I was convinced, for my first five minutes of my first pool workout with the triathlon team, that I was a pretty decent swimmer. Despite my raspy throat, burning chest, and aching shoulders, I was actually able to keep pace with my teammates. At the end of our first set, I stood up in the shallows and turned to Emily to ask her how to perform the specified drills. She replied that we were supposed to first perform catch-up at a moderate pace after our “easy” warmup, and launched into the drill in a strong, confident stroke. As I watched Emily, and the rest of the Tri Team glide across the pool with effortless technique, I bit my lip to keep from crying. It seemed that swimming, like everything else here at Dartmouth, would be a learning curve that started at level zero.
I first heard about the Dartmouth Triathlon Team before I ever stepped foot on campus. While surfing the internet in search of activities to join once I arrived on campus, I stumbled across Tri Team’s webpage quite by accident. In spite of a team cover photo filled with happy smiles, funny blog posts, and well-organized calendar, I didn’t spend more than a few minutes scanning the website. Competitive athletics, I had decided, were a part of my past. It was time for me to close the yearbook and focus on the academic pursuits that I believed were the key to success in life beyond Dartmouth. I was convinced that coming to a new place like Dartmouth meant I had to be a new person and throw away my childhood in favor of the adulthood I hoped to find here.
Two weeks into term, my wish for a “new life” had been granted. Classes were new. Friends were new. The food, my room, professors, my schedule— there wasn’t one part of my life that was exactly how I remembered it back home. Overwhelmed, I began longing for the familiar cadence of a long run and the joy of having time set aside each day to focus on life outside of academics. Cranky from sitting in the Stacks for hours on end, I began to reevaluate my decision to throw my passion for athletics away.
On the heels of this realization, I remembered the smiling faces in the Tri Team photo I had seen back in December. I decided to begin showing up to practices, hoping that I could one day count myself among them. Yet standing at the end of my lane during that first swim practice, easily one of the slowest swimmers on the team, I began to wonder if I had made a mistake. I didn’t look, or feel, like those excited, athletic people that I remembered from Tri Team’s website.
“Try breathing more frequently, and don’t turn your head so far out of the water.” Glancing up, I looked over my shoulder to see Coach Jeff standing on the pool deck. As I focused on my technique, I felt a newfound steadiness in my stroke, and felt the dejected tension in my stomach begin to ease. When my lane-mates returned, we began the next set together; encouragement flowing through the group. By the end of practice, I wasn’t ready to join the Olympic swim team— but I wasn’t ready to give up either.
Swimming, Biking, Running. Each sport is difficult on its own merit, and as triathletes, we put them altogether to create a sport that is the ultimate test of athleticism, spirit, and above all, grit. Many of us on Tri Team came to Dartmouth with backgrounds in a wide range of sports and bring our own personal strengths and weaknesses to triathlon. For some of us, that may mean starting at level “zero” in at least one element of triathlon. Yet, my first day of swimming with Tri Team taught me that our first steps into the sport do not represent our limitations, but our launch pads. They propel us into improvements that reach as far as our hard work and tenacity will take us.
Most importantly, though, our journeys into triathlon represent a path that we walk with our teammates. Our shared experience as students at one of the most rigorous universities in the country, coupled with our demanding training, has created a community in which each person genuinely values the contribution of everyone’s personal best— because we all understand what it means to challenge your own limits every day. My love of athletics may have brought me to triathlon, but this accepting and hard-working community has been the part of my experience on the team that convinced me to stay. It has been such a blessing to get to know all of the amazing people on triathlon team over the course of the past seven weeks, and I can’t wait for all of our adventures together over the course of the next four years.
SBR,
Maya
About the Author
Maya is a ’22 from Minnesota. She loves running to Norwich with the team on Mondays, strawberry-banana smoothies from Collis, apple-brie sandwiches from Novack, Nordic skiing, and having outdoor adventures of any kind.
