Lack of Practice Doesn't Slow Locals
By Scott Sandsberry
Yakima Herald-Republic Monday, July 7, 2003
Richard Esparza would be the first to admit he wasn't ready for Sunday's Valley of the Sun.
First
there was the nagging tendinitis in an Achilles tendon, forcing him to
cut back on his training runs.
Then there was the problem with the combination lock on the bicycle that wouldn't open at the starting area at Lake Aspen Office Park and had to be cut off with a hacksaw.
Finally, there was the fact that the1I-kilometer swimming Course at Lake Aspen - which in the past had gone counter-clockwise - was now clockwise, meaning the final 400 meters of the Course wouldn't be near any residential-area docks. "I'd been counting on having all those docks to hold on when I needed to take breaks," admitted Esparza, who had done precious little swimming to prepare.
"He's never swam this far," said his wife, Kathy. "Last weekend he swam a couple of times in the Spokane River. That's about it."
This isn't to say Esparza, 44, the high school principal at Granger, isn't athletic; he is. He ran 29 miles on his 29th birthday. Two years ago, he took his kids Tasha (then 11) and Richard (then 13) to the summit of Mount Adams. When he had been the wrestling coach at Grandview, he'd been on the mat, showing the kids how it was done.
In fact, one of those kids was doing Sunday's triathlon with him. John Graf had broken his arm in his first wrestling match as a Grandview eighth-grader; Esparza, then the high school varsity coach, had sought him out to pass on some comforting words, to say that he, too, had broken his arm in a match and come back from the injury. They've remained friends ever since, and Graf - now 32 is now a wrestling coach himself in Ellensburg.
So when Esparza decided to try the Valley of the Sun, he called Graf to join him.
But neither man was ready for the swim.
"John's done zero swimming," Linda Graf, his wife, said during the swimming stage, in which her husband and Esparza were far back behind the pack "I've been married to him 13 years and I haven't seen him swim a lick in all that time." No lap swimming at all? "He says, 'It's not going to help me now, so I might as well not do it. '"
Nothing much was helping Esparza on the swim. He languished far behind the rest of the individual entrants, including Graf; for that matter, all but four of the relay swimmers (who started 15 minutes later) passed Esparza as well.
Still, he pressed on, backstroking when he had to, grabbing spectator boats for much-needed breathers - though, it should be noted, not ever being pulled along by them - and finishing the 1- K swim in about 40 minutes. And there, waiting on a bicycle, was Graf.
"I'd seen him grab one of the boats," Graf said. "I figured if he was quitting, that was definitely going to have an effect on whether I was going to keep going."
But Esparza wasn't quitting. Nor would Graf let him; he stuck with his old coach the whole way. "He waited for me on the swim, he waited for me on the bike and he waited for me on the run when I was cramping up," Esparza said. "He carried me today, to pay back his old coach for all the times I carried him.
"Oh, I was crying today."
But he was finishing, too, slightly more than three hours and 15 minutes after starting.
Near the finish line, Kathy Esparza got a chuckle out of a triathlete's T-shirt that read: Real Men Marry Athletes. "That's true," she said. "Behind every real man is a strong woman."
"Our husbands aren't real men," laughed Linda Graf. "They're just crazy."
Maybe so. But, after Sunday, they are also calling themselves triathletes.
Source: Yakima Herald-Republic
