Crazy lady's sister, Lisa, just finished her first triathlon. She's already a wonderful climber, and came in first during the Limestoner Monster Rock event earlier this year. She wanted to give swimming/running/cycling a chance. Here's a brief snippet from her blog:"...Actually, my initial perception of triathlons was shaped by growing up and seeing the first Ironman races on television, so when I talked to a friend who’d done the Danskin and heard what distances were involved, I remember thinking, “That’s not a REAL triathlon.” But I also remember thinking that it was a triathlon I might be capable of doing.
I still wasn’t sure if I’d want to do it, though. After all, it involved an open-water swim. And I am not a swimmer. When I was in college, in preparation for becoming a counselor at a kid’s camp one summer, I took a water rescue class. At the end of the class, the teacher handed me my certificate, but then she looked me in the eye and said, “I’m giving you the certificate, but I don’t want you to ever try and rescue anyone.” That sums up how bad a swimmer I am.
I think the most swimming I’ve done since that class in college was the brief 200yd swim required to get my scuba diving certification. Now, if I decided to do the Danskin, I’d have to somehow work my way up to a continuous 800m swim in Decker Lake. But at least it sounded more do-able than a continuous 2.4 mile swim in the rough seas near Kona.
While trying to decide, I talked to a friend of mine whose wife had raced in the Danskin the year before, grilling him with all sorts of questions. What if you have trouble during the swim? (Lots of women don’t swim well, so the water is full of Swim Angels offering you noodles and kayakers waiting to keep you from drowning.) Do you need a wetsuit? (No, the water is warm.) Are most of the women riding fancy road bikes? (No, only maybe a third of them.) Finally, he looked at me and said,
“Most of the women are just there to see if they can do it.”
That decided it for me. I was in."
You can read more about Lisa's training here. Congratulations!Oh, and the line about "lots of women don't swim well?" Crazy lady assumes that it was the friend talking, not her sister Lisa. Plenty of women are fabulous swimmers. She still has the scars from losing "water chicken" against Lisa, while they were wrestling in the pool growing-up. Crazy lady insists, "Lisa has always had freaky strong legs for a girl."
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