Not to be confused with petal… I am talking bicycling, not gardening.

I did it. This morning, I mailed my entry form to Time Out Productions for the July 19th Falmouth Sprint Triathlon on Cape Cod. This is where the word pedal comes in.

Completing a Sprint Triathlon is on my New Year’s Resolution List 2009. Here it is, coming up on the half-year mark, and I’ve finally put my rear-end in gear. The Falmouth Sprint Triathlon involves a 1/3 mile swim in Nantucket Sound (Atlantic Ocean), a 9-mile bike ride along the famous Falmouth Road Race course and then a 3.1-mile run along Surf Drive, finishing at Wood’s Hole.

It is the mailing of the form that makes it real… the butt-kick, so to speak.

So today I begin kicking in my bicycling skills. This means that I have to dig my old 10-speed out of my shed, dust it off, inflate its tires, squirt a little WD-40 here and there, find my bicycle helmet and GO. And by GO, I mean try to ride steady for at least 45 minutes.

We’ll see.

I have printed out an 8-week training program for sprint triathlons (swimming, cycling, running), and each time I think about that entry form somewhere in the magic we call mail, my stomach jumps a little with both excitement and fear.

But I honestly think that when all the training, and the race, is over, I’m sure to fall in love with old Cape Cod!

For now, it’s one pedal at a time.