LOUDONVILLE — I finished a race on Sept. 9, and, for a brief moment, experienced the elation of being in the lead. Happiness, however, is fleeting — especially when your legs and body cannot physically keep up.
I can see how being in the lead of a race is motivating, though. The urge to maintain the lead is strong. But urgency cannot be the only force at work. Preparation through training is what sets apart the podium finishers with the mere finishers.
Anyway.
It was the Mohican Triathlon, organized by Ryan O’Dell’s Ohio Mountain Bike Championship series. It’s a reintroduction of sorts to the early days when triathlons were popular around here. Back when Shannon Kurek put on races at Pleasant Hill Lake and people doing the swimming portion had to be rescued. Oh, the good ole days. Back when race directors didn’t have to worry about their snowflake participants filing lawsuits or — worse! — leaving a bad review.
The Mohican Triathlon, with its kayaking, mountain biking and running, shouldn’t be called a triathlon. That’s at least coming from a friend, who, albeit, didn’t know the first-ever recorded triathlon in Paris involved canoes. (And, really, the name is adequate.)
It is, I concede, an odd event. At least around here. Elsewhere, a quick Google search revealed, these types of events are common. There’s the Lost Loon Triathlon in Tennessee, Morgan’s Little Miami Triathlon, the Chippewa Triathlon in Minnesota, the West Penn Trail Triathlon … the list goes on.
But the event’s strangeness, and, thus, appeal, isn’t its novelty. It’s the distances. Six miles of kayaking; 5.6 miles of mountain biking; 6.6 miles of trail running. As a mountain biker, my initial thought was “hm. Interesting. The least amount of miles is during the cycling portion of the race.”
Nearly all other triathlons feature…
Local and state officials cut the ribbon on the Mohican Trail in Williamstown on Thursday morning.
One of the new signs marks the trail head near the corner of Syndicate Road and North Street (U.S. Route 7).
The Western New England Greenway gave Williamstown two signs to designate its new multimodal trail as part of a network advocates envision from Canada to Connecticut.
