Mom was not athletic or even particularly competitive--she loved to dance and sing, but team sports or exercise as competition was never part of her neccessary makeup. It's not part of mine, either--like Mom, I am not physically brave. I am afraid of heights, and when I started riding my entry-level, flat-bar road bike, I was terrified of the cars, and the turns, and of braking. When I got over some of that, I was terrified of clipless pedals--the idea that I couldn't just put my feet on the ground to stop seemed profoundly impossible. And yet I had been training for the Naylor's Beach Aquabike event (a triathlon minus the running) for several months by the time Mom passed away. During one of the ten or so conversations that Allison and I had that night, I told her I'd skip the race to come be with her and Grandmother. "Don't," she said. "Go, and run it in Mom's honor." "But isn't there a lot to do?" I asked her. Don't you need me to be there and help?"
"Set a personal best," Allison answered. I pointed that out that since this was my first triathlon ever, I could hardly fail to achieve that. Turned out to be a very good thing.
I swam in a wetsuit for the first time the day of the race, and was shocked by the difficulty of moving through the water in it. Swimming is my strong point in this event, if there is one--Mom had me and Allison on the Baton Rouge Piedmont swim team as soon as we could float. That day, though, the current pushed me back, and the buoyancy and constriction of the rented wetsuit made me feel as if I were paddling from the top of an inner tube--with Ace bandages wrapped around my arms and legs. I slowed down and kept swimming.
The bike leg would be such a relief, I told myself all the way through the Rappahannock River; and it was, until I heard that awful sound for any cyclist, ever--the sudden hiss that means you've had a puncture. I had flatted out after only a couple of miles. John, a roadside assistant, tried valiantly to change it, and finally succeeded-and then, before I could even put away the tools, we heard the same sound again. Something was wrong with my bike, and it was not going to get fixed today.
While John radioed the support vehicle, I stood on the side of the road and cried.
"There'll be other races," John told me.
"I could be with my family right now," I answered. "My mom died two days ago, and I could have gone to Arkansas and Baton Rouge with them, but they said stay and do this in her name. And now I have to tell them I didn't finish." John stopped talking and gave me a hug. "It will be okay," he said. I thought of the post I'd put up on Facebook the day before: "I'm still doing the Aquabike--in my Mom's memory," and of my sister, telling when I wavered a few days before the race, "You're doing the right thing." I cried some more.
And then I looked up and saw my husband coming towards us, running his last leg of the event. My heavy heart lifted a little, just because it was him. Greg got to us just as the support truck pulled up; I explained.
"A bike's a bike," he said, in his matter-of-fact, Scottishly practical way. "Ride mine. Can she do that?" he asked John, who walkie-talkied the request back to some kind of tri headquarters, got it approved, and joyfully delivered me to Greg's bike. Can I do this? I asked myself, as John lowered the bike seat, and I mounted the super-light racing Felt, with true clipless pedals (mine were commuters--pedals that allow you to unclip and ride like a sane person) and aerobars, and brakes that I had to reach out and down to and close with two fingers.
Did I mention that I'm not a risk-taker?
I thought of Mom, and clipped in and rode. It was wonderful. As I passed each turn, hearing the still-enthusiastic cheers of the race volunteers, I could not stop smiling. I finished the twenty-six-mile course on Greg's killer racing machine, and I would never have tried it if I hadn't promised Mom that I would.