After four triathlons I finally broke down and bought a wetsuit and it arrived this weekend! As a family we try to be very thoughtful of where money is spent. Minimizing expenditures on trivial things that we can do without has given us the opporunity to do things that are important to us. However, in the case of the wetsuit I realized our thriftiness had had a negative impact on my very survival when racing in the Steamboat Springs triathlon in the Rockies of Colorado. I entered the water with my age group. It was a sea of fantastic slick black wetsuit cad athletes and me, a shivering pasty white man in a tiny pair of tri-swim shorts! I may as well have been wearing a lime green thong for the looks of incredulity I was getting. I turned to the focused looking chap next to me and jockingly said "Should I be worried if I can't move my eyelids?". He looked at me like I had just passed gas and it had bubbled up in the water next to him. Not in the mood for some humor before he breaks the land speed record I guess. Well the gun went off and 20 or so minutes later I emerged out of the fridged lake looking like an extra from the movie Avatar and wondering where my private parts had dissapeared to. So lessons learned and today I proudly put on my new black wesuit and black swim cap. I shuffled squeeking towards the mirror to take the first look at what I anticipated would be one magnificant athlete. As I stared in the mirror two things where immediately apparent; 1) I was sweating so badly under the inch of neoprene I may have already lost a couple of pounds while having the claustrophobic impulse to claw the suit off me, and 2) I was perfect to audition as a sperm in one of those educational school documentaries about Human Reproduction.
Wish me luck racing this year.....hope I'm the first one to the egg!
(Mark)
