triathlon permutations

So, I was musing to myself about the potential ironman today, trying to compare it to the 40km swim I did way back when I was all into swimming in that kind of crazy way. And it got me to thinking about how 40km is pretty much a marathon, so I’ve pretty much swum the run portion of the ironman. Not after biking 180km mind you, but still… (trail off)

This brought me to the idea that it would be really cool to do different permutations of triathlons. Being a swimmer and a not-yet-good runner, I sometimes experience a little pang of indignancy at the relatively minor role bestowed upon swimming by triathlons. It would be fun to do a triathlon where the longest portion was the swim, maybe a nice little 15k or something. You wouldn’t necessarily need to change the order of the events, just their relative time duration.

Three sections means 6 possible permutations:

1. swim bike run - the traditional triathlon
2. swim run bike - longer run and shorter bike? I think we’ve taken a step backwards…
3. bike swim run - Mmm… the long swim sounds right, but the short bike doesn’t do justive to the wonderfulness that is cycling.
4. bike run swim - No one likes over 5 hours of running.
5. run swim bike - Now we’re getting somewhere. No need to make the run any longer than it has to be.
6. run bike swim - Yep, this is it. Perrrfect.

marathon

I did my first marathon yesterday. It was painful from start to finish due to a couple of injuries, but it was still a very enjoyable experience. That may be in part owing to the fact that I went at a more or less leisurely pace on account of said injuries.

What I’ve noticed (and what pleases me) after re-entering the world of competitive sport and serious training is the way my brain immediately grasps at the slightest hint of a challenge and deposits it into a kind of immutable to-do list. It’s this weird little urge that fights against the part of me that generates wise and reasonable notions. The challenges I’d make for myself in swimming - small ones like doing a bunch of 50’s without breathing, or big ones like swimming 200×200 - each started as a small spark of a feeling that this would be something really cool to do, and quickly cemented into a very difficult to defy commitment to do them. I’ve been lacking in such feelings ever since swimming faded from its once-prominent position in my life, so it’s been fun to encounter some new ones. I guess it started with my first long runs earlier in the summer, where I rotcheted up my longest-distance-yet-run by 30-40%. And the ~340 km biking plus race weekend, made slightly unpleasant by a cold. And then the marathon in which, after convincing myself that I wouldn’t run the full distance if I was in a lot of pain, I decided after the first 2.5 miles that I would run the full distance in a lot of pain.

That propensity to readily jump at the chance to do crazy things is a quality of my brain that I’m particularly fond of, so I’m glad to see it hasn’t atrophied in the few years that I’ve starved it of challenges. I’ll bet it will come in handy with the impending ironman training too.

In other news, there was a guy who did the marathon on stilts, and I thought that was really impressive.

undergrads

I was walking on campus the other day, and I passed a couple of blonde, tights-and-dress-like-shirts clad girls walking in the opposite direction, holding their notebooks over their heads to protect them from the rain. Now, I’m pretty sure hair doesn’t become irreparably damaged by rain, and I’m also fairly certain that paper does. In fact, I believe it is common practice in this culture to douse one’s head with water periodically for cleansing purposes. It seems like common sense would dictate that one would not cover the thing that is impervious to water with the thing that can be damaged by water. But then again I don’t wear makeup to school and spend a lot of time on my hair every morning. Only six days a week.