Attempting a Triathlon—at 75

     I was a terrible athlete as a kid. One year I got a total of one hit in the entire Little League season. But I have since learned that even if I ain’t particularly coordinated, I can be excessively dogged.

     So as an adult I ran some and biked some. But I didn’t dare a triathlon until I was turning 70.

     We had bought a house near a lake, and I had finally learned to do a half-way decent crawl. And, one day, it occurred to me that I could now do all “tri.”

     It proved unsurprisingly hard—a half-mile swim in a bay, a 13-mile bike ride, then a 3-mile run. (This was a “sprint triathlon”; all those distances are doubled in “Olympic triathlons.”) There were hills (though not on the swim).

     And I turned out not to be the only septuagenarian who could do those three things—and almost all the men who did them that morning completed them faster than I did. But I finished. That felt good.

      So, I tried another triathlon in Florida that winter. And I have done one every summer since. I looked for sprint triathlons that are relatively flat. One, for example, was in Atlantic City. (We swam in a channel, not the Atlantic.)

      And guess what? I began to do okay. I always finished, never walked during the run or bike ride, and even came in first among the handful of men 70 and over a couple of times. And, to my amazement, I usually completed the triathlon faster than about a third of the men of any age. (Many of whom, to be sure, probably had not trained for it.)

      I turned 75 this summer and was excited at the thought of graduating into an even more advanced—and presumably even less competitive—age group. And something they called the “USA Triathlon National Championships” was coming to Atlantic City.

      That sprint triathlon took place Sunday. It was huge, and the participants, who came from all over the country, were good, as the designation “National Championships” should have made clear to me.

      You had to have recently completed a triathlon to register for this one. I ended up with the 1,403rd best time of the 1,511 men and women who finished the race. And I was 25th out of the 30(!) men aged 75 to 79 who finished.

      Disappointing? Yeah, kind of. One dreams . . . but I remain a long, long, long way from “National Championship” level.

      But exhilarating? Yeah. I can—for the moment—still do it.