How not to do a triathlon

My training regimen for this triathlon is pretty bad. I didn't really start doing swim workouts until last week, (tri is on July 29), and basically, my swim workouts consist of a few laps of an aptly-named-in-my-case "crawl" that is so slow that I am regularly lapped by old ladies weighing 300 pounds and wearing flowered shower caps in order to keep their hair dry (they don't put their heads under water).

My bike workouts consist of a few miles of FLAT roads, and some half-hearted hill attempts at the stationary bike at the gym, the one that says it isn't out-of-order, but which still regularly tells me that my heart rate is either 55 bpm or 300. Extrapolating its accuracy in bpm to its elevation accuracy, i am either climbing the matterhorn or actually coasting pretty smoothly downhill at any given "hill climbing" moment.

And running...well, in my case it is really better described as "jogging", or perhaps "hobbling." In fact, I sometimes have to check to see whether I am actually jumping rope instead of running, because i seem to stay pretty much in the same place for long periods of time. And here I thought running was supposed to move you forward.

Trouble is, I don't look sick, cancer-thin, or out of shape. I look athletic. Thus, it's kinda embarrassing because people expect me to be able to do stuff. I'd much rather look like i'm on my last legs and then blow the competition out of the water, than look like I know what I'm doing and then turn out to be slower than the #1 train on the weekends.


Nonetheless, I am mentally as game as a young racehorse, although I may be physically more like something fossilized and reconstructed for the eddification of paleontologists....