the crawl very well. I got into the water, got ready to swim, and suddenly had trouble breathing. I’d lift
my head to breathe, same as always, but the timing was off. And when I’m not breathing right, fear takes
over and my muscles tense up. My chest starts pounding, and my arms and legs won’t move the way I
want them to. I get scared to put my face in the water and start to panic.
In the Tinman competition, the swimming portion is shorter than usual, at only half a mile, so I was
able to give up on the crawl and switch to the breaststroke. But in a regular 1,500-meter race you can’t
get by swimming the breaststroke. It’s slower than the crawl, and at the end your legs are exhausted.
So in the Murakami Triathlon in 2000 the only thing left for me was to tearfully be disqualified.
I got out and went up on shore, but felt so mad at myself that I got back in the water and tried
swimming the course over again. The other participants had long since finished the swimming portion
and had set off on their bikes, so I was swimming all alone. And this time I was able to do the crawl
with no problem. I could breathe easily and move my body smoothly. So why couldn’t I swim like this
during the race?
At the first triathlon I’d ever participated in there was a floating start, where all the participants
lined up in the water. As we were waiting, the person next to me kicked me hard in the side several
times. It’s a competition, so it’s to be expected—everybody’s trying to get ahead of others and take
the shortest route. Getting hit in the elbow while you’re swimming, getting kicked, swallowing water,
having your goggles fall off—it’s all par for the course. But for me, getting kicked hard like that in
my first race was a shock, and that may have thrown my swimming off. Perhaps subconsciously that
memory was coming back to me every time I started a race. I don’t want to think that way, but the
mental side of a race is critical, so it’s very possible.
Another problem was that there was something wrong with the way I was swimming. My crawl was self-
taught, and I’ve never had a coach. I could swim as long as I cared to, but nobody would ever have
said I have an economical or beautiful form. Basically it was the kind of swimming where I just gave it
all I had. For a long time I’d been thinking that if I was going to get serious about triathlons I’d have to do
something to improve my swimming. Along with searching for what went wrong on the mental side, I
figured it wouldn’t be a bad idea to work on my form. If I could improve the technical side of my
swimming, other issues might come into sharper focus as well.
So I put my triathlon challenge on hold for four years. During that time I kept up my usual long-
distance running and ran in one marathon per year. But somehow I just wasn’t happy. My failure in
the triathlon accounted for part of this. Some day, I thought, I’m going to get revenge. When it comes
to things like this, I’m pretty tenacious. If there’s something I can’t do but want to, I won’t relax until
I’m able to do it.
I hired a few swimming coaches to help me improve my form, but none of them were what I was
looking for. Lots of people know how to swim, but those who can efficiently teach how to swim are
few and far between. That’s the feeling I get. It’s difficult to teach how to write novels (at least I know
I couldn’t), but teaching swimming is just as hard. And this isn’t just confined to swimming and