Why I Race
Lots of triathlon blogs out there by people looking to prove to themselves that they can do something cool. Well, shit, yeah, if you devote practically your whole life to doing an Ironman (but not a lower-case-I iron-distance tri, no, it has to be the trademarked o-fish-ul one), you ought to be able to. 'Specially in the might-as-well-be-walking time of 16 hours.
Look, I know how therapeutic athletics can be. Explore the catacombs of this very blog and you'll find instances of the author drawing inspiration from some pathetic success (or even failure!). But to a tiresome degree, the tri-blogger community that has emerged is beginning to feel like a sprawling, voracious, pop-psych-spewing self-help-best-seller-hypnotized group. You see this, too, with Team in Training, and with the advocates of fat people "running" a marathon in six hours to feel good about themselves. It's depressingly common stuff.
Fine, fine, feel good about yourself. But I'm in this for the sport, and the sport is to go as fast as possible, and though I'm slow, my times matter to me, matter a lot. Just finishing is not what it's about. To me.
1 comment:
Big difference between the nature of what you're doing and what I'm doing. These brevets -- in a sense they're about doing what you need to do to survive and finish. Once you have that down, you think about time -- and I can tell you my best times (not generally too impressive, except that I have them) for all the key distances. And the non-competitive nature of my kind of riding aside, yeah, I still get a thrill from staying with someone like you or Peter up a hard climb. On the rare occasions when that happens.
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