How to Ease into a Triathlon

The last 3 weeks are, mentally, the most difficult part of preparing for a triathlon; it's when nervous people psyche themselves out.  I am a nervous person.  Though, at fifty, I've mellowed somewhat...but there's no getting around it; I will be nervous.

Joe Friel, in his book for beginner triathletes, says, "Your goal is to finish with a smile on your face.  Forget about winning anything.  Forget about beating your personal records.  Just finish with a smile."  Trying to look at it that way.

Also--it helps to know that I've prepared well...not fantastically well; I didn't do hourlong workouts on a regular basis.  But--I know that I'll finish.

Today my loving husband drove me to the race site; the purpose was mainly to see if I needed my very warm setsuit or my average-warmth wetsuit for the swim portion; the answer was the average-warmth one (El Nino is helping me out in a big way there).  I swam for nine minutes in the brown goop known as San Francisco Bay, then (after gingerly stepping out--lots of rocks, some of them sharp) I raced to my bike, did the first transition in about two minutes (not bad but not great) and biked the 8-mile course in a decent time. The hardest part was heading uphill on the bike right after swimming.  I've not practiced that part of it very much, and was seriously out of breath for the first three minutes up that first hill.  After that, though, it was okay.  I finished biking with enough fuel in the tank to jog 3.1 miles (though I didn't do that today--need to keep my routines moderate from now until race day).

My husband and son were trapped for four hours, doing something that held almost zero interest for them--shuttling me one and a half hours to a race site, waiting for me to get my wetsuit and booties on, waiting forty-five minutes while I got through my workout, then shuttling me home again.  It was good of them to do this, and to support me in other ways, leading up to and including my first triathlon; but I definitely don't want this to be the pattern.  My husband bought a bike rack for the top of his car, because we thought it would make more sense for him to handle this part; but I think I need to get a trunk-attached rack for my car soon after this race is done.

Back to the issue of mental preparation.  The trick, I think, is to ease into this rigorous, exhausting event--to tell myself, "Okay, it's going to be a harder workout than most, with a big crowd around you; but basically, it's still a workout.  You've done this before.  Just do what you did before, and you'll be fine...in fact, you'll be better than the last time you did it, because you've been training for weeks since then.  And you've rested up well in the last few weeks.  You're primed for this; just take it easy and everything will be fine."

I know this is the way to approach it; I need to be more laid-back, to compensate for my high-nerves attitude about the whole thing.  This probably applies to every high-effort activity I'm involved with. Work hard, but saunter into the end zone if at all possible.