Why do I do triathlons? Stairs.

My goals of running sub-eight minute miles, cycling at a 20-mph average and swimming for an hour all originate from one Seminole moment. One day in the spring of 2005 I jogged up a flight of stairs and was out of breath. And I’m not a big guy (6 feet, 190 lbs).

I was breathing hard, I was disgusted at how little it had taken and I had a new goal. I wanted to be able to jog up a flight of stairs and not be winded. So I started running four or five times a week around my neighborhood or Lake Padden. Twenty minutes, a half-hour, maybe 40 minutes if I was feeling crazy.

But the goal of not being winded when I jog up a flight of stairs got old. It’s not that exciting. And on days when I wasn’t feeling up to running, it was easy to put it off because there was no hard date, or ultimate test of my efforts. So, then I started thinking about races. And I started getting a little bored with just running. I started cycling. This was made a little easier by the fact that the company I work for also owns Softride, a bike company geared toward triathletes. So I got a great bike, pretty affordably. And co-workers told me about a local Triathlon at Lake Padden. So I also started swimming-cycling-running, just to see if I might feel up to racing in a competitive triathlon.

Well, I did it. Last year I participated in two Olympic distance triathlons. Lake Padden and the Baker's Breakfast Cookie International. I would have done a couple more, but I had scheduling conflicts and whatever. I even hunkered down for the last couple of months of 2005 and toughed out my first running marathon in Seattle.

I have plans for more this Summer, at Lake Padden, Tri Without Borders and maybe Lake Stevens, Black Hills or Black Diamond. The Disneyworld one would be awesome.

So now my goals have become to post better times than I did last year. For example, in the Baker’s race, the Bellingham Herald, our local paper, published the top 15 finishers in each age group. I finished 16 out of 23 missing the top 15 by one minute and 23.5 seconds… or so. No newspaper ink for me. This year I want to be in the top 15!

Just so we can keep track, my goal of posting an Olympic-Distance Triathlon time under 2 hours and 40 minutes stems directly from my goal to not be winded after running up a flight of stairs. Make sense?