#4. The Strange Joy of Starting from Nearly Zero
#4. The Strange Joy of Starting from Nearly Zero
Is there such a thing as a pre-beginner swimmer?
Two weeks after renting the indoor bike, I sent away for a “triathlete’s training diary,” the first time in my life I had a thick physical journal to log my workouts.
Now I had proof of my modest efforts, as well as my low autumn spirits. Draggy./ Low energy. Rain! / Indoor biking, due to rain. / Outdoor run of 2.7 miles, in the dark, with rain. / Saturday run: steady freezing rain. / Glad for the indoor bike, but feeling heavy and unfit. / Hard to imagine biking more than one hour. / Consider putting away the scale. / Motivation low. / Keep with it.
I did a mini-“brick,” which means a bike ride followed by a run, which inevitably feels like running on stumps. Muscles that tightened in response to the cycling motion pick a fight with opposing muscles that are needed for running.
My brick workout involved only twenty minutes of indoor bike spinning followed by twenty minutes of easy, outdoor jogging. But I did it. I appreciated the fact that I knew how to talk back to my muscles—to tell them it didn’t matter how they felt because I wasn’t going to listen. The point of doing bricks isn’t to improve to the point where they feel easy. The point of bricks is to teach your body that you can run even when it feels hard.
(Interestingly, the second part of the brick workout doesn’t have to be long. Even more advanced triathletes will go out for a four-hour-plus bike, followed by a twenty-minute run, just to keep training the legs to adapt to that particularly odd brick feeling.)
The journal I’d bought came with training tables. First, I had to pick my annual training volume goal. Professionals train about 1,000 hours a year, according to Triathlete magazine. Serious amateurs rack up 700 to 1,000 hours. A mid-pack athlete might aim for 500-700 hours.
But that was for a full Ironman. I picked 300 to 350 annual hours.
One table in the diary helped me see how many hours I should train per week, based on this goal. The numbers started with base periods, followed by build periods, on the way up to peak and race. Every four weeks, a recovery week of fewer hours was suggested. Good idea. Our bodies need to be purposefully stressed, but they also need to repair.
What I loved about the diary and its tables was that they gave me a plan. Even without getting lost prematurely in the “weeds” of precisely what kind of workouts I should do, I could focus for now on just nailing my volume and tracking the hours I was investing. A base of cardio fitness, plus learning my way around each sport, including gear and technique, was plenty to do in the first two months.
If I put in the time, I would have to get fitter.
I went to a pool about an hour plus a ferry ride away, wondering about the wisdom of visiting a pool at all, with COVID-19 still raging.
The 25-meter lap pool was open for an hour at midday, and I wasted the first ten minutes in the changing room, pulling on the stretched-out bathing suit I hadn’t worn for seven years, and showering with a mask on—yet another thing not to like about going to a public pool. (Damp mask, chlorine-scented hair, coming outside to winter temps feeling like a wet dog, post-workout. What’s to like?)
My goal was to swim a mile. I’d had to google the basic math facts of pool-swimming. I did my best, resting between every one or two laps, trying to stick with the crawl but inserting some breast-stroke and pathetic side-stroke laps when I felt fatigued. I thought I was doing alright, though anytime I tried to imagine how a person could keep swimming without resting, I felt overwhelmed. How do you just keep swimming, for an hour or more, as if you are walking?
The only time I felt like I was swimming properly was for each fresh lap. Even by a second lap, without a break, I could feel my technique breaking down; I kicked harder, took more breaths, and felt certain that other lap swimmers were noticing my heavy panting once I reached the wall. But I’ve also read accounts of people starting triathlon training without being able to complete a single lap.
My favorite tri-related essay was written by a new online acquaintance and humorist, Lucie Frost, who wrote about her first swimming class. Unlike me, she was a strong swimmer. But she also weighed three hundred pounds. She couldn’t hoist herself out of the pool as other swimmers did with ease until a coach gave her tips and she made the choice to come to class early to practice the maneuver, hoisting one leg up onto the deck, then rolling up and over.
In addition to learning how to get out of a pool without needing a ladder, Lucie Frost ended up completing two full 140.6 Ironmans, as well as five or six 70.3s.
“Anyone can do an Ironman,” she told me—a claim I’d hear many times, “as long as they have the time and money, and the mindset. Two big IFs.”
Toward the end of my session, the pool attendants started hurrying me out, pulling in the floating dividers, even when the official clock showed I had a few minutes left. I ignored them for one more lap, prompting a young woman to crouch at the pool’s end, shouting, “You have to get out. The lanes are closed.”
She didn’t realize she was observing a turning point in my life. I’d done it—a mile! I’d always been amazed by the thought of swimming a mile. On my first try, if only barely!
But when I got back to the car and googled again, I realized I had the math wrong. A mile in a 25-meter pool is 32 laps (a lap means to the end and back, as versus a length, which is only to the end). I’d panted my way through 24 laps. Hmph. Next time.
Each one of those laps had felt difficult. I wanted to rest at the wall every time. I certainly didn’t know how to do a flip-turn. Then again, there’d be no flip-turns in any lake or ocean. My suit bagged in the wrong places, my goggles leaked, my lungs burned and my technique needed help, but I was on my way.
Five weeks after I’d started training, I registered for a half-Ironman in nearby Victoria, British Columbia, to be held in 32 weeks.
I told my husband Brian only after paying the fee, $362 US—an extraordinary amount, it seemed to me at the time, given that I was only “attempting to train,” as I wrote at the top of my first training page.
Attempting to train.
Not “training,” as if all training isn’t an attempt.
I was tiptoeing into this thing, afraid to commit or let anyone else know I had my heart set on doing a half-Ironman. Why? Fear of failure, fear that I’d lose interest and quit (I’ve always been an expert quitter), fear that I’d reach my physical limits far short of the goal.
I didn’t want an audience for these potential failures. I kept trying to hide my desire, even from myself, as if desire itself was a shameful thing. I knew I would return to this question. Why is it so hard to admit what I want?
But that registration date, logged in my journal, was a turnaround point.
The next day, for the first time, I logged a workout as “great.”
I found a different city pool with longer lanes—50-meters—which made the lengths alarmingly long but reduced the number of turnarounds—and swam a full mile in 54 minutes. Or possibly 57. I lost track of the laps and tacked a possible extra one at the end, wanting to make sure I’d really finished this time.
When I looked up average swim times online, I was told that a beginner swims a mile in “40 to 50” minutes.
Excuse me? Even if I had to rest a lot, I didn’t think I was that bad a swimmer.
Did this mean I was actually a pre-beginner?
This irked me. But because I am stubborn, it also motivated me.
Maybe the website was wrong. I googled some more. Every source confirmed it.
Couldn’t they have said “40 minutes and up” instead of “40 to 50 minutes” is beginner level? That seemed more fair.
In Zen Buddhism, much is made about the benefits of “beginner’s mind.”
Is there a pre-beginner’s mind?
If so, I had it. Or I was willing to cultivate it: open to everything; determined to learn; willing to be the last, the slowest, and if not the most unlikely, at least one of that tribe. The Unlikely Tribe. Willing to live in that curious, uncertain space between the improbable and the impossible.
The chronological entry just before this one, 2. A Stormy Start, can be found here.
The Big Why of my journey is here.
I’m telling this story mostly chronologically, from Oct 2021 to my half Ironman in May 2022, but because I wrote a prologue, you can get a sense of the 70.3 race start here. I’ll be continuing that part of the story when I’m caught up with my training backstory! Once I’m all caught up, the newsletter will move onward, because yes, there is an onward. More to come.