Friday Tri: Know Yourself

I was talking over my race last weekend with a friend who is a newer triathlete, but an experienced runner. She ended up in the water with a lot of people who were a lot slower than she was, but apparently did not know how to tell what their estimated swim time would be. This happens all the time in races where you seed yourself in triathlon. The main problem is that the newer you are, the less you are able to gauge your own abilities. You don't have the judgment that more seasoned athletes do. And yes, there are seasoned athletes who are not great swimmers, but they still know exactly what their time will be out of the water, and how they will make up their time in other disciplines. An experienced runner tends to have that ability to make judgments about herself, cares about her time and has done the timing of her swimming in recent weeks to have a proper estimate. Someone entirely new to racing does not.

I have found that I tend to ask people questions about their swimming and racing that are not necessarily time related, in order to figure out how to place myself around them. The most important question for me isn't their time, but if they do flip turns or not. Why? Because swimmers who do flip turns are people who know the rules of the swimming pool. They are generally former swimmers (as I am) and they are not upset about being passed. They move over and don't hit you in the face with their feet. They also know how to pass properly if the reverse is true. And they don't hang on the walls making it impossible for me to do my flip turns which reduce my overall swim time enormously. I also find that the closer they are to an exact time, the more accurate they are. "Under 5 minutes" is not as good an answer as "4:42." If they say they are a breaststroker, this means something. If they wish we were diving in, this means something.

I have been thinking about how this applies to other areas of life. Watching So You Think You Can Dance for the first time this season, I was struck by how easy it was to tell who was a dancer and who wasn't simply by how they walked on stage and held themselves during conversation. How they looked, how muscular they were, how they had dressed for the audition. Of course, you don't skip the audition and just go for the looks, but these were people who knew themselves and that spoke volumes. As a writer, I have found that I have become more and more confident in myself as a writer. This doesn't mean that I don't write crappy first drafts. I do. But I know that is part of the process and it doesn't bother me as it once did. I also know that they are crappy, and don't think that anything I write is wonderful at conception. When I talk to beginning writers about their work, they tell me a lot when they use certain terminologies or name agents they've submitted to or conferences they've been to. I don't give them extra points, but it shows me that they are on the path to self-knowledge, which is enormously important.

As a parent, I think the same thing applies. Knowing that your children are going to act in certain ways at certain ages because you've read it in a book is different than having been through it five times before. Book learning helps, but it's better to remember how to stand, to tell yourself that you've been through this before and everyone survived, to remember to vent privately and not at the child, and to be wise enough to accept that if you've had a bad day with a child today or for the last year, that doesn't mean that you should give up or that you are a terrible parent. It's just par for the course, and you keep going. You buy some chocolate, remind yourself that you do other things well, and read a good book. You don't flail in the water because you're in the first race of your life. You breathe deeply because you've done it before.