Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all! I hope Santa’s sack has been full of carbon pull-buoys and AI gear shifters, and that in 2024 all your race times finish with .59 rather than .01.
If this seems unusually nice for me it’s because my New Year’s resolution is to try and be a bit more cheerful and a bit less grumpy when it comes to racing and training.
Don’t get me wrong, at heart I’ll always be the spiky, sarcastic voice of triathlon you all know and love/fear/mock (delete as applicable), but there have been a couple of instances this year where I realised I could do with being a bit more my usual affable self and looking a bit less like I want to impale the head of a mortal enemy on a track pump:
Incident 1
At a standard-distance tri, I’d just racked my bike and finished laying out my kit when my transition-neighbour arrived and proceeded to rack their bike the wrong way.
I, politely, told them, ‘You need to rack facing the other way’ and as they gave the usual reply about wanting to face the same way as the bike exit I could feel myself clenching my nether regions so hard you could strike matches on them.
My face must have betrayed me because they grudgingly turned theirs around and a hostile silence reigned until we were called to the wave start.
Despite a swim technique that looked like treacle leaking from a rusted tin, I was back in T1 before them and discovered that at some point they’d snuck back and turned their bike the wrong way round again.
So, in a fit of righteous indignation, I wasted valuable time turning their bike back the right way – a level of pettiness that I’m sure you’ll agree is as impressive as it is sad.
It wasn’t until I was stomping furiously over the finish line that I began pondering whether my
actions were worth the teenaged strop I’d spent the last 2.5 hours in, and whether I’d have enjoyed my
race much more if I’d shrugged it off like a grown-up.
“I think you’ll agree that it’s high time I turned away from this path of spite”
Incident 2
In recent weeks I have been waging a one-man war with members of the public who I perceive are trying to encroach on to our club swimming sessions by sneaking into the pool earlier than they are allowed.
The swimming club I’m in has the pool from 5-7am every day, after which it’s open for public swimmers.
But in recent weeks some of the public have started appearing on poolside 10 or 15 minutes early and trying to get into empty lanes which have been vacated by club swimmers who have (lazily) finished early.
The coaches try to keep the public at bay, but there’s constant pressure with up to a dozen public swimmers looming over the poolside and scowling at us like a shelf full of novelty jugs.
A truce of sorts has been reached whereby the club has exclusive use of the pool up to 7am, but if it is empty earlier than that then the lifeguards will allow the public swimmers in.
However, if there is just one person still in the pool, they have to wait. I’m sure you know where this is going…
Yes, I have been deliberately swimming right up to 6:59.59, even though I have probably been the only person in the pool for the past 10 minutes, and even though those final few hundred metres are probably of no training benefit to me whatsoever.
If, in my younger carefree days, you’d have told me that there would come a point in my life where my main source of entertainment was watching the impotent fury of recreational doggy paddlers I’d have said you were mad, but here we are.
I think you’ll agree, therefore, that it’s high time I turned away from this path of spite which can only lead to me becoming even more tense, knotted and gristly than I am already, and started rediscovering the simple joys of tri.
Let’s face it, we do this for fun, so from now on it’s out with the malice, and in with peace and goodwill to all – after 7am, obviously.
Top illustration credit: Dan Seex
