“So, how come people don’t swim last during a triathlon? Who wants to get soaking wet at the beginning of the race?”

My friend looked up from her phone and stared blankly at me for a moment, toeing the line between incredulous and judgmental. “People collapse by the end. If swimming were the last event, they would drown.”

Her matter-of-fact answer shocked me into the realization that I knew literally nothing about the sport for which I was set to begin training in mere days. During the summer before my freshman year at Stanford, my suggestions to friends that I might try out triathlon in college usually evoked a few seconds of laughter followed by a hesitant, “Oh … you’re serious?”

I couldn’t blame them. Most had known me to fake contact lens emergencies and debilitating cramps to avoid physical exertion throughout four years on the school’s soccer team. The idea of me voluntarily saddling up to the starting line in a skintight multi-sport wetsuit was equal parts hilarious and preposterous.

My ignorance spanned far beyond the logistics of the race itself. I had no concept of the freestyle stroke except that it is not, as I learned just a few weeks ago, an opportunity to just “do whatever.”

I hadn’t ridden a bike since I outgrew my Disney Princess training wheels, and I had no idea what differentiated a road bike from a commuter bike (other than the exorbitant price tag). I was coming off of four years during which I took great pains to avoid running, even when I was miraculously lifted from the bench during soccer games.

And yet, on my first day of class as a Stanford student, I dragged myself out of bed at 6:45 in the morning, groggily laced up a pair of running shoes and circled my dorm by bike a few times before locating the path to Cobb Track.

Over the first few days of triathlon practice, I jogged warm-up laps behind grad students in Boston Marathon Finisher t-shirts. I swam (or more accurately, flailed) lanes away from a gaggle of Iron Man Triathlon swim caps and seemingly permanent Speedo Endurance+ tan lines. I saw individual calves with more muscle mass than exists in my entire body. Every part of me wanted to crawl back into the safety of my bed, to resign myself to mid-afternoon treadmill runs where my lack of speed wouldn’t be so immediately evident and to try again next year.

During all six overwhelming days of NSO in September, mantras like “take risks,” and “don’t be afraid to fail,” bombarded the class of 2021 in speeches, house discussions and orientation publications. I planned to ignore them. It’s easy to view these charges as general, convenient fillers rather than as indicative of the larger Stanford culture. But on my ride home after the first week of practice, I finally felt like I had taken the plunge – like I was on the road to discovering what Stanford really is all about, despite feeling utterly unprepared and more than a little incompetent.

One of the greatest things about Stanford’s culture is that it encourages us at every step to dive in (or, for the less aquatically inclined, like me, to get as close as possible to the pool’s edge before flopping in gracelessly), even if we’re surrounded by people who are light years ahead of us in their abilities. Sure, I had to wikiHow “how to put on a swim cap” in the locker room and then doggy-paddle my way to the end of the first swim workout. But jumping in is half the battle – and my initial struggle made it all the more gratifying when I figured out how to stay afloat.

Contact Jackie O’Neil at jroneil ‘at’ stanford.edu.