I love watching inspirational videos, especially those about sports. It creates an amazing feeling you’re so close to your goal, so close to make dreams come true. People tend to argue with me that those videos are useless, supposedly it creates wrong vision everything is possible. Yes and no. I remember me watching IronMan motivational video from Hawaii championship with outstanding soundtrack – Coming back to life by Pink Floyd. I’ve always admired people who have courage to move forward. I watched it so many times that when I heard Pink Floyd Coming back to life I thought about that video. I’ve never forget that extra motivation kick during marathon preparation, when I heard Coming back to life in my earphones. Sub consciousness was telling me it’s only one-third of iron man, that’s easy.
Beginnings
Finishing full marathon under 4 hours boosted my self-confidence so much, I signed up for my very first triathlon. Trakai triathlon seemed to be perfect fit for me because it was located in a beautiful historic city (if in Lithuania you should definitely check it out) and close to my residence place - Vilnius. As you may know, triathlon consists of three different continuous and sequential disciplines: swimming, cycling and running. Only three disciplines and two problems at the start of preparation: I could barely swim 100 meters and I didn’t have a road bike. I started to train swimming with trainer to learn good technique from beginning, to swim right front crawl. Later I trained on my own, in the pool and in open waters, I drunk liters of water. Week by week I swam further and further. Standard beginner’s triathletes swimming program from 0 to 1650 helped me very much. Before that I could finish this whole distance by mixing strokes, but I wanted to do it completely crawl. The day I managed to finish all 1650 I felt like the toughest guy in the swimming pool that day. You get out of a swimming pool, take a look at tracks and slowly (but confidently) head towards Jacuzzi to make yourself comfortable like a boss. My second problem, much smaller was solved quite easy. I bought Fuji road bike. Nice bike for beginners, pretty big difference between the new one and my old “classic mountain” bike. My goal for this very first triathlon was to get out of water safely and by my own. Cycling and running are simple. At least you will not drown if you collapse. I managed to fulfill all expectation and I finished my first Olympic Triathlon in 3:14. As my girlfriend stated, now I can call myself a marathoner and a triathlete.
Tips
I want to share with you some tips and ideas to give you better results with your first triathlon
- Sign up for an event. Having a bigger goal, waiting for you somewhere at the horizon, always helps, gives extra motivation.
- Keep to your schedule
- Buy a proper swimming googles. There’s nothing worse than googles full of water. It stresses, annoys and feels terrible! It’s possible to survive under water since you can still see plants and fishes but orienteering and track keeping is impossible.
- Don’t wait till everyone is ahead of you! As a very beginner I started at the end. Apparently, there were slower swimmers than me and overtaking appeared to be very difficult.