I made my own private mini-triathlon

I have participated in 3 organized triathlons in the past. They are challenging, they are fun, they have a great sense of community spirit and you feel great after doing one. The flip side is they are corporate and the real objective of doing them is so that the company that organizes them can take money from you. They are always a lot more expensive than I feel like they should be and therefore while I enjoy them, I kind of feel like I'm getting taken advantage of when I am paying someone a couple of hundred dollars for a shirt, a medal, and a couple of dinners.

The other day I had a day off mid-week and since I live in a city where everyone works, this would be the perfect day for me to try to make my own triathlon but I don't really have it in me to do a full one, so I did a sort of half triathlon on my own.

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I didn't do it exactly like an organized tri, and really there isn't much way that I could do that without having some people help me, but the idea here was to do all 3 exercises in the same day, sort of back-to-back-to-back.

I wanted to do half of an Olympic triathlon. There are a lot of different kinds of triathlons but the Olympic one is the one I have participated in several times in the past.

Just like a real tri, I started in the water but instead of in the ocean or in a lake, I started out with a free coupon that I had for the local lap pool that is about a km from my house. I prepped the bike and some water bottles for after the swim. The first portion was just me planning on getting in 600 meters in the pool. At first I chose 600 meters instead of 750 because the coupon was only for 30 minutes and I didn't feel like that was enough time for 750. As it turns out I was probably wrong about that and think I definitely had time to do the remaining 150 meters but it was too late by the time I figured this out.

I probably could have done this faster, but I chose to take it easy and did almost all of it with breaststroke, which is an easy stroke for me because you get to breathe a lot.

After getting out of the pool and changing, there was a small break before the next leg because I had to walk home and i'll be honest, I had something to eat as well beforehand.

In a real triathlon, the cycling is the 2nd stage but I mixed it up because I knew that I would be disgustingly hot after a mid-day run and the bike would help cool me off. On the run I carried a bottle of cool water with me and on the bike which I left in the hallway there was another bottle of water mixed with electrolytes that I had frozen solid before the run. I figured it would be nearly liquid by the time I got back. I was kind of pleased with my per km time considering that I was taking it very easy because I knew I had a 20km cycle ahead of me upon my return.

The ice block water had turned kind of into a slushie of water by the time I got back and this was a real treat. As I was dripping sweat all over the floor retrieving my bike the super cool water was a very welcome refreshment. Then I took off on the bike on the bike trails but wasn't able to get up to as high of a speed as I am capable of because we were at 530 PM now, and "all the idiots" were out on the trails as well so I had to slow down a lot very often.

When I was finally done, I was kind of surprised about how not fatigued I was and this made me feel good about the amount of training that I have been doing lately. I feel as though I probably could have done the full Olympic and other than the run, probably totally crush it.

This will be too complicated for me to pull off on my own though, unless I am seriously willing to have a ton of delays from other people getting in the way. I may try it anyway. It could be a "try-athlon" but that is probably the wrong attitude to have going in. Do or do not, there is no try!

I might even say that this was borderline fun to do and the only part of me that really hurt, per se, was my butt from the bicycle seat. I really should invest in a pair of those shorts with the padding in the backside if I am going to pull off distance rides. Since it is almost entirely flat here in Chicago, riding longer distances on a bike isn't very difficult.

The organized triathlons that I have participated in in the past had hills, and that really changes how you feel about it. My bike isn't a tri bike, but it is a pretty good quality hybrid bike with 21 gears and that makes that portion of the exercise kind of feel like the "cooldown" if you do it last.

The active calories was nearly 1400, so this is the most amount of continuous activity I have completed in quite some time.