This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: The future. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
I sat by the only open window on the schoolbus. It was a little after 8 o’clock in the morning outside the Elks Lodge in Ticonderoga, N.Y. The bus shuddered into motion, on loan to carry me and the other triathletes through the June gloom toward Lake George, which is the size of San Francisco and lies in a valley among the Adirondacks. We passed a house burned out and one collapsed and one gleaming, the restorers’ sign still upright in the yard.
Next to a row of portable toilets near Black Point Beach, the bus stopped. Single bright red lamps glowed above each of two emergency exits. I got out the front and carried my wetsuit over to the transition area, where I looked at the pedals on the bicycle I’d already set up there and realized the shoes that attached to them were 215 miles away.
A day earlier, my boyfriend and I had driven his car several hours up from the city. The palette outside converged into a four-part spectrum: trees, road, lake, sky. We’d stopped at the race site and left my bike, but I took the rest of my gear with me to spare it the day’s intermittent drizzles. Then we drove on to the home of my friends Amy and Adam and their girls. They moved last year from Atlanta to the vicinity of a renowned organic farm whose meat and asparagus and slightly fizzy Caspian yogurt fed us at their table. I slept poorly, my body just awakening to the fact that I really did plan to leap into a lake and stay there.
The reason cyclists clip their shoes in is that doing so allows for muscular engagement with the whole revolution of the pedal. Pushing down provides most of the thrust, but when you can also pull up with the other side at the same time, you recruit more muscles into the effort and make it more efficient, so you can go faster and get less tired. This was my first triathlon on my own bike, a kind of home-court advantage. I didn’t know how I’d do on the swim or the run, but I expected to kill it on the cycling course—and have a little more juice left for the final, running stage.
Now that was not going to happen. With the grace of the wrench-bearing organizer of the event, Mark, and of a guy named Lou who had finished the sprint distance earlier that morning and didn’t need his pedals for the Olympic, I quickly got them onto my bike. These did not even have cages over the top to grip my shoes, so I wouldn’t have any upward power in the stroke. I looked over at the wet crown of cloud on the mountain at the lake’s far edge, and my framing shifted: This race was not a race. I would bike as well as I could in my running shoes. I was here just to be.
The epilogue, though, is that I finished 10 minutes faster than my record. Each stage was better. (“Good to know all that training is for something,” James said drily.) And that is the point of today’s newsletter: We’re never ready. Something is always off. If that stopped big strides, we’d all still be swimming. But it doesn’t stop big strides. Find Lou. Kill it.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.