Mr. Tennessee Williams' FTP is unknown. He certainly didn't give any hints to it in The Glass Menagerie or in A Streetcar Named Desire. Blanche DuBois was uncharacteristically taciturn on the matter. In this undated photo of the famed playwright you immediately notice a comfortable, upright position, a voluminous, retro Bento box, an aero haircut and glasses for all occasions.
So it is the off-season and I'm plowing through some literature (The Picture of Dorian Gray by Wilde), some junk food reading (Insomnia by Stephen King) and a sobering treatise on running by a man named Jack Daniels. As I walked the flea-bag around a chilled Boughton Park I wondered what literary characters might be like as triathletes.
In the Clydesdale division my money is on Frankenstein's monster but only if he can hold up on the run and get an aero helmet that fits his square head and has cut-outs for his neck bolts. Does Newton make a boot with a lift? Did Mary Shelley have the back end of an Iron-distance race in mind when she wrote, "But I am a blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul; and I felt then that I should survive to exhibit what I shall soon cease to be--a miserable spectacle of wrecked humanity, pitiable to others and intolerable to myself." Ms. Shelley we have all been there.
Ol' F. Scott created a beauty in Jay Gatsby didn't he? Think of all the solitary training time, time away from that god-awful Daisy. Of course the millionaire would be on some custom tri-bike made of unobtanium, he'd have an SRM, Sidis, Rudy Projects, etc. He cheated his way to his millions though so I'm guessing you'd see him cutting the swim course, drafting on the bike and pulling a Rosie Ruiz on the marathon.
The main character in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment is Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov. Spectator might have a tough time reading his last name off of his bib and shouting personal encouragement while on the run. The run would be his strength though as poverty and guilt have robbed him of his appetite and he has the lean body of a sub-three marathoner. Dostoevsky has suffered in his writing as many an Iron-head has, "“He longed to run away from the place as fast as possible. And if at that moment he had been capable of seeing and reasoning more correctly, if he had been able to realize all the difficulties of his position, the hopelessness, the hideousness and the absurdity of it, if he could have understood how many obstacles, and, perhaps, crimes he had still to overcome or to commit, to get out of that place and to make his way home, it is very possible that he would have flung up everything, and would have gone to give himself up, and not from fear, but from simple horror and loathing of what he had done.” Sounds like Fyodor completed Ironman Siberia.
Papa Hemingway didn't have many characters that weren't alcoholics. Seven in the morning start times are tough when you are rolling into your hotel room at five all silly on the grappa. The inevitable DNS's should be ignored as they would have the best parties after the race.
I'm off for a mountain bike ride later in Dryer Park and hope to avoid any Ethan Frome incidents.
