Week 1: Meet my friends

As I've never competed in an Olympic distance triathlon, I enlisted the help of Coaches Neil and Laura Fraser, who run Tri More Fitness multi-sport coaching and are part of San Francisco's Golden Gate Triathlon Club. I paid about $400 bucks to join the Tri and Give (TAG) program, a 10-week course that includes 3 coached workouts per week, plus weekly detailed workout schedules.
The $400 (which includes my annual Golden Gate Tri Club membership) insures that I will make it to every coached workout. Spending money is amazingly motivating when you're poor.
It also includes instruction in the kind of gear to buy, transitioning, dealing with injury and anything else that might be useful on the day of the big race.
Our finale event is the Treasure Island Triathlon Nov. 9-11, a 1.5 k swim, 40k bike and a 10k bike. This is the link.
There are about 20 of us in the TAG program of varying abilities. For most of us, there's one discipline we excel in, one we are mediocre at and one that keeps us up at night with worry.
For me, the order is swim, bike and oh my god, run.

SWIM/BIKE/RUN in that order
I never knew I could swim pretty fast until I started swimming this year and started timing myself against others. Sure enough, I find swimming fast pretty easy. As far as biking goes, I have more experience with mountain bikes than road bikes. I don't have the endurance part of road biking down yet, but I'm comfortable enough on a bike to feel OK on 20 mile rides. Running is a different story. My heart rate shoots up to about 187 in the first 20 paces of any run and it never looks back. So the funny part about me is I get increasingly slower as a triathlon goes on. How to beat the exponential frustration that creates with each passing minute of the race, will require Coach Neil's help.

RUN/BIKE/SWIM
In the first few workouts I met two friends who have their own anxiety-inducing disciplines. My new friend Kristy, 25, has never done a triathlon before. She, like I, was a rugby player in college. (A flanker, like me, for anyone who follows it). So while we have much in common, that (insert gender-based derogatory name here) is fast. She did her 2-mile test in well below 16 minutes. And she's even faster on the 200m, 400m, 600m, 800m, 600m, 400m, 200m with one-lap recovery laps between exercise we did in our second coached track workout. Kristy, however, calls the swim workouts: 'the drownings.' And that will be her biggest challenge. She plans to try and barter for a wet suite. "Otherwise, I'll just get the $400 one," she says.

SWIM/RUN/BIKE
Our other friend Neva had to sit out the first workout because she didn't even own a bike. Neva's a former field hockey player and matches me pretty well on the run. We both did the timed 2-mile test during our first coached track workout in 18:51. I am glad I have her to run with. Neva just bought a 49" Specialized and found the first 18-mile Paradise loop right pretty challenging.
"I pretty much spent the rest of the day in bed after that reading US Weekly," she said.
Despite her magazine preference and her weekly mani/pedi ritual post Saturday workout, Neva is hard core. During our swim workout last week we all practiced swimming en masse to get used to the scuffle that is triathlon open water swimming. I mentioned to Neva that I liked full contact swimming. "Yeah," she said. "I was dropping 'bows on the brown-haired girl the whole way." See what I mean?


Check reluctant triathlete frequently to follow our progress.