Finding Triathlon

The sport of triathlon represents a secure bunker of commitment, focus, and striving. It signifies much of the health and hopefulness seen in endurance sport. It is stylish, techy, challenging, and can enable such otherwise difficult-to-learn traits as self-confidence and control. But this triple-activity sport might also reflect the gluttonous 80s, the falsity of Regan’s trickle down, the aesthetics of neon, and the tragic glory of excess. Most of my friends who are private equity capitalists love triathlon.
But this book isn’t about triathlon.
 
Finding Triathlon is an attempt to explain certain kinds of human behavior that are not yet made explicit by the growing popularity of endurance sports; it is an attempt to unpack our psychosocial environments through a scrutiny of endurance sports. This book asks many questions and, with any luck, will answer a few. Finding Triathlon is an effort to explain effort. Why the hell would well over a million people around the world willingly spend thousands of hours and  dollars, jeopardize jobs, marriages, essential health and wellbeing, all in preparation for a day of suffering? Are triathlons and endurance sports a new kind of religion?

A marriage of spiritual materialism?

Material spiritualism? 

Consider that in recent years nascent endurance sports have had less bearing on the decadent look-at-me body types found in other sports than some quest for something ephemeral and intangible. Endurance sports, we are led to believe, is of a higher plane than say, soccer or fishing or ice hockey. And triathlon, we are told, is where you’ll find the Grail.  

But where do ideas emulate that suggest running 26.2 miles is better for your soul and your social life than a Sunday morning game of hoops or your Thursday bowling league? Have endurance sports been over-sold to us? Mythologized by mass media? Offered as purple Kool-Aid by the already-hooked? Sports such as swimming, cycling, running, hiking, paddling—heck, anything that goes on for hours and days and weeks—can fall into the endurance sports category. And they ain’t going away.

So, why not try to make sense of their place in our hearts, minds, and bodies?
What is it about triathlon, and the emerging endurance sport phenomenon, that suggests some larger shift in our social worlds? That helps to explain the nuances of first world choices that might or might not have any bearing on any betterment of mankind? That would seem, in another time and period, evidence of the pure lunacy of the participants? Why, in God and  Pele’s name, would tens of thousands dream of racing across the barren lava fields of West Hawaii in scantily-shod skin; scorched meat, balls and boobs straining against spandex and for what? To transform yourself (as the announcer promises) from John Q. Public to a finisher of a full distance triathlon? 

More questions than answers.

***

There was a period where I took triathlon for granted—my smooth, wide bike-lane of a life rolled past a SoCal coastline, sunshine on the back of my neck, training partners listening to my same boring stories. But the quest for the greatness had gotten too close to the reality that I wasn’t. Still, the shadow of illusion had created its own cooling effect. Many of us need to get out of the tepid heat of our own everydayness. A little well-orchestrated self-subversion can’t be all bad, can it?

This morning I was preparing for my two mile run. That’s right, two miles—one out, one back. But it started to rain and I couldn’t find an umbrella. That’s right, an umbrella. But that’s a bad lie. And before I kicked the dog and swore that someone had brewed decaf and generally became again that rock upon which I’d broken myself again and before I sabotaged a joyful twenty minutes tramping around in the mud, I reminded myself that it is good to be beset with the harder ironies of life.

Somewhere, I convinced myself, Sisyphus must be happy.

If I believe that I can be okay with two miles, then I willingly dodge the antiseptic training pressures that have colonized other multisport hearts and minds. The reality is not that I don’t have time for three or the energy for four but that I only want to run two miles. An illusion would be that I needed to run more for the wrong reasons. For today, the Quest and the Illusion had brokered a climate of physical glasnost and joined forces in the sweet irony that if I changed my mind, I would and could go ten. Or twelve.

Multisport is just that; a multiplicity of options. 

If the idea of a triathlon allows us to dream big and go short, to ride fast downhill and walk up the other side, so be it.  We might lower our flags to our fears but that doesn’t mean that they have beaten us. Only that our ship is not sunk.

To strive for something, to really go after it without the mediation of Dig-Me-Beach-Nightmares or faux Kona-ifications is to be organically honest with yourself. That kind of mythic-rooted quest has sustained personal and spiritual campaigns since the Grail was more than the subject of a popular play. And Illusion, well, that’s the malleable, incongruous entity that can sneak up on us and commit determination’s perfect murder. Most of us endurance athletes have taught ourselves the difference between that map and that territory; we know how to lie to our legs when it counts in the race standings but lie prostrate to  our worldly partners when it doesn’t. Self-deceit in sport is only a crown of thorns when you allow your own blood to blur your vision.

***

I like endurance sports for the same reasons that Steinbeck liked Cannery Row; for the “tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots.” But also for its ability to let us both dream and get caught sleeping in. I don’t like the illusion of the body politic as much as I like the drone of an angry peloton. The truth is that quadriceps and mammary glands wax and wane, but the momentary bliss of a true sporting experience is forever.

It’s been argued by any number of critical thinkers that sport is a necessary catharsis in the human species, that the competitive instinct is innate, and without sport our society would run the risk of devolving as man seeks other less desirable forms of conflict and test. And while I don’t necessarily believe this is absolute, I know that as imperfect as sport can be, it’s a hell of a lot better than war.

While there may be evidence enough to support the thesis that we are born with a competitive gene, there is ample data to deny it as well. Certainly there are cultures that are much less competitive than North America and Western society. Tibetan monks living in mountaintop monasteries rarely race to the dinner table in order to secure the chunkiest parts of the day’s soup.

But for those of us born and raised in this breaking millennium with material comforts aplenty, we appear to be creating and then challenging unnecessary obstacles. Is it for the sake of bettering ourselves or others as we hurdle these ubiquitous gauntlets? A kind of DIY Darwinism?

Or is it simply about having some fun?

What is a game of golf without a wager? A nice soak in the spa without seeing who can hold their breath under water the longest? Doing your nails in record time while keeping the polish off your fingers? The first to one place, the fastest to another—on it goes.
So could it be that these self-imposed challenges are more than a part of this sporting life and this frenetic environment? That they are a part of how we reduce the monotony in our daily world? It seems to me that the minor contests we invent have become a physical lexicon of sorts, something that prescribes our identity in the judgment of somatic performance—our bodies telling us who we are by what they can do.

Years ago, my brother Jeff, the great triathlete, Mark Allen, and I found ourselves in Paris for a few days near the end of a long season of triathlon racing. Standing at the base of the Eiffel Tower one day, a gorgeous morning laying out beyond us, it had to happen—someone said let’s race to the top.

At the time it seemed perfectly natural, a way to spice up our climb, to validate our fitness, to push each other simply because we could. Of course, if that were to occur now, I’d blame it on the third espresso or second vin ordinaire and lie down in the grass until the madness had passed. Or perhaps we weren’t mad. Just young.

The difference is in knowing the difference.

And how it affects our physical and social worlds.

—Excerpt from the Prologue by Scott Tinley