If there’s one thing I’ve discovered in the last two and a half years of triathlon training, its this: You never know everything about your sport. Being a complete newbie to not only triathlon, but any sort of endurance sports training when I started, I asked a lot of questions and have done a lot of watching. You see some smart stuff and some practices I’m pretty sure I’ll never adopt.

Learning keeps me from growing stagnant in both sport and life. When you find yourself a widower, its mighty tempting to just pull everything close and quit moving forward in life. It feels like moving forward will bring further separation from your wife. She won’t be there to experience this new aspect of your life. Its weird. It hurts. Its scary. Its no wonder we shy away from forward momentum with all those negative connotations tied to it. But when we stop moving, we get stuck in an inward focused grief-spiral.

Training was an exception to the forward movement paralysis though. It seemed like an accessory to my life, not my main life, and it was an accessory I was OK with exploring. As I moved deeper into training for triathlon, I found I was learning and life was indeed moving forward and I was learning to be OK with it. Training moved me past the fear of new experiences without Kristi to share them. Training opened the door to a new life.