I spent eight mornings from the last two weeks practicing Biatlo at CEPê, the USP club. A light biatlo: generally 500 meters of swimming and 3km running, first on the athletics track, then on the dirt trail surrounding the club.
On the most demanding day it was 25 minutes of each modality, which, in my case, meant 600 meters in the water and 5.4 km of gravel.
As happened in previous years, the evolution in the pool, my very weak point, was daily. If on the first day I could barely finish the first 50 meters of the Olympic pool, tormented by a phobia that sometimes resurfaces after long periods away from the water, at the end already tested the breath in four times in the crawl.
Hence to debut in the intermediate trials of Triathlon, such as the Triaray Series, from the same organizer of Ironman Brazil, Carlos Galvão, would be a natural step.
But these competitions take place in open waters, where there is no support to rest every 50 meters, such as the Olympic pool.
I don’t know if this is a really limiting variable, but it is precisely this need to stop the swim from time to time that makes me see me vying for the trigay or even the Iron medium, where swimming hits 1.9 km.
There is also an Iron medium at USP in September, with the swimming test being practiced in the Olympic Raia. The Treys Series have three different formats, with swimming at distances of 375, 750 and 1,500 meters.
In addition to São Paulo, the environment Iron, or officially 70.3 (the sum of miles traveled in the three modalities), happens in Brasilia, Rio, Florianópolis and Aracaju. The Tripay has two steps in Bertioga, with swimming in the sea, and one in Sorocaba, with the crawl in the lake of Porto das Águas Park.
(I’m giving cheap that my indie bike, limited 21 gears, meet minimally with their obligations if I participate in one of these competitions; who has to park the previous one, stolen in the light of day, in an official paraciclo of Ibirapuera Park?))
It may seem strange that this columnist, who professes a disabled race, totally disconnected from evidence-as he said here, training is proof, and vice versa-who sees in “run” something as valuable as the supposed evolution in race , confess your desires and fears about one or another competitive test.
It is almost impossible not to be seduced by the new and supposedly challenging – in my case, a competition that contemplates swimming.
Now perhaps I begin to understand why so many submit to the marathon fetish, a mere juxtaposition of miles of running, an arbitrary number that is worshiped by some cultural reason that certainly escapes us everyone.
It is not common to run more than two or three hours, and those who do so are generally training for the marathon. At one point in the test, at 35km, 36 km, it enters an unknown territory, as the biggest “long” pregnancy is just it.
But when we face these unpublished challenges, what is at stake is quite something else. In the absence of great moral challenges, which I want to believe that we are increasingly away, there is left for sport, however fetishist, a relatively safe place to face our demons.
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