Duathlon, our run-bike-run variant of triathlon, first appeared in the mid-1980s under a variety of names: “byathlon,” “run-bike-run,” “cyruthon” (cycle-run), and the name that stuck: “biathlon.” In the early days the most common format was run-bike, followed by run-bike-run and then bike-run. It quickly evolved, however, to an almost exclusive focus on the run-bike-run format. My good friend Daniel Honig, president of the New York Triathlon Club (NYTC, nee the Big Apple Triathlon Club, BATC) was one of its principal early developers if not the original inventor of the format.

Last February, as I’m sure many of us were, I spent some of my time watching the Winter Olympics.  One of the events I came across was the women’s biathlon. I recalled watching a men’s biathlon years ago, but this was a rather different event. In the latter, competitors skied a cross-country course carrying a rifle on their backs. At points they would stop at a target, take shots, accumulate scores, and then proceed on the course. Winners were determined by a combination of skiing speed and shooting accuracy.

On February 22, 2014, The New York Times published an article on champion NASCAR driver Jimmie Johnson titled “Jimmie Johnson Does Triathlons, but is He an Athlete?”

And so in this context I thought of the question, “what is an athlete?”

Is it that Johnson happens to do triathlons and works out rigorously in all three sports on a regular basis that makes him an athlete? Or are racecar drivers athletes on their own merits. In the article, Donovan McNabb, a former NFL quarterback (and a pretty good one too), was quoted as saying: “He sits in a car and drives. That doesn’t make you an athlete.” But even though it’s not the same physical skill as throwing a football or swimming, cycling and running fast, he does have to have a physical skill to do what he does - keep a 3000-4000 pound car going at 200+ miles per hour for up to four hours with a bunch of other cars in very close proximity.

My paternal grandfather, Jacob Kyzor, came from the East End of London.  Even though Grandpa Jacob’s parents were mid-19th century Jewish emigrants from Russia, he always regarded himself as English. And so I have always regarded myself as one-quarter English. My mother took me to London for the first time in 1950 when I was 13 years old. I lived in London for two years in the 1960s, doing post-doctoral work at the University of London and the London School of Economics. And since then, as I am fond of telling Londoners when I visit, I am lucky enough to have been in London more times than I can remember.

When you see the headline in the sports section of your local newspaper that pitchers and catchers are reporting in a month or less, if you are a baseball fan, you know that even if there is snow on the ground spring is on the way. So while in some parts of the country multisport racing goes year-round, for many of us, now is when we start to think about our own spring training for the upcoming season.

In the U.S. a variety of holidays are celebrated at the end of the year, from Christmas to Kwanzaa to the Winter Solstice to Hanukkah. Gift-giving is often associated with these year-end celebrations and so my thoughts turn to what advice I can give to gift-givers, in this column.

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.