done, and there is plenty more of that to come. A daft, slightly broken part of me cannot wait to find out how much the next bit hurts, and that is the why.