Triathletes: Wusses or Bad Ass?

Many of the worlds top triathletes look about 150 pounds wet with rocks in their pockets. Often referred to as "tri-geeks," we are some what nerdy...easily excited about the newest gear. The September issue of "Outside" magazine may change a few options...(maybe not but we can hope). In the article "Swim. Bike. Run. Shoot. Kill." The Navy tells of some of it's difficulties in finding the "right" people to achieve the very sot after position of Navy Seal. Captain Duncan Smith, 48, an adventure racer who joined the SEALs in 1985, served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has headed the Recruiting Directorate since its inception. "Navy recruiting complained that 'We send you good guys and you break them,' " Smith says. "And our answer was, 'Well, you're sending us the wrong guys.' " The seal initial screening to become a seal yous go through "BUDS." "BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training), is a notoriously brutal selector, intentionally designed to disabuse the vast majority of its initiates of their SEAL daydreams." "The graduation rate at BUD/S has historically stood at around 26 percent, which, though low, was enough for the SEALs to maintain their 2,300-man force. But then they became, in a way, victims of their own success." "When Smith started looking behind the numbers at BUD/S and discovered that triathletes were graduating at a rate of better than 40 percent." HEY! We might just be a little bit bad ass... "Smith is convinced that the right guys are endurance fiends like triathletes—wiry all-arounders who tend to be focused, good both on land and in the water, and largely indifferent to physical discomfort. Contrary as it may be to our cinematically sculpted notions of them as neckless linebacker types, typical SEALs are around five foot ten and 175 pounds. "Bigger guys are mostly weeded out," an instructor told me at the BUD/S compound on Coronado Island last spring. "Too much body to haul around."" Maybe we are a bit more gnarly than we appear...just in spandex..."the required uniform."