Among my close circle of friends, which consists of one other former varsity nordic skier, one category two cyclist, and one extremely snide non-endurance athlete, a constant source of amusement and pleasure is making fun of triathlons, and triathletes.

There are a lot of reasons that triathletes are the butt of our jokes. $5,000 bikes. Hundred dollar race entry fees. Weenie shoelaces. Level-four group rides with aero bars. Sleeveless jerseys. Triangular water bottles. The list goes on and on and on. 

While my friends’ sport-centric jokes was originally centered on triathletes, their circle of consideration was broadened after I started getting neurotic about my training last summer–one might call it “No Obnoxiously Self Centered Athlete Left Behind.” Whenever I started to get too anal about recovery, fret over the duration of my threshold intervals, or generally take myself at all seriously, my friends–particularly the non-endurance athlete one–would instantly seize upon the opportunity to put me in my place, warning me about how they could easily see me becoming “weenie-triathlete” as I aged.

Now that I am no longer a member of a division one, varsity NCAA ski team, I may not immediately be at risk to become a “weenie-triathlete,” but I certainly see within myself the potential to become a “master blaster”–master blaster being defined as someone who takes their athletic pursuits extremely seriously and spends a lot of money on their equipment. Every time I get on my bicycle, I start thinking about what kind of ride I should be doing.  Overdistance? Intervals? Hard riding? Recovery? Once I’m riding, I usually don’t worry too much about how fast I’m going or how high my heart rate is, but these are definitely things that are on my mind.

Recently, in response to a previous blog post, one of my old assistant coaches, Adam St. Pierre, offered to give me some coaching advice and put me on a plan to make me a huge baller of a biker or skier. Adam is highly qualified, with a masters in something-ology that has to do with training and exercise physiology (if you need a coach, you can write Adam at st.pierre.adam.d@gmail.com), and initially, I was very intrigued. I’d love to upgrade to Cat. 2, or even to Cat. 1 and get a pro cycling contract, or get top 50 in the Birkie, or even qualify for the Olympics, so Adam’s offer was enticing.

After thinking about it a little bit, though, I realized that I wasn’t sure that I really wanted a coach. In fact, paying for a coach is actually one of the tri-attributes that my friends and I dislike.

Oh, dear. I’m about to get into Patrick Stinson-introspective territory. But bear with me.

The reason that I’m skeptical about having a professional coach is that I think that physiology and exercise and athletics is simple enough that for someone at my level (and for someone at the level of most middle-aged triathletes),  I should be able to figure out my own training plan. One of the things that my former coach Marty Hall always said was that a large part of my college athletics experience was preparation for the rest of my life as an athlete. To me, what was implied in that statement was that by the time I graduated, I should know enough about the sport and about my body so that I didn’t need a coach any more. I mean, for goodness sakes, my roommate Nick Crawford IS a coach now, and he’s certainly not any smarter than me, so I should be able to do it myself. (Okay, Nick does know more about some things. Mainly rocks [he was a geology major].)

Furthermore, since the ski season finished, I’ve very much enjoyed the opportunity to go outside and use my mind and body however I want, without concern for the ultimate consequences of sprinting for a town line. Today I went rollerskiing and spent a large portion of the time contemplating slugs (major questions that arose: how many slugs are there in total on top of the 6-mile stretch of road that I skied out and back on today? how many slugs are there in maine, total? the world? has anyone ever done research into slug populations? are slugs carnivores or herbivores? where do slugs go when it gets hot outside? don’t they dry up? all of these questions could be easily answered by google and wikipedia, by the way, but I chose not to look them up so that I could ask them in earnest in this blog entry). Last week I rode 85 miles and rode just about as hard as I could up every single hill, and instead of using Cytomax or Gatorade, I just drank an entire liter of Coke.

In a nutshell, what I’m trying to say here is that there’s a time and place for sport to be serious, and for me, it seems like I should probably be concentrating more on finding a reporting job and doing other things, given that I just spent the last four years of my life taking skiing very seriously. And when it’s time for me to start taking things seriously again–whether that’s in 20 years when I’m trying to win the 45+ age category in the Putney Cyclocross race, or in five years when I’m trying to kick butt in the Birkie–my feeling is that I should be able to rely on my own accumulated knowledge and expertise to improve, rather than hiring a coach to figure it out for me or spending my money on equipment that will shave a quarter of a second off my 40-kilometer time trial. And, from this perspective, anyone who does spend money on a coach or on sweet equipment is overly serious, a big weenie, and unable to think for themselves.

Except, I’ve realized, that there’s a slight problem with this philosophy, and that’s that I’ve just spent the last 4 ski seasons shelling out $40,000 a year for a coach, for ski wax, and for equipment. Yes, I guess I also got a degree and learned some academic mumbo-jumbo as well, but that’s secondary–kind of like the triangular water bottle that you get when you spend $5,000 on your Cervelo P3. Which means that I’ve actually already had four years of being a weenie-triathlete (a cross-country ski version), just within the sheltered environment of a college where I can blend in because the majority of the rest of the people also happen to be weenies about about something, too. I’m not entirely sure about this, but I think that the large majority of weenie-triathletes are people who discover athletics in the middle of their lives, and who haven’t yet had the opportunity to take their athletic selves extremely seriously, build up a stockpile of sweet equipment, or learn enough about their own bodies and about the basics of physiology to coach themselves. I know my mom, for instance, never had the luxury of being able to compete in an endurance sport at a young age, and I don’t think I could begrudge her if she decided to take up triathloning and get a coach. Although I still sincerely hope that she doesn’t. 

So I guess that I’ve carved out a (very small) place in my heart for triathletes, even if they are weenies about the sport. And, yes, it should be acknowledged that there are plenty of triathletes who approach the sport in an entirely healthy manner. However, this whole thought experiment still hasn’t gotten me very far in determining what my own athletic approach should be for the immediate future. Should I be training to be a cyclist? Skier? Weenie triathlete? Who knows where I’ll be or what I’ll be doing in six months, so it seems pointless to follow a long-term plan. I guess I’ll just keep rollerskiing and contemplating the slugs…

One thing that I’ve discovered, through my years and years of accumulated training wisdom, is that there’s absolutely and unequivocally no such thing as an easy group bike ride.

Let’s back up. Yes, it’s June now, and I probably should be rollerskiing. But: NEWS FLASH!! I GRADUATED FROM COLLEGE! This means no more enforced boredom or misery in the form of OD classic skis with Walt, rollerboarding to exhaustion, or time spent with the baseball players in the weight room. Not that I would have been doing too much of that anyways in the last few weeks, what with the end of the semester, senior week (read: college-sanctioned and enforced drinking), and a slow-to-heal knee injury. But what this means is that my training for April and May  largely consisted of short, easy bike rides.

Over the last couple of weeks, however, my knee has finally been feeling good enough to start riding hard again. Two Sundays ago I got to jump in a fun little training criterium, and then this last Saturday I did the storied “Saturday Morning Ride” in Portland. If you’ve never heard of the SMR before, it’s the real deal–anywhere from 40 to 70 guys (and the occasional intrepid girl) hammering around Portland at about 25 mph, using up the entire lane, sprinting at regular intervals, and generally making mayhem. It’s totally awesome, and I recommend it to anyone who has the constitution for that kind of thing (which is probably anyone who’s reading this blog to begin with…).

In any case, with the Auburn races this coming weekend (more on those later), I’ve been ramping up my training from 3 hours a week to more like 6 or 8 hours a week. This means I’m serious, legit, and that the Freeman brothers should probably watch their collective back (on a who-does-the-most-badass-training basis, rather than actually having to be worried about losing to me in a ski race), because my hours are going up, and my splits on the track have been going down.

Thus, yesterday, after the SMR and another good ride on Sunday, I opted to go on the thrice-weekly pedal with “the old men of Augusta.” Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, these 10 crusty older (over-50) dudes meet up in the parking lot of the Augusta Career Center and ride their $5,000, Zipp-404-equipped bikes on a 30-mile out-and-back loop on Route 27. In and of itself, riding on Rt. 27 makes little to no sense, given that it’s dominated by semi trucks on their way to Farmington and tourists on their way to Belgrade Lakes. But then again, most of the things athletes do make little to no sense, so I just enjoy it for what it is–usually a low-key, moderate-paced excursion with a bunch of friends.

However, at this point, I’m pretty sure that the Old Men of Augusta Ride (henceforth OMAR) only exists as a “low-key, moderate-paced excursion” in my mind, along with unicorns, jackalopes, and me winning the Tour de France (both the overall and the final stage on the Champs-Elysees [has that been done before? b/c if so, that would be awesome]). Though yesterday before heading out I recalled that the OMAR was usually nice and slow and relaxed, upon further reflection I’m pretty sure that of the 20 or so times I’ve done this ride, that has only actually been truly easy like once or twice, if that. In fact, I’ve had similar experiences numerous times on the Brunswick Tuesday Night Ride (BTNR). The BTNR is–in my mind–a marked contrast of the Portland Tuesday Night Ride (PTNR), a preposterous 50-mile epic undertaking that seemingly tries to conquer every single vertical foot within a 20-mile radius of Portland. The Brunswick ride is–again, only in my mind–much easier: only 30 or 40 miles, with a lot less people and much more limited firepower.

In most of my BTNR experiences, as well as with last night’s OMAR, this is what happens. First, I arrive at the designated meeting place thinking mostly about how much better a rider I am than all of the other silly fools assembled around me: I’m a Cat. 3, these guys are all old and tired and don’t deserve their $5,000 bikes, my legs are totally jacked, etc. Then I sit quietly in the cool cyclist-pose on my bike (one foot on the ground, the other foot clipped in and resting my thigh on that side on the top tube) as all the old dudes or Brunswick regulars make small talk, and, depending on my mood,  I either plot out how I will utterly humiliate and embarrass these individuals, or relax into a Zen-like state in preparation for the calming, soothing experience of a pleasant, easy ride that will not at all tax my well-developed calves.

What inevitably happens is this: one of the old guys on his $5,000 bike actually turns out to somehow be ridiculously strong. Yesterday, this old guy was the dude rocking the sweet Garmin-Chipotle bike with carbon wheels, and whose nickname, I discovered at the end of the ride, is “F—— Jeff,” with the “F——” pertaining to the intensity at which he pedals. In addition, also present yesterday was another old guy with a foot-long beard, a fanny pack, and a mirror on his handlebars, as well as a pudgy-looking triathlete–complete with aero bars–on his first-ever group ride. For the first half of the ride, I spent about 75% of the time suffering on F—— Jeff’s wheel, periodically checking behind me to confirm that yes, in fact, beard-dude and triathlon guy are still there.

This lunacy continued on the way back. We did ultimately manage to drop beard-dude and triathlon guy, but I had to dig disturbingly deep to make it up the one big hill and not get dropped by F—— Jeff.

Humbled and only slightly disappointed, I returned home last night and drowned my sorrows in a delicious dinner of baked penne with 5 cheeses, prepared by my sister. The only thing that makes me feel marginally better is that on Saturday I get to race in the Pro-1-2-3 race with Mark McCormack and Ted King. I’m pretty sure that cycling is the only sport in the world that can offer this degree of ego inflation and reduction: you can ride shoulder-to-shoulder with the world’s best one day, then struggle to to keep up with bearded-dude the next.