Fewer than two dozen elite professionals are expected to claw it out for the prize money Sunday in the Chicago Sun-Times Triathlon.
So who are those other 4,000 people jumping into Lake Michigan at 7 a.m.? They`re the few, the hardy few, who saw, read, or heard about a triathlon once and said, ”Hey, I want to do that.”
Some will be part of relay teams; others will walk in the competition`s last leg, the 10-kilometer run, because their only goal was to finish.
Some 200 of those competitors are members of the Chicago Triathlon Club, and they`ve been practicing their open-water 1.5K swim, 40K bike ride and 10K run for months. For many, this is the biggest contest of the year.
Several days before the race, club founder Rick Freuh was at the lakefront at 6 a.m. supervising 30-plus swimmers in practice. They`re training for endurance and Freuh is mostly there to shout encouragement and keep them motivated.
When Freuh, a 35-year-old former fitness instructor, started the club five years ago, about 30 persons joined, many of them dedicated runners looking for some variety in their training programs.
”Now we`re finding people are joining who have not been competitive at all,” Freuh said. ”They wanted to get involved in something that would motivate them. They wanted this challenge.”
The club offers some structured training and the chance for the amateur triathletes to alleviate boredom in the solitary sports by working out together. They work inside in the winter, targeting nine summer triathlons within short driving distance when the outdoor season begins.
Triathlon distances have shortened in the last few years, enticing more recreational triathletes who may have been scared off by the perceived impossibility of the Ironman event, with its 112-mile bike ride and marathon run.
”I did an event in the Virgin Islands that was two-thirds of an Ironman and it took me seven hours,” Freuh said. ”After six hours I had to ask myself why I was doing it. I do this for fun, and I couldn`t see exercising for 10 hours and it still being fun for me.
”With the shorter races, people realize you can finish a race in one to two hours and enjoy it.”
Chicago resident Robin Tucker is one triathlon club member who can relate to that. The 36-year-old New Zealander used to dream of being in the Olympics and participated in a half-dozen intramural sports as a boarding-school student in England.
But athletics weren`t much encouraged for women in Europe. It wasn`t until she came to the U.S. six years ago as the American correspondent for Asian Review magazine that Tucker began to fulfill her athletic potential.
To compete takes hard training, she concedes, but she does it to unwind.
”I listen to my body when I train and I don`t overdo it,” she said. ”I try to put as little pressure on myself as possible.”
Not to say the amateurs don`t have goals. Tucker would like to finish in 2:20 (the winning women`s time in 1991 was 1:52.12). And when the pros-Brad Beven, Jeff Devlin, Joy Hansen, Joanne Ritchie, Michellie Jones and the other favorites-push off, Tucker and the others will be taking note.
”You watch the pros and imitate them. You watch their cadence and tempo. ”But you don`t expect to win. I enjoy competing against myself. I try to do the best I can and leave it at that. I try to simplify everything as much as possible.”
For information about the Chicago Triathlon Club, call Rick Freuh at 312-549-1661.
