Beginner Triathlete - Scott Tinley's Writings articles

If you ask beginning triathletes what they fear most, a standard response usually includes some reference to mass swim starts and bike crashes.

Multisport athletes don’t have to look like cover models from some cheesy sex-and-abs magazine. You just have to be comfortable in your own skin however logo-d or clear.

Why it’s so hard for us to talk about losing at a simple game? Sports are supposed to be about building positive character, supposed to be about fairness, equality, and striving for excellence.

There is a serious, devoted athlete, committed to the task of triathlon. He is happy because his heart rate is low, his blood lactate is low and his chances in this year’s Kona lottery is high.

Part Two: On Appreciation and Acceptance. At some point your body will let you down. Then you have to decide whether it is really the enemy.

There are races to prepare for and health to be found and a lot of adventure and release to be sought in the oceans of the world.

When people say that sport is “just a game” don’t believe them. Love is not just hanging out with someone that you like and raising a family isn’t just putting food on the table. Sport is more too.

We often forget the Other, that person or persons living behind the doors of our individual hubris, that secreted cheerleader who polishes our medals but never wins one of their own.

As endurance athletes we purposely trick our psyches. Our minds hop-scotching our physical bodies. We play chicken with something very personal.

Triathletes have embraced any new device in the belief it will increase their speed and performance. Ten millimeter thick wetsuits and ten pound bikes sell for more than most paid for their first car.

Part One: On Speed, Desire and Age. There are some advantages to running slowly. Now, give me a minute here and I'll try to think of one.

Traveling as an athlete is better than traveling as a tourist or on business or even just wandering around with a backpack and a holey sleeping bag. An athlete is given wide birth.

The sport of triathlon is rife with untold stories of chicanery and altruism, deviousness and grace.

It started like this: In the third week of August 1976, three things happened that altered my life forever. And they all took place within a mile of where we sit tonight.

A hundred years before the first Hawaiian Ironman in 1978, the geographical frontiers had been discovered. So we turn to triathlon to fulfill our genetic drive to test and conquer.