By Pavithra Natarajan
The weather conditions could not have been more perfect had I been able to request them. It’s a clear, sunny fall day, a comfortable 72 degrees. The torrential rain of yesterday afternoon had thankfully stopped before we drove down from Boston.
I am in Nickerson State Park on Cape Cod. It’s beautiful. A harmony of green leaves sparkle in the sunlight. Fallen pine needles underfoot cushion my sage-green trail-running shoes.
I am among a throng of 150 athletes. Many look as if they’re composed of sheer muscle. No one else looks like me. They are white…I am brown. Their muscles are taut…I am soft in the middle. They are mostly young…my youth is creasing into wrinkles around my eyes.
We mill around Area 6 of Nickerson State Park, and I half-listen to the instructions being given by Kathleen, the race director of the Gut Check Adventure Triathlon – “the hardest sprint triathlon in the U.S.,” in their words. Having watched the Athletes’ Instructions video three times over, her words are by now familiar: Participants, racing solo or in teams, are given map showing the nine checkpoints with only a 10-minute warning. We’ll have to swim through multiple lakes, bike and trail run between them — collecting a different coloured wristband at each checkpoint, before racing to the finish line. If you get irrevocably lost. blow your whistle. In the 10 years that they have been holding this event no one has ever blown their whistle. I knew deep down that there is a high chance that I will be the first.
The race officials hand out laminated maps right on cue at 8:50am. I try to plan my route, using skills learned from scout camp when I was 17 — an entire lifetime ago. My brain malfunctions – I have been researching these trails online for weeks now, but suddenly my mind is racing so fast I cannot focus. Luckily, a team of four athletic British guys let me join their huddle while they work out their route. I look at the line that they have drawn and trace it along my map, too.
We are all urged to get over to the start line. I give one last kiss to my 9-year-old daughter, my 2-year-old son, and my husband, who grins and whispers, “What if you win it?!” “Don’t joke!” I scold him. I say a quick prayer that this is not the last time that I see them, and I walk to the start line.
At precisely 9am, the whistle blows and we’re off.
As I run, I repeat my list of priorities like they are a mantra:
1. stay injury-free
2. enjoy myself
3. not get too lost in the woods
4. complete the triathlon
These are my priorities, I remind myself, in that exact order.
I had started racing triathlons in my 20s. I was younger fitter, in that casual way that 20-year-olds can be fit without really trying. My husband, when he met me, was impressed that I raced triathlons. We did an Olympic distance triathlon together, and a
few more after we became married.
But then life got in the way. We had two children. I was perpetually exhausted. I put everyone else’s needs before my own.
A chance encounter last year, sitting in a lecture next to a student in her early 20s, changed things. She told me she had signed up for a triathlon, her first — and it nudged awake something inside me. I signed up to do the London Triathlon in July, then the Boston Triathlon in August, and the next thing I knew I was exercising daily and had bought a Lycra tri-suit.
The Gut Check Adventure Triathlon was to be the last of my tri-triathlon summer, and I knew it would be the hardest. The website, with its warnings about the terrain, had almost dissuaded me from signing up multiple times. Up until two weeks before the race I had never ran trails, but a few hastily organised trail runs near my home in Middlesex Fells — a reservation just north of Boston — had left me feeling slightly prepared.
As I run now, with the race underway, I mull over this journey. Before I even get to Checkpoint 1, I think to myself, “You know what, I’ve already won. I’ve seen this challenge and risen to it. Whatever happens from here is just a bonus.”
The water on the two lake swims feels like slipping into cool silk bedsheets. Conquering the steep hills of the bike ride makes me feel invincible. But it’s the trail running that is truly liberating. I’m simultaneously running, checking the map to make sure I’m going the right way, looking at my feet to make sure I’m not about to trip on tree roots or rocks underfoot, and marveling at the beauty around me. Fragrant evergreens are standing proudly, like benevolent giants, amongst fireworks of red and orange leaves. Caramel coloured pine needles caress my shoes. The sky is luminescent. There’s a good chance it’s the endorphins, but as I run alongside other racers I tell anyone who will listen how magically beautiful this is.
Eventually I became lost — but not too lost, I fall over right before Checkpoint 9, but apart from a cut on my left elbow I
escape injury free. As I approach the finish line, almost three hours after I started, I can see my family gathered; my daughter is jumping up and down, jubilantly cheering, “Amma! Amma! Amma!” She gives me a high five as I pass the finish line.
And I’m done.
The rush of endorphins and emotions is exhilarating. I am elated. I join the throng of athletes gathered listening to the awards ceremony, which is already underway. A woman taps me on my shoulder, “I think they’re calling your name” she says. “Why?!” I ask, in utter confusion. I’m thinking, I went to all the checkpoints, how can they disqualify me, but before I tell her this she says, “You’ve won an award. ”
In a blur, I’m being whisked up to the podium and handed a certificate that says, ‘1st Place Winner’ and having an official photograph taken. “How on earth have I won an award?” I keep asking, in bewilderment, as everyone cheers. I’m told I won first place in my age category – “Solo Women over 40.”
I think back to one of the many women I met this summer of triathlon – a blind runner in her 80s at a London park run event. She was exquisitely wrinkled, and faster than me. “Keep doing this long enough and you’ll start winning awards,” she had winked. Turns out she was right. I laugh the whole way home to Boston. And now, a week later I’m still wearing my rainbow of nine colourful wristbands — given to me at each of those checkpoints — to remind myself it really happened.
Pavithra is an infectious diseases doctor and a writer from the Greater Boston area.
