I’ve never been the strongest swimmer. Growing up in a Maine fishing village right on the coast, I never really swam. The water was too damn cold for me to ever get comfortable in it.
When I got older, my family moved to Florida for a while. I did spend more time in the water there, but I never really treated swimming as a fitness pursuit the way I did with running. I never went out for the team. Mostly, I just played and splashed around. I was comfortable treading water, but I never got the knack for high-level swimming. I have a strange sinus setup where if I flip over on my back underwater, my entire head floods with water. It’s very uncomfortable and turned me off from getting serious.
After my marathon career, I discovered triathlon. The way I saw it, triathlon spread the load: I couldn't run as many miles because I had to cycle and swim. It was a huge undertaking for me—not just getting over the feeling of being lazy because I wasn’t running 100+ miles every week, but the burden of doing something I wasn’t very good at.
Swimming was torture. Every once in a while, I would get the sinus thing, which is incredibly uncomfortable, and sometimes I would mistime my strokes and breaths and take a lungful of water. One time as a kid out in the cold waters, I had a scare, and it really threw me off for a long time. Fear of breathing in water and drowning has never really left. That’s the funny thing about early childhood memories that you don’t even consciously remember anymore—they can still stick in your gut and lodge themselves deep in your instinctive lizard brain.
In other words, I had a lot to get over.
Though I wasn’t great at swimming, I was a great runner—that was my bread and butter. Cycling was fairly new as an endurance fitness pursuit, but it came naturally to me. I was good at withstanding discomfort, had strong legs, and a big engine. I had two out of three down. I knew I could be good enough to measure up against other triathletes.
At the February 1982 Hawaii Ironman, I was the slowest swimmer of all the finalists—and not just by a little. I was the slowest by a lot. But because I had trained enough to no longer be a novice, and because I had become competent, that was enough to help me survive and lean on the events where I excelled. I placed 4th overall.
It turns out that two out of three can be enough. Do you have any examples like this in your life? Is 2 out of 3 enough for you? Tell me on Instagram or Facebook. 
