Friday Tri: The Experience of Racing

A friend recently suggested the idea that we as humans need more experiences and fewer things. I tend to find myself collecting skills, rather than mere experiences. I don't try things perhaps as often as I should, simply because I am aware of the fact that once I start something, I tend to do it rather obsessively, until I become good at it, and then it is part of my collection of skills. I don't tend to do things once.

But triathlon, perhaps more than other things, is both a collection of skills and a collection of experiences. I suspect that one of the reasons I find racing so addictive is that it is is memorable. There are parts of every race that get blurred, sure. But training is far more blurred on a regular basis than is racing. Racing tends to stand out like a sharp light in my head. It stays with me. In many ways, I feel that some of my first races are just as clear in my mind as my last race. This is partly because I like unpacking old races in my head at night when I am trying to fall asleep. It is also because races are like being transported into another world. They are a kind of magic.

When I am racing, it is like I have entered another dimension in which time does not move in the same way. I can't say that time moves more slowly or more quickly there. Sometimes one, sometimes the other. But time feels different. It feels more like a substance and less like the air that I breathe. That is, it forces me to notice it more. Maybe this is because time is the stuff that matters most while racing. It is the way that we judge how well we have done, and so I pay a lot more attention to it than I would in ordinary life. Each second matters, and so I notice that I must not allow the seconds to dribble away. I must take hold of them and dole them out wisely. No, that isn't quite right. That makes it sound like I have control of time, and I'm aware that I don't at all. But it is like a creature and I have to learn its language and feed it somehow, to use it.

When a race is over and I cross the finish line, there is both a sense of elation and a sense of sadness for me. Elation that I've finished and that I feel good about what I've done. The sadness is there because the race is over and because I loved the race itself, the experience, not merely the accomplishment. I love what it feels like to be racing, the intensity and the lightness. I like being able to let go of the other parts of myself, the mother, the wife, the writer even. I am only the racer, a tighter and more animal version of myself, a version of myself that does not stand overhead and make judgments about good and bad, but only pushes more and more and lives now. Living now is something that does not happen easily for me or often, but it is good.