Activating Scott Tinley

Tinley door
Originally uploaded by jjactive2.

Triathlon legend Scott Tinley recently talked to me for a Q+A session that's going to appear in the inaugural issue of SwimBikeRun St. Louis Magazine. in October. As you might imagine, Scott was laid back, gracious, and interesting in reflecting on his career and talking about his new loves: teaching and writing.

Excerpts of that interview will appear on Activeness over the next couple of weeks. To read the whole thing, get the magazine.

TINLEY Q+A, PART I

When I reached Scott Tinley in his office on a Monday morning in September, he had just returned from a weekend surfing trip that led him 200 miles up the Southern California coast from his home in Del Mar to search for waves in a spot north of Santa Barbara.

"Surfing is my gig," says Tinley, a seventh-generation Californian who won nearly 100 triathlons over his 25-year pro career. "My father surfed. I’ve been doing it since I was a kid and through all my years in sports. It’s one thing I keep going back to."

What do you love about surfing?
That’s like asking what I love about life. You have autonomy and freedom. It’s non-competitive and exciting. You are in a natural environment. I connect with the ocean and the whole experience pretty deeply.

Back when you were competing in triathlons, did you worry about getting hurt while surfing?
Unless the surf is really big or you’re doing stupid things, you have to work pretty hard to get hurt while surfing. It’s is not like racing motorcycles or hang-gliding. [At this point I decided not to mention straining my MCL a few years ago while learning to surf at Pacific Beach’s Tourmaline Surfing Park.]

In hindsight, I missed a lot of really good days surfing while I was out on my bike. I would be riding around looking down at the surf going, "Gosh, look at that!"

What was a monster training week like for you back in the early 1980s, during the prime of your career?
I’d do 350 to 400 miles on the bike, about 25,000 yards of swimming, and 75 to 80 miles of running. That was 35 to 40 hours. Throw in some stretching and weights. I was so obsessive about my training. I probably could have done half as much and done twice as well.

You didn’t have any models to follow.
We were all winging it. Guys like Scot Molina, Dave Scott and myself -- we got lucky. Nobody had a coach. In the early days, it felt closer to play than competition.

Today there are so many great, experienced athletes and people are extremely intelligent about their training. As triathlon has become institutionalized, it has gone the way of many other sports. It’s more bureaucratic and there are rules about "right ways to train." We had none of that.

Would you have been able to conform to that kind of structure?
Good question. I would have struggled. I struggled in the end with all the different professional organizations being proposed. You could see the writing on the wall. I’d butt heads with ITU [the International Triathlon Union] because I was an advocate for the athletes and I didn’t like what they were doing. And I still don’t like how they treat athletes.

Of course the financial opportunities are much greater today. But I’m lucky because I was able to compete, for the most part, on my own terms.