Thomas Paine: Triathlete
This blog started out life as The Year of the Cow, so named because it was the chronicle of my year training for Ironman Wisconsin, aka IM Moo. It was my first Ironman and as you might expect it was a helluva journey; you can read all about it in the older posts on this site.
But it wasn’t the end of the journey. Ironman was not simply an item to cross off my bucket list. Training for and competing in multisport events has become a core component of who I am (and the period of relative inactivity since that event has underscored how important the training became to maintaining a sense of rhythm and focus in my life). There will be more races. There will undoubtedly be more Ironman events. That means, in essence, that there will be more suffering, exhilaration, and general craziness to write about.
What is the significance of the new title for the blog? I’ve always found the homophonic similarity of tri and try intriguing. But I’m more interested in an alternative meaning of try, one that used to be common but is now rare: try not as “attempt” but as “test, evaluate.” This is the way in which old Tom Paine was using the word, in the famous phrase I’ve appropriated for the tag-line of this blog. He used the word in the sense of a stress-test, to see what you were really made of, to separate the true metal from the dross.
So, Alchemy. Because, at least in my case, multisport is about trying to take base materials (extremely base materials) and transform them into something that, just for a moment, looks like gold. Alchemy also in the sense that multisport involves bizarre attempts to fuse often incompatible compounds–human and bike, human and water, human and Recoverite–to see what results. Alchemy finally because as the past year in particular has told me, the multisport crucible is also about the bonds–complex, often unpredictable–you form with other people.
Ye olde alchemists tend to have a bad reputation in our oh-so-rational age, on the same page as sorcerers, conspiracy theorists, and Tea Party activists. Yet many of them were motivated by a belief that the world was more than it appeared on the surface and were doing their best to test the world and their relation to it with whatever means they had at hand.
So, my friends, let us light the forge and see what we’re made of.
