All I Really Need to Know About Triathlon I Learned From World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft is an online Dungeons & Dragons game. You get sent on quests to slay monsters to gain experience. When you gain enough experience, you go up a level: your character has attrbutes such as "Strength" and "Stamina" which increase with each level. Many of the quests can be done alone ("soloing"), and then there are dungeons which are more challenging and designed specifically to be done with a group. Typically, I will spend several days or a week soloing trying to gain a level, and then on the weekend I may join some friends to do a dungeon. Then I'll go back to soloing again, go up a level, then do a higher-level dungeon the next week. And so on.

Today we were supposed to do an 84-mile bike ride. (3 laps of 28 miles.) The last time I was on the bike was our previous long ride 2 weeks ago. I did the first lap today and I was done. I wasn't really sore, or sick, there was just absolutely nothing in the tank. I also had a bad run last week while out with the Axis of Evil. The problem is that I've been doing tough bike rides on Saturdays, then I think I deserve a couple days off, then I do a tough run on Wednesday, deserve a couple days off... you get the idea. Today I realized that I've been doing all the dungeons but haven't done any soloing.

Some of the people I'm going with are Level 70.3; others are already Level 140.6. Me, I'm only a Level 26.2. The dungeons are too high-level for me, and without soloing I can't keep up. So I'm going to go out on my own a bit, do some quests to increase my Strength and Stamina. Then I will be able to survive the dungeons.