see where I’m going as I swim. So what in the world is happening? Then it hits me. After I rubbed my
skin with Vaseline I didn’t wash my hands, so I wiped the goggles with oily fingers. What an asinine
thing to do! At the start line I always wipe my goggles with saliva, which keeps the inside from
fogging up. And this time I had to go and forget to do that.
During the whole 1,500-meter swim my foggy goggles bothered me. I was constantly off course,
swimming in the wrong direction, and wasted a lot of time. Sometimes I had to stop, remove my
goggles, tread water, and figure out where I should go. Imagine a blindfolded child trying to hit a
piñata, and you get the idea.
If I’d thought about it, I could have swum without my goggles. I should have just taken them off.
When I was swimming, however, I was kind of confused and didn’t have the presence of mind to
figure that out. Thanks to this, the swimming part of the race was pretty disorderly, and my time
wasn’t nearly as good as what I’d been hoping for. In terms of my ability—remember how hard I’d
trained for this—I should have been able to swim much faster. I consoled myself with the thought that
at least I wasn’t disqualified, didn’t get left behind that much, and was able to finish the swim. And
whenever I managed to swim in a straight line, I did a decent job of it, I think.
I got up on the beach and made straight for where the bikes were parked (which seems easy but
actually isn’t), peeled off my snug wetsuit, tugged on my bike shoes and helmet and wraparound
sunglasses, gulped down some water, and, finally, headed out onto the road. I was able to do all that so
mechanically that by the time I was thinking again, I realized I’d been splashing around in the water
until just a minute before and now was whizzing by at twenty miles an hour on a bike. No matter how
many times I experience this, the sudden transition feels odd. It’s a different feeling of weight, speed,
and motor reflexes, and you use completely different muscles. You feel like a salamander that’s
evolved overnight into an ostrich. My brain wasn’t able to make the switch very quickly, and neither
could my body. I couldn’t keep the pace up, and before I knew it seven other racers had passed me.
This isn’t good, I thought, and up to the turning point I didn’t pass anyone.
The bike segment follows a well-known stretch of seacoast called Sasagawa Nagare. It’s a very
scenic spot, with unusual rock formations jutting out of the water, though of course I didn’t have the
time to enjoy the scenery. We raced from Murakami City northward along the sea, with the turn near
the border with Yamagata Prefecture that would send us back along the same road. There were slopes
in several places, but nothing steep enough to make me blank out. Before reaching the turn, I didn’t
worry about passing others or being passed, but focused instead on pedaling at a steady pace, using an
easy gear. At regular intervals I’d reach down for my water bottle and grab a quick drink. As I did all
this I gradually started to feel comfortable on the bike again. Feeling I could handle it now, when we
reached the turn I downshifted, sped up, and in the second half of the race passed seven people. The
wind wasn’t blowing hard, so I could pedal for all I was worth. When the wind’s strong, amateur
bicyclists like me get pretty dejected. Making the wind work for you takes years of experience and a
great deal of skill. When there’s no wind, though, it all comes down to a question of leg strength. I
wound up finishing the 24.8 miles at a faster clip than I’d expected, then tugged on my good old
running shoes for the final leg of the race.
When I switched to running, though, things got pretty rough. Normally I would have held back a
little in the bike portion to save up energy for the run, but this time, for whatever reason, it just didn’t