Join the club (or don't)

Saturday was my second appearance in the Limmer Wasserstadt (water city) triathlon.  I wrote about it last year too, in a post called Neoprene and the Random Channel. This year the water was warmer, the skies were sunnier, I was one year older, I wore the Wonder Woman head band... and I finished with almost exactly the same time. I guess that's good, considering I only signed up 2 weeks ago and I can still run a 5k far faster than I did in high school.

This race, like most sporting events in Germany, was dominated by clubs, or Vereins. Germans like to belong - there are 87,000 official sports clubs in Germany. Each club offers a variety of sports for different ages, from tiny kid swimming up to professional soccer. Each club offers several programs - for yoga and horseback riding and rowing and fencing. There's even a club for American football.  Instead of playing sports on a school team, kids join a club. And they can stay in that club their entire lives.

Club sports are the main reason why the international school doesn't have any great sports teams. Any remotely athletic kid joins a club, and might also show up at school team's once-a-week practice for social reasons. If the international school's sports teams want to survive, their only hope is to work around club practices and/or attract the kids who don't speak enough German to want to join a club. This is something I'll be dealing with next school year, since a good friend of ours is now the after-school activities guru. I'll be coaching a sort of year-round cross country and track program. I did that during our first year here, too. Then I had some issues with working for the previous guru. That's another story, though. Back to sport vereins...

Some clubs offer triathlon teams too. I've thought about joining. I even went to a swim practice once. But for whatever reason I haven't brought myself to sign up. I have many excuses - good ones, even. It could be because I don't want to have a racing outfit with my name printed across the butt. It could be that I don't want to go to swim practice at 9:30pm on a Tuesday, and pay a fee to do it. Or maybe it's that I find triathlon men generally nerdy and annoying. I know I could benefit from some coaching, but maybe I'm not serious enough about it to be coached. Maybe it's silly to be so serious about a sport that is just a hobby, a way to stay in shape and have a competitive outlet.


In Limmer on Saturday, there were plenty of competitors - in all sorts of shapes - with names printed across the butts of their lycra outfits. My no-name butt got kicked by a few of them, but it blew past a lot of them too.