Race Day

3:45 a.m. Zero hour. The alarm pulled me out of a fitful doze. I stared up at the ceiling, steely resolve tempered by a burning desire to crawl back into the womb.

Splashed my face with water, meditated, and forced down breakfast (my last?). Lynne and I drove the 250 yards from the motel to Shadowcliffs, the site of the event.

Shadowcliffs. A gloomy, Tolkienesque name. Particularly for a lake in downtown Pleasanton, California.

We registered, laid out our stuff at the transition area, and waited for the sun to rise. I wrapped my arms around myself, shivering in my swimming trunks. Tall figures with muscled jaws, long femurs and outsized shoulders stalked around. Sleek, lycra-flanked blondes stamped the ground, chomping at the bit, whinnying. Where were the fat slobs I had envisioned, cannon fodder for my triumphant entry into the sport? Christ. What had I gotten myself into?

I went to the bathroom. The first, gray light showed the buoys marking the swimming course, just over the horizon and far, far, far away from one another. Surely that was longer than the advertised 1/4 mile! Clearly it would be longer than I'd ever swum in one stretch.

Christ.

I went to the bathroom again.

They gathered us first-timers together. Everyone else looked like a product of some East German eugenics program -- well, at least everyone but me had enough bodily substance to stay afloat out there. We listened to this petite blonde with a voice like paint stripper, a veteran of dozens of Iron Man tri's whose motivational speech had but one point: the swim was going to be a bitch.

Thanks. Really needed to hear that.

The first wave took off, Iron Man pros using the Tri For Fun as a warmup, a stretching exercise. I had never seen humans move so fast in the water. They jetted around the bouys, 10-foot rooster tails following in their wakes. They were in and out of the water in under four minutes.

Then the horn sounded for the under-35 men. I watched the roiling mass move away from the beach. My group, the over-35s, inched forward. For the first time, I really understood what it must have been like when the ramp of your LST dropped down off Omaha Beach. Of course, we were on the beach, but still -- all that was missing was Germans raking the buoys with machine-gun fire.

"Honey, this is so exciting!!" Standing behind me, Lynne grinned and jumped up and down. I went to the bathroom. Again.

Back at the beach with two minutes to go, I drifted to the back of the group, as directed for those who felt their swimming was "a little sketchy". Which would be, in my case, a charitable way of putting it.

The horn went off. The herd of adult males entered the water. And as I stood there, watching these guys find a place in the water and start swimming, a sense of calm settled over me. The kind of eerie calm you feel when you have completely, utterly lost your bearings.

"Oh," I said to myself. "I'm going to take a dip. What fun."

Then another thought started to form: "And...I see I'm about to enter a swimming race. How very interesting! You know, actually, I believe I shall instead go back up the beach and visit the bathroom."

But I was pressed forward by the crowd, the water swirling around my thighs, my chest -- and then everything went black, an inky gloom of duck spoor. I broke the surface in the center of a thrashing, frenzied scrum. Elbows, feet, knees flying, punching, grabbing for anything. I tried to move forward and freestyled up on a guy's back once, twice, three times. I stopped, took a breath, pointed myself in another direction. A long strand of water hiacynth wrapped itself around my torso. A Samoan swam over me.

After a few minutes of this, I looked up and saw the first buoy to my left. Rounding it took an eternity. It was beginning to dawn on me, as I slid further and further away from the course and into the center of the lake, that I could not find my stroke. I had no stroke. Instead of extending my body in a long, elegant line, I was pulling myself into a fetal ball. Every breath sucked in pints of lake water, ripe with protozoa, amoebas and zooplankton. One of the dozen or so lifeguards, watching us carefully from surfboards, called out to me: "you okay?"

I didn't answer.

Now was not the time to cave into that nagging doubt that comes whenever I slide into a pool, the feeling that I don't belong there. I clearly don't know what I'm doing. I mean, don't get me wrong, I can execute a basic crawl stroke, and have even been studying this Total Immersion DVD, but still, more than 40 yards and I always expect some lifeguard to see my form, do a double-take, jump in and haul me out.

I didn't want to talk to any damn lifeguards, didn't want to think about my bad form, didn't want to dwell on my insecurities. So even as I gagged on litre after litre of giardia-laden pond filth, even as I said to myself, "ah, so this is what drowning is," I was determined to get through this damn thing.

And the hell if they were going to pull me onto one of those surfboards and cut my swim short.

The back leg of the course was endless. And my crawl simply wasn't there. I defaulted to a kind of spastic breast stroke. A side stroke. Floating on my back. But I kept...moving...forward.

I drew some comfort from not being the last guy in my wave. Five or six other poor souls also plodded along on their fronts, their sides, their backs. I'm sure at this point the under-35 females were gaining on us, maybe even passing us, maybe getting on the bikes already. I don't remember. In fact, the whole thing's a blur now, a jumble of frantic images, splashes, a wet lens, shark's mouth gaping, a severed leg, water full of blood, camera at a crazy angle.

I pressed on. Where were those warm, slimy plants? Out here it was cold, with chalky sunbeams slanting down into the fathomless depths of the Marianas trench.

On the home leg, breast-stroking furiously, I followed our motivational speaker's instructions to keep swimming until there was sand right under me, until I couldn't swim anymore. And when I dove ten feet straight down, what do you know, there was the sand! I walked under water for 20 yards and up onto the beach to my bike.

Fumbling with my helmet, shoes, gloves, hands shaking. Jacked up with adrenalin. Pulse racing, my mind a whirl. I had faced death -- and worse, humiliation -- and I had prevailed. I was back in my element. I didn't even know I had an element before this, but now I was on my bike, air all around me, terra firma beneath, and I was flying! I passed everyone I saw (more than half of whom were on mountain bikes, but still). Pulling up to a young woman I'd been following, I checked my speed from her computer -- 21 mph -- took it up to 22, 23, left her standing still, and in a flash I was back in the park, pulling on my running shoes.

I took off at a fairly easy pace, but damn if I wasn't passing all the runners, too! The futility of the swim transformed into the swaggering confidence of a well-trained athlete! Ha! Me, Doug! Fleet of foot, high of anaerobic threshold! Kicking ass, taking names! Lynne and I grinned wildly and high-fived as we went by each other on the course. The nauseatingly fit couple!

A few people passed me, OK, but only six, and only two of those were GIRLS, and one of them was an Auschwitzy, emaciated, ultra-marathoner type, so that doesn't count because she could probably have run until next week anyway. Then I overtook a big guy who'd passed me on the last hill, jousted with him for a moment in the last quarter-mile and LEFT HIM IN THE DUST with a HUGE BURST OF SPEED at the finish line!!!!

I shot under the sign, arms up in victory -- where was the olive wreath? where was the American flag to run around with?? -- and then remembered the clock! My time! I trotted around to the front of the finish line again and looked up: 1:29:13. So...let's see...third starting wave, subtract 10 minutes, and then the time it took to come back around to the clock...uh...1:18:55. Or so. Yes, the real triathletes had finished the race and left the park 25 minutes ago, but hey, that was not a bad time!

Elation. Bliss! Ready to do it again!! The horrors of the swim expunged from the memory!! Standing by the finish line, waiting for Lynne (starting smack in the center of the over-35 women's wave, she was even more freaked out at people swimming over her and kicking her, and didn't complete the swim any faster than I so I was able to beat her time by 35 seconds -- a major victory for the male ego), everybody was cheering for those crossing after them, a tremendous collective euphoria and accomplishment and relief -- except, perhaps, for one girl bent over next to me, vomiting prodigiously. I patted her on the back and said, "good race, huh?" She grinned up at me and said, "yeah!"

I knew just how she felt.

So anyway, I found that I am in halfway decent shape for a rank amateur cyclist and runner. I told Lynne flatly two weeks ago that I really would have no interest in thinking about another triathlon once this was over but, I have to admit, the whole experience has me thinking. So if -- IF -- I do another one of these things -- I have GOT to get the swimming thing down. Knuckle down, face the music, throw myself back into lakes, rivers, lagoons, estuaries, the bay -- gulp -- the ocean.

Christ!

I've got to go to the bathroom.