triathlon training is all about not wearing underwear

So yes, I’m training for a sprint triathlon. Some of you are thinking one of those insane Ironman things like on tv? and although I wish that were the case, no. Not quite. In the race I registered for you swim a 1/2 mile, bike 14 miles, and then run a 5K (3.1 miles). [In an Ironman you swim 2 miles, bike 112 miles, and then run a full marathon (26.2 miles). I would love to train for and do an Ironman, but that is something you work up to, and I think working up to that will take me at least 7 years. When I'm about to turn 50 we'll talk.] My piddly little sprint race is August 2. Feel free to mark it on your calendars.
Last year when I had my little melanoma scare/wake-up call at the beginning of the summer something fundamentally shifted inside me. The shift was pretty immediate, and I’m still feeling the fallout. One of the things that happened was that I decided that if I was going to fight cancer at some point in my life (which feels likely) I wanted to start from the healthiest place I could. I started exercising. Around the same time I went and watched my good friend PrettyDecoratorGirl (aka T.) race in a sprint triathlon. I was enamored. Immediately.
I wanted to race in a triathlon too (because it looked like fun and it sounded hard) but I’ve got the three kids and I was in no shape to even contemplate a race like that. (Although those in the know online say that most people could finish a sprint triathlon with little or no training. I tend to disagree, but perhaps they are right. I suppose if you could swim the half mile without drowning the rest would definitely be downhill.) So I told her I would do it with her in 2010 and I just kept my head down and got on the elliptical machine as much as I could.
As I mentioned K. and I had that little horribly stressful earthshaking economic downturn of our own and one of the results was that beginning this past April K. began to work at home most of the time. K. working at home meant that I had the time to train and after a ridiculous amount of whiny indecision on my part I decided to just train for the darn thing this year even though I didn’t really have enough time to get myself in the kind of shape I wanted to be in when I raced it. And here I am, 8 weeks out, pretty panicked and working out 6 days per week.
Jumping into a new world is always interesting. There is terminology you don’t understand, rules you have no idea even exist, and people who are dedicating their lives to something you didn’t have one single clue about just days ago. Life is so fascinating, isn’t it? It is not easy for me to feel stupid for months at a time, but then again how do you learn something new if you’re not willing to look like an idiotic loser from time to time? In the spirit of the thing I walk more than I run in my tricked out running gear, I’ve almost fallen off my bike more times than I can count, I haven’t even begun swimming yet, and I am such a poser on my expensive bike and wearing the million little exercise gadgets that K. has thoughtfully provided me with. Jumping in also involves reading books, getting on the internets, and of course training.
The training has been interesting. I’ve learned so much already, and it’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Much to my surprise I’ve become one of those people in the goofy bike shorts and funny bike shoes. I’m about to take a swimming class. I already have a bum knee and a sore Achilles tendon. And I’ll let you in on a little secret: triathletes hardly ever wear underwear. Of course there isn’t underwear when you’ve got your bathing suit on. Running shorts these days come with a little panel sewn in so that you don’t have to wear underwear underneath. And although I never realized it you DO NOT WEAR UNDERWEAR with bike shorts. The sweet woman at our local bike shop (‘lbs’ to triathletes) told me three times that you DO NOT WEAR UNDERWEAR UNDER THE BIKE SHORTS when she sold me my very first pair. You see it’s all about chafing and the minimizing of it. Chafing is bad. Get the right gear, use the zillion varieties of sport-specific anti-chafing lube out there, and skip the underwear but whatever you do don’t chafe.
I haven’t chafed yet so I must be doing something right, right?