Swim, Ride, Run, Breathe: How I Lost a Triathlon and Caught My Breath

By Jennifer Garrison Brownell

One winter, Jennifer Garrison Brownell, a mid-life pastor, wife of a seriously disabled man, and dedicated non-athlete, decided almost on a whim to train for and run a sprint triathlon. In the process, she was surprised to discover that her spirit was as transformed as her body. With humor and without sentimentality, Brownell keeps breathing as she reflects on marriage and swim goggles; motherhood and bicycle repair; disabilities and running shoes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pilgrim Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483557755

Book preview

part one

SWIM

A triathlon starts in the water. Sometimes it’s open water—a lake, a river, or an ocean. This triathlon, the 2012 McMinnville, Oregon Parks and Rec Department Sprint Triathlon, starts in a pool. Or maybe it starts before the pool, in the car, with Justin Bieber on the headphones and the green dawn of May in western Oregon zipping past. Or maybe it begins the night before with lists of things not to forget to pack (towel, Luna bar, helmet …) and then packing the things from the list and then unpacking to make sure I have everything and then repacking it again. Or maybe it begins all those months before when Dennis at church said to me, almost in passing, It’s one of the most important things in life to set a goal and then to complete it.

I thought about that and wondered if, officially in my mid-forties, it was too late to actually set a goal for the first time.

OK, you may be thinking, obviously, you’ve set and met other goals at some point in the last four decades.

It’s true if you look at my life on the outside. I don’t look like much of a drifter. I attended college. Twice. I got married, became a pastor, had a kid, moved to the suburbs. But the truth was, I felt always like I moved without much thought into the next thing that showed up. I felt lucky that somehow things just seemed to work out, mostly, but I did not expect that luck to last.

During that year in college when I drank too much more than a few times just to see what it was like, some boys found me late one night leaning woozily against the wall of some bar.

Come on, honey, they cajoled, we’ll walk you home.

I thought I recognized one of the guys from a class and the idea seemed as good as any other. I squinted up at the boys, reached out a hand toward the voice and felt someone pull me, wobbly, to my feet. It seemed very hard to see any of their faces clearly, so I looked at their shirts instead, trying to make the wide stripes of white and green come into focus. At that moment, my boyfriend’s roommate came out of the bar.

She’s with me. I’ll walk her home. His earnest Cameroonian accent sounded more beautiful than ever. He firmly took my hand and walked faster than I could really keep up into the cool night, the stars spinning close overhead.

Later I found out that the boys in the green and white shirts were members of a rugby team who had been accused of raping another student. I thanked my escort by throwing up on his shoes on the way home and crying that he was my one true friend.

I didn’t drink much after that, but you don’t need alcohol to become an addict. I got addicted to drifting. I waited around for someone to come along to suggest a course of action. As long as I didn’t get a better offer, I just went along with whatever was suggested.

But no one would have suggested a triathlon to me, for me. Because no one, starting most especially with myself, would have seen me as the kind of person who would do a thing like that.

Until today. I have set a goal, my own goal. I have trained for this day and prepared. I have not slept all night to make sure I would be awake when the alarm goes off at five. And now, here I am, not just at, but in a sprint triathlon.

I’m in the second pool at the second rec center, which is really, let’s face it, the baby pool. I’m sitting on the edge next to two other people who have similar estimated swim times as I do. I assume we are the slow lane, although a few lanes over are two little girls, maybe ten or eleven years old. Surely they must be slower than us, I think with relief.

I’m surprised by how friendly and chatty my lane-mates—an incredibly tall guy a little older than me, and a woman my age named Jennifer, naturally—are. (For those of you who are not one of the million and half or so Jennifers born in the late 1960s and early 1970s, suffice to say there are a lot of us. A lot.) The tall guy tells me his name, too. It’s not Jennifer, and I instantly forget it. We agree that the first triathlon sure is nerve wracking, decide I will go first, and then run out of things of say.

We sit around.

We grin sheepishly at each other and fidget.

It seems like the race will never start and I wonder why I arrived early.

See, this is why it’s a good idea to be late for things, because then you don’t have to wait for stuff to start, the most unhelpful voice in my head comments.

This part probably lasts for a minute and a half, but it feels like a lot longer. At last, a guy with a clipboard and a whistle comes by. Nothing in life has prepared me for helpful kindness from any individual carrying either a clipboard or a whistle and certainly not both, so I do what I do when I am nervous. I start talking.

This pool, it’s so small! I’ve been swimming in a much bigger one and I have to keep track of my laps. How will I know when I’m done? I really have to keep track of my laps in order to … I go on like this for a minute or two.

My nervousness about Clipboard Dude was needless, it turns out. He waits for me to run out of steam and then taps the clipboard with confidence but with none of the aggression I expect.

Don’t worry, I mark down all the laps right here. I’ll be counting all your laps and keeping track. Now, if you’re going first, you should start in the water. I’ll blow the whistle for you to go and then fifteen seconds later, I’ll blow the whistle again and the next person will go, OK? His smile is reassuring.

My husband, Jeff, and (as of today! It’s his birthday!) ten-year-old son, Elijah, wave from the end of the lane.

I probably wave back, but I’m distracted by my brightly colored earplugs as I slide into the water. I fiddle with them, put them in my ears, worry I won’t be able to hear the signal when it comes and take them out again. I’m more than a little hard of hearing. Whistles, especially high ones, are often out of my hearing