The Known Unknowns of an Eleven-Year Itch…
It turns out Donald Rumsfeld was a triathlete. Or at least, he perfectly captured the mental degradation that happens two weeks out from a race.
On paper, I’m fine. The base is there. The logbook shows the yards, the miles, and the hours. But there is a massive difference between having the physical capacity to grind out a finish and remembering how to actually execute a multi-sport race when you haven’t stood on a starting line in eleven years. Eleven. Entire political regimes have risen and fallen since I last transitioned from a wetsuit to a bike.
The panic didn’t creep in; it hit me like a crosswind. I was out in Rockford two weeks ago, grinding through a miserable ride on the actual course, when a stray thought bounced into my brain: Oh, yeah. Hydration and nutrition. How exactly am I handling that again?
That’s the Rumsfeld problem. It’s not the things I know I need to fix. It’s the “known unknowns” – the things I know I’ve forgotten, but can’t quite recall until it’s too late. What else am I missing? Am I going to rack my bike and realize I forgot body glide? Am I going to fumble with my bib number? Is my transition setup going to look like a yard sale?
Some is coming back. This morning, on my bike commute, I thought, “Hey, where am I going to eat the night before the race? And what am I going to eat?” It’s little things like that.
Then there’s the swim. Rockford is a downstream river swim. Mechanically, it should be easy-ish – the current does some of the heavy lifting. But the cold reality is that when I jump into that river on June 14th, it will be my first open-water swim event in eleven years. No practice in the murk. No sighting adjustments. Just straight from the pristine, black-lined bottom of the indoor pool to river water. It’s a hell of a way to get reacquainted with the sport.
If I could rewrite the script, I wouldn’t be doing this. In a logical world, the progression is simple: an Olympic distance to dust off the cobwebs, a 70.3 to test the endurance, and then the big dance at the 140.6 in September. In fact, the training plan explicitly called for an Olympic-distance race right about now, pushing the half-Ironman further down the calendar. But the race schedule gods didn’t consult my training plan. The local calendar didn’t line up, the dates didn’t work, and so here we are. I skipped a step. I’m staring down a 70.3 as a “warm-up.”
It’s stupid, but it’s what I have.
The plan for this weekend is damage control. I’m driving back out to Rockford to ride the course again. No illusions of grandeur, just re-familiarizing myself with the asphalt. Afterward, I’ll throw on the running shoes for a quick one- or two-mile brick run off the bike, mostly just to remind my legs of that specific, awful sensation of turning over after ninety kilometers in the saddle. I’ll practice a transition to run (complete with a fake race bib holder).
At this point, the romanticism of the return is completely gone. I don’t want a poetic breakthrough, and I don’t need a PR. I just want to get this specific weekend over with so I can close the loop on the unknowns and get back to the work I know how to do.