The multisport racing season has come to a close in many parts of the country. If it was your first season, it’s time to revisit just what you’re doing in the sport. Let’s say you had a great first year. You are already looking forward to next year and possibly starting to plan for it. But perhaps you have tried a few races and are not sure of your place in the sport. In either case, to help you focus and make sure that what you are doing is right for you, I would suggest that you think about the following questions: Where am I now? What am I getting out of the sport? What, perhaps, am I not getting out of it that I thought I might? What should I be doing this winter?

I am a very lucky man to have found triathlon.  I reached the age of 46 having been able to do only two sports reasonably well.  They were downhill skiing, which I got into during my first year of medical school at the age of 22, and sail-boating, which I got into in my 30s.  I fell in love with skiing on my very first day, even though I spent almost as much time down on the snow as I did actually standing up on my skis.  But not be good at any of the usual school sports I felt that I had finally discovered one I could do, if I took lessons and practiced.

For many of us outside of the South and Southwest, the racing season is coming to an end.  Most of us who do multi-sport races do them for a variety of reasons.  One of them is to promote our personal health.  So perhaps it is time to consider just what health is, or at least to consider what I, as a life-long public health physician, think health is.

However, I've been slow and have been getting slower as I get older (I’m now 76), in my 31 years in the sport (with, as of this writing 236 tri’s and u’s under my belt, up to and including the ironman distance [although that was some time ago!]).  Believe me, “staying within myself,” which for me means not only going slower (fast-walking rather than running the run) but also going shorter (Sprints only) I am having as much or even more fun than ever.  Nevertheless, I also want to tell you that every once in a while I'm in an event and I do find myself racing.  There's someone coming up behind me who I want to keep in front of or there's someone in front of me who I want to catch.  Sometimes I "win" and sometimes I don't.  But as long as I keep it in perspective, actually racing, every once in a while, does indeed add to the fun. 

As you know by now, triathlons and duathlons come in a variety of distances and levels of difficulty. Back in the October 2008 issue of Inside Triathlon magazine, a letter writer said, in part: “Some time ago, I participated in a sprint-distance triathlon. The race took me a few months to prepare for, was a lot of fun and got me excited about mul­tisport…Here's my problem: [Some say] that I didn’t really do a triathlon and that I’m lying whenever I tell people I did, even though I always use the ‘sprint-distance’ qualifier. [Some say] that only the Ironman distance counts as a real triathlon. Am I misleading people, including myself, when I say I did a triathlon if the race was only a sprint?"

Is multisport racing for everyone? Are the real triathletes only those who go fast and train for at least 15 hours per week?  Well, some of the participants in our sport seem to think so. One once defined a "triathloid," as "a bozo who prefers to survive, rather than train for, triathlons." For this "expert," training began at 6 hours per week, going up to 22-25, for an Olympic-distance triathlon. The "Olympic," so named because it covers the distances  of the triathlon variant run in the Olympics, is comprised of a 1.5 kilometer (almost 1 mile) swim, a 40k (almost 25 mile) bike, and a 10k (6.2 mile) run.

Regular readers of these pages likely know what triathlons and duathlons are, but just in case you are just coming into multisport racing, it might be helpful to go over those definitions. Triathlons are distance races with three separate legs.  The usual combination is swimming, road cycling, and running — in that order. However, there are other combinations, such as: downhill skiing, cycling and running (and I did a couple of those some years back); running, cycling and canoeing/kayaking; and swimming, off-road cycling and running. But by far the most common combination is swim-bike-run, with the latter two done on the road. They come in a variety of lengths from short to very, very long.

Why Do It, 1: Who this Series is For

Dr. George Sheehan was the great philosopher of the modern running boom, starting back in the 1970s.  He once famously wrote: “The difference between a runner and a jogger, is a race entry blank.”  And so the difference between someone who works out in more than one sport and a du- or triathlete is also a race entry blank.  This series is for you if you are just starting out or even thinking about starting out, to do some variety of multisport racing.  It is also for you if you already are a multisport racer, are in it primarily to have fun and stay in shape, and want to get more organized and more efficient about both the racing and the training.