’94 US Military (Europe) Triathlon Championships
This story is really not ready.
My competition was going to be a guy that worked
at the NATO headquarters in Belgium. He
used to be a pro triathlete, and although he can’t train as much as he used too,
he was still very good. This is the guy
that got sick the day of the World
Championships. I knew that he would kill me in the swim, but I'd
make up
some time up in the ride--having crushed him in the time trial at the Cycling
Championships the
week prior. The snowboarding crash 7
months previous had cost
me enough training that beating him in the run might be unlikely.
I’d probably need a 30 second lead by the time we started the run.
So that was the plan, not go nuts too early in the swim (no sense killing
myself in his event), get on the bike, become a madman, fight to catch up to him and pass him
before the ride-run transition and then kill myself to keep the lead through the
run. Well, it didn’t quite work out that
way.
First, it was thundershowers off and on all morning and the “The Time Machine” is widowmaker-unstable enough on it's best day. You know how on most bikes you can sit up and ride without your hands on the bars? Well the Time Machine is so xucking unstable, because of small light wheels and aggressive frame angles, etc, that just a quick glance at my watch can throw me on the other side of the street. I hate riding it, it takes total concentration every second and it is fiendishly dangerous. But boy oh boy is it greased lightning. It is soooooooo fast.
I was 4th out of the water in my start group, I was 4 minutes behind my buddy (Jesus, how can he swim so Xucking fast!). I grabbed the bike and ran towards the exit of the exchange zone. The week prior I had experimented with having my shoes already clipped on my pedals so I could just jump on my bike, flip the shoes over with my toes and pop my feet in. After a bit of practice it seemed to work fine.
Just before I hit the road I pulled my yellow lens sunglasses off and clenched them in my teeth because under the trees and in the rain it was dark enough that I couldn’t hardly see. So I jumped on my bike and started trying to flip my shoes around. Well, ya know how Oakley sunglasses will come apart? That way you can exchange pieces and they don’t break when you sit on them (for me, a critical issue). Well, all of the sudden they exploded and Oakley pieces scattered all over. Don’t you just hate it when that happens?
So I’m continuing to industriously flip my little shoes with my little toes--trying to get the flip just right so my toes will pop in. It is just not Xucking working. What went so smoothly at home when I was all comfortable, was proving to be impossible here in the thick of battle. It must have taken me 20 very very long seconds to get going. Meanwhile a couple more nuckleheads passed me up. Finally I got going and passed all the xuckers in sight, seconds later, on the first big hill.
Then the real disaster struck. I was flying down a hill in the middle of a small town in a huge thunderstorm. The rain is coming down in buckets. Zooming down into the unknown, no brakes, can’t see, I have about one whole square centimeter of rubber in contact with the road, the wind is blowing my unstable nightmare all over and I’m just plain scared xucking shitless. I'm screaming down hill, on the thin edge of control and I can see at the bottom a “T” intersection with a referee guy standing in the middle of the road. I have about a 1/2 a second to figure out which way he wants me to turn before I have to start setting up to do it. He has an umbrella in one hand and a flag in his other that is clearly pointing left. Ok, so I set up for a left turn and execute it praying that I don’t lose it on a slippery patch of asphalt. I make it thru the turn and accelerate hard. I get about a hundred meters away, still accelerating and suddenly at some subliminal level I think that I hear him say something back there. Horribly wracked with indecision, I decide I need to find out what is going on. I fully realize that this delay was going to cost me the race. No matter if I was going the right way or not, just the act of trying to go back and find out was going to cost me enough time that I was going to lose my chance to catch up to the ex-pro. I was extreeeeeeeeemely piqued. It took me about a 50m to stop and then very carefully turn around.
When I could then look back I was immediately puzzled because he was not waving me back or making any kind of obvious gestures at all. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t even xucking looking in my direction. So I had to ride all the way back to him and ask him which way I was supposed to be going. Not until I got all the way back to him and got his attention did he start waving his arms in the other direction.
Important reminder so you really have a genuine feel for the moment. In a race you are operating on pure adrenaline and hysteria. A normally quiet person turns into an xucking ax murderer on wheels. Or, at least I do, anyways. Now, normally, endurance types are a pretty pacifistic bunch and I’m sure that I’m even as calm and relaxed as any, but I was so xucking out of my mind with rage that I almost came unglued, dumped the bike and xucking beat the shit out of him. But I rode on. After, of course, a few choice words delivered with a venom that probably scarred his psyche for life.
In the next town I came to “Y” intersection with another referee standing there. Trouble was that she wasn’t pointing anywhere, as a matter of fact, she was looking in another direction. What a surprise. Sigh. I had to ride up and ask which way to go. Then she came alive. Again, I was in a bit of a hurry and kinda annoyed so I’m afraid that I wasn’t too polite. No, not too polite.
By this time I was so frustrated and feeling so sorry for myself, that I just kind of said “screw it” and quit riding so hard. From then on, the best I would give was a 90% effort.
The next turn had a guy with flags in both hands and both outstretched horizontally, one left and one right. Now what the hell does that tell you? I guessed from memory and turned the correct direction, fortunately. I was moving too fast to even bother yelling at him. It is difficult to slowly and understandably shriek “HEY DUMBASS, YA, YOU WITH THE FLAGS POINTING IN BOTH XUCKING DIRECTIONS, WHAT THE XUCK IS YOUR MAJOR MALFUNCTION” in the 1/2 second it takes to roar through earshot.
Finally, after another 10km I saw another guy up ahead. After I passed him I was the second man, of those in my start group. When I finally got back to the transition area, there was my friend’s bike, parked next to mine. After my weak ride, it had probably been there for 15 minutes, I figured.
The run was painful and dull. Couldn’t see the ex-pro front, had no one to worry about behind me, I was just an island of fury running through the forest. It was mostly an out and back run course so I was able to see my friend pass me going back towards the finish. He had about 800m on me which might have well been 3km for all of the motivation that I had.
When I got to what I thought was the turn-around point I found a two old women manning a water station in a clearing with a big tree about 5-10m behind them. As I ran at them I tried to figure out just exactly how this turn-around was supposed to work. Was I supposed to run around the tree? Was I supposed to just run up to the women? Maybe they would mark me with a marker of some kind to prove that I was there. I looked for arrows on the ground, signs, gestures from the women...Anything. Well, nothing. There was just no clues. So I ran up to them, took some water and raced off back down the hill.
Had to happen. I was flying away when suddenly I thought that I heard something again. I stopped bout 30m down the trail, looked back and sure enough they seem to have said something. Not bothering to make this feeble effort at communication move faster I just turned around and headed back for that xucking tree, 30m back up the trail, in disgust. My effort to constructively correct their inadequate attempt to guide exhausted runners came from the same reserves of anger and frustration that had been building all morning. I guess that I’m fortunate that I didn’t give them heart attacks.
It’s not really any of the referee’s fault. They don’t race, so they have no idea what works and what doesn’t. When these folks were briefed they should have been told that they needed to imagine what it is like to be a maniac flying at them on exotic racing machines. You can barely see through the clouded glasses (assuming yours didn't explode off your face) and rain , you can’t hear over the wind noise, you are 100m away and you have only one remaining non-frenzied rational brain cell that has a 1/2 second to understand and act upon what the referee is trying to get across. Once those conditions are understood, then the average person will be able to figure out a way to make navigational instructions work.
So now I’m running for the distant finish, 5km away. As I neared the lake where we started this all, I started looking for that turn of last year, where we turned off of the main trail, broke out of the woods and took the 1km trail down to the lake itself and to the finish. I looked and I looked. I ran and I ran and I started getting worried. I could see the lakes, I could see the last year’s trail paralleling me down below, I could even see the crowd, but I was still on the main trail and not on the one that we took, last year, to the finish line. I had checked the big posted map carefully before the race and it was clear the run course was exactly the same this year as it was last year. Oh shit. Somehow, here, I’d had missed the turn. I was being so careful and somehow I had STILL missed the damn turn.
I started looking for a way to get over this big fence that separated me from last year’s trail. I just kept on running, though, depressed, looking for a turn, a hole in the fence, a race official....anything. It was a bleak moment. But for lack of anything better to do I just kept on the trail and headed back around to the exchange zone, following the course that we had taken out.
As it turned out I was on the right course. THE DAMN MAP WAS WRONG. Those idiots had changed the run course, but then posted last years map.
I hit the finish line, had a hell of a hard time trying to find some water and just kind of stumbled around, drank and thought about how pissed off I was.
In talking to the other competitors later, nobody had the problems that I did. It seems that I became the race course trouble-shooter by viciously correcting the slackers that were working the course. "Well", I thought, "you all are very welcome".