Dreamers, I can’t help but feel the need to post an account, minor as it may be, of my adventurous Sunday morning finishing my first sprint triathlon. Sprint not because I sprinted the whole time, but because a regular triathlon is longer than what I did. Now, let me be perfectly clear about how little training I did for this thing. There are three components to a triathlon: swimming, biking, and running. And let’s just add a fourth category, general health. We’ll go through them one by one:

1) Swimming. OK, this is the one I actually had. I was going to do a two mile swim in Tahoe this summer, I used to play water polo for Dartmouth, I swim laps sometimes, that part was fine.

2) Biking. I bought a used bike three weeks ago in Arlington for $200 (new ones are really expensive, no thanks REI.) I had plans to ride it to work everyday- that has happened no days. I also had plans to ride it around on weekends. The only time that happened was one morning I had to retrieve my vehicle from the Greenbelt Metro parking lot after having taken a taxi home the night before. Total distance: 1.2 miles. As in, total distance traveled on a bicycle in the last 2 years: 1.2 miles.

3) Running. I walk my dog everyday. We don’t run. I did run a 5:15 mile when I was 16. That is a long, long time ago. So I also hadn’t really run in maybe 9 months.

4) General health. I bought the patch in February. I bought it again last week. Because I basically smoke 3/4 of a pack of cigarettes a day. I eat vegetables because they are cheap and filling and meat is expensive, so I guess in that sense my diet is ok. I met a friend for drinks on Thursday night and she knew I had this race coming up. When we were making plans, she goes “is your coach going to be ok with you going out to the bar this close to your race?” I told her I thought he’d be fine with it.

So that’s the set-up. We’ll make this a multi-part account of things. Stay tuned, readers. And if you haven’t voted already, VOTE.