SMACKDOWN! TC vs. TC: To Honor or Forget, That is the Question ...
We know you're used to a good mano a mano on the issues pressing the triathlon world. Well, Jeffy has a few major multisport races to orchestrate this summer, so we've let him off the hook for a while. But that doesn't mean ol' TC isn't bubbling with issues to vent on, conundrums to attack, debates on which to pontificate. So here we go ... One hot topic, one impassioned tri scholar, one juicy topic, two sides argued .. by one man. Here is the question:
Is it time to forget the legends and embrace triathlon without history?
YES: The legends helped give birth to and put a cult sport on the map. But now triathlon is a big participatory sport that’s here to stay with magic demographics. It’s time to grow up and give the masses what they want - training tips and lip smackingly beautiful equipment catalogs - and forget force-feeding the attention-deficit generation a bunch of musty history.
NO: It’s emotion that drives all of us to be all that we can be. And swim-bike-run has a romance and a glamour that draws more and more people to the sport thanks to a series of remarkable heroes that started with amateurs like Tom Warren and Julie Moss, continued with Ironman legends Dave Scott and Mark Allen, evolved with amazing pros like Paula Newby-Fraser, Michellie Jones, Natascha Badmann, Peter Reid and Tim DeBoom, and boosted by everyman and every woman over-comers like Sister Madonna, Blazeman, Dick and Ricky Hoyt, and Sarah Reinertsen.
Since this is a one-man show, let's stat with the YES ...
When I hear pompous statements like, “Thanks to a series of remarkable heroes that started with amateurs like Tom Warren and Julie Moss, continued with Ironman legends Dave Scott and Mark Allen, evolved with amazing pros like Paula Newby-Fraser, Michellie Jones, Natascha Badmann, Peter Reid and Tim DeBoom, and boosted by everyman and everywoman overcomers like Sister Madonna, Blazeman, Dick and Ricky Hoyt, and Sarah Reinertsen,” I first stifle the impulse to barf.
Then I ask, "Who? And who? And who? And who? And who?"
Then with a shrug, I say, "Who cares?"
The intelligent men and women who are most responsible for leading this sport to its rocketing growth spurt in the 21st century don’t presume to know what triathlon’s swiftly increasing participants want. They ask them. For those of you unfamiliar with modern scientific business practices, the way you do that is to organize something called a focus group. You find a group scientifically chosen to represent your target demographic and find out what’s on everyone's mind.
Many of the hard-core triathlon cultists would be shocked to know that the vast majority of those asked in the latest focus group on the sport had no idea who Dave Scott was or is. And what’s more, they don’t care! The Man! Irrelevant? How can this be?
Take a look at Runners World magazine - a paragon of MBA business smarts - and you will see an unending series of 10 ways to a faster 5km, five ways to a faster 10km, seven ways to a marathon PR, six interval workouts to trim 12 seconds off your 8km PR, 10 ways to improve your half-marathon nutrition, 26.2 ways to a Boston Marathon qualifying time. Some genius figured out that numbers are catchy, lists are cool and anything that readers hungry for self improvement think they can use is gold. That model has proved in the marketplace that it is good for runners in an era when too many of the old heroes are disgraced drug cheats chasing illusory glory that no longer seems too urgent to the general public. Sadly, that cloud also covers with its soot the golden aura surrounding even unblemished classic heroes of the sport like Frank Shorter, Emil Zatopek and Steve Prefontaine. And so runners have learned to live without those guiding beacons.
The pursuit and massaging of the triathlon demographic demands non-sentimental thinking. And here is what the MBA hunters stalking the prize customers have found. If you are reading this you are Type-A. You are an alpha male or alpha female. You make a lot of money. You may want to do triathlon for fun, but such fun should mirror your pre-existing personality. You have risen to the top of your field by honing in on your target and getting what you want and not wasting time. You are not the type of person who sits around watching TV, playing fantasy leagues or worshiping stars in any field. Those slobs caught up in the celebrity culture are losers plain and simple. You, on the other hand, are drawn to triathlon to do it, not to watch it. You want to find the quickest way to eliminate mistakes, to go faster, to win. You are not a teenager who puts up posters of sports heroes on your wall or a lonely adult who gorges on Us Weekly, People, National Enquirer, "Page Six" and holds your breath until Entertainment Tonight tells us what Oprah and Lindsay Lohan are up to next. You are a winner, a grownup who wants to be the star in their own script. And you are doing it as a side trip to your career, therefore you need to find the quickest, most efficient way to do your sport. Your modus operandi is get in, get out - on top, of course.
While most people are not cutthroat age-group competitors, much of the profile applies to even the much larger just-want-to-finish crowd. Many of them just want to finish a sprint triathlon, share the celebration with their family and go home. They want to know how to train for that single race on five hours a week and go back to the rest of their lives. Indeed, finishing a triathlon at any distance has become an adult merit badge with enough inherent romance of its own, just the same as running had graduated from an elite endeavor where only a 36-minute 10km or a three-hour marathon will do to even bigger business where there is room for four-, five-, six-, seven- and even eight-hour marathoners and two-hour 10km walkers who, like Rocky, just want to go the distance.
And looking at the big picture, they are getting healthy and have a modest attitude that gets them out of doors and enjoying the fresh air.
What this comes to is that the impulses to push yourself to the limit is fine and dandy if you want to. But for most of us, rinsing cottage cheese to cut your Ironman time by 10 minutes is no longer amusing. Spending 30 hours a week training for an age-group medal is obsessive and simply not necessary. And so is it no longer necessary to memorize the old stories and myths to inspire you go get out the door and swim, bike and run, which was and is the whole point of it anyway.
While The Man and The Grip may be resting in peace far from today’s triathlon consciousness, they should feel satisfied that they have done their jobs well and today’s triathletes no longer need the equivalent of comic book superheroes to fuel their triathlon obsessions.
Triathlon is now grown up, thank you very much. May all her prehistoric heroes nap under the cobwebs covering the stacks of old tri magazines stacked in the back of the hard-core tri-dinosaurs’ garages.
Triathlon is no longer a cult demanding that its practitioners know the whole canon of its founding and early heroes. No memorizing Ironman finishing splits in coffee shops before taking your morning workout with the fervor of fundamentalists reciting the Koran endlessly in the madrassas. No need to tune in, turn on and drop out of your non-aerobic life. It is enough to simply swim, bike and run.
Here's where the other TC butts in ...
No! No! No!
With all due disrespect, my alter ego is nuts. Even in a cold-blooded business sense he’s crazy and he’s going to lose money betting that the average triathlete has stripped his beating heart of any passion and emotion. Even in an era of high technology and low expectations, even if you accept that triathlon is by far a participatory rather than a spectator sport, there is an inextricable, unbreakable link between the sport’s heroes and her humblest practitioners. It is the shared sense that every one of us is on a mission to become the greatest athlete we can be and the joy of breaking our old limits and achieving our goals results in the sum total of ecstatic joy that is precisely the same for Chris McCormack and Chrissie Wellington as it is for the mother of five who manages to break the 17-hour mark.
To think that triathlon is just another box to check off on a resume of life success is insane. There is nothing mechanical about the act of putting on a wetsuit, stepping up to the start and entering that watery mixed martial arts tangle on the way to the first buoy like a Navy SEAL. By the time anyone has finished the bike, they can be proud of the fact that they conquered the course just like Lance Armstrong, and ran to the end against all obstacles just like Haille Gebreselaissie. Much more than beer league softball or miniature golf or even your average 10km or high-level pickup basketball at the YMCA, anyone who does a triathlon has mastered equipment preparation and the physical challenges of three sports and is at least a distant-cousin version of a warrior of sport.
Because it takes real courage, organization and a fighting spirit, no matter the distance, triathlon will never be just a one-hour workout at Life Time Fitness. Whether at Ironman Hawaii’s hallowed finish line or four women who wanted to find an exhilarating way to lose weight together crossing the finish line at one of Sally Edwards' Danskin races, the looks on the faces you see there can never have the matter-of-factness of someone who’s just cut the grass or polished off another Pilates class. And whether they just heard about that triathlon from a friend at the office or in the gym or just caught the Ironman accidentally on television, everyone has a vision of the triathlete as a being that is well above average, on another plane, not just another schlub.
Triathlon, quite unlike esoteric Olympic sports like synchronized swimming, rhythmic gymnastics, kayaking, weight lifting, tae kwon do or decathlon, somehow seems simultaneously noble and accessible. While no one is likely to daydream that they can run like Michael Johnson, bike like Taylor Phinney or swim like Michael Phelps or do a tumbling somersault run like Paul Hamm, there is something to just finishing all of triathlon’s parts that seems like you’re part of the club. There is something about 1,700 amateurs finishing the same 140.6 miles in Kona that Dave Scott, Mark Allen, Julie Moss and Paula Newby-Fraser did that makes triathlon unique. And it is the humility of those legends, knowing how thin is the physical and mental margin between victory and catastrophe in triathlon, that they share with the humblest of triathletes in random encounters at the pool or track or on the roads, enriches the whole experience.
Somehow, Julie Moss’ crawl, Mark Allen’s seven-year quest to finally win Hawaii, Dave Scott’s total commitment, Greg Welch’s infectious joy, Natascha Badmann’s flying like an eagle through the wicked mumuku winds on the Queen K, Michellie Jones’ bravery finishing the 1998 world championship with a foot soaked in blood, the Blazeman’s indomitable spirit in the face of a deadly, paralyzing disease - all these deeds and spirits are passed on to the DNA of every person who does a triathlon. You don’t have to memorize the stats or read all the books or obtain bootleg tapes the ABC Wide World of Sports of Julie Moss’s February 1982 finish to be a part of it. But the sheer fact is that the sport has a collective memory that is passed on in every person-person contact - from an old triathlon hand to a bright shining newbie. The knowledge of the characters of triathlon’s past are absorbed and passed on.
And without those stories, that lore and the sheer love for the sport that is passed on, triathlon would not be thriving as it is. It would be lying limp in the dustbin of history.
So, if the men and women running the focus groups and the spreadsheets are right, you might imagine that one night Dave Scott would have a dream not unlike Jimmy Stewart’s character in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” exploring what would have happened if he had not been there in Bedford Falls to make a difference. Dave’s dream would have surely introduced him to the thousands of people who admired him and cheered him on and best of all tried as best they could to follow in his footsteps and become the best triathlete they could be. He would have seen thousands of men and women becoming prematurely old, looking wan and gray without a zest for sport and life. Same for Mark Allen and Julie Moss and the rest of the best of triathlon’s history.
Even if you tried, you could not erase the heroes and the romance of the sport. They are both embedded deeply in its DNA.
