Dirk Elsperman, Chief Operating Officer -- I’ve been entering triathlons for about 10 years now. Why? My first response is that having an event on the calendar is a motivator to get out of bed every morning, then on the road, or into the gym or pool. However, looking a little deeper and asking the question again, I’d have to say the real answer is “fear.”
I’m sure that if you went back in time, fear has been the major motivator for all of our initial athletic accomplishments. Whether the fear of being eaten or the fear of not having something to eat, once humans got onto two feet, they’ve been looking for ways to be faster.
Although I have seen sharks in the water while swimming (a tangible motivator to swim faster), I generally feel safe from predatory harm while out on a course. And while I do like to paint a mental target on the back of the athlete ahead of me, I’m not chasing after him with a knife and fork. For me, fear has moved away from the basic animal instincts and manifests itself in my more pedestrian life: fear of slowing down mentally and physically (I’m planning on at least a hundred years), fear of putting on weight and creating more back problems, fear of not being able to complete a race within my personal goals, and fear of that little old man zooming past me on his bike like the California Raisins singing Ike & Tina Turner’s fast version of “Proud Mary” while I’m riding at the CCR pace.
So fear is what gets me training. But what makes it interesting? Once you’ve counted all the tiles for the millionth time, what else is there to do besides think? That’s when construction parallels entered my race regimen. I started thinking about how triathlons are much like construction.
First, they both are COMPETITIONS. While fear is definitely a motivator in construction, that’s not what we’re all about at Tarlton, so we replace the concept of fear with the spirit of competition. Through competition, we do better than if we were isolated. Remember the caveman: He didn’t need to outrun the saber-tooth tiger; he just needed to outrun the guy running next to him.