Standing in the shadow of the starting line, ankle-deep in a lake the color of iced coffee, my husband throws me a final fist-bump. It's the signal we use during our daily shift change, when one finishes a workout and the other begins, the passing of a phantom baton. The biggest race of our lives is here -- the ITU Cross Triathlon World Championships -- and we're members of Team USA.

Our race nanny brings over our 4-year-old son, who delivers a good-luck kiss. Austin thinks our red, white and blue team uniforms are almost as cool as Captain America's. We think he's wrong -- they're way cooler. With our last names emblazoned on our chests and rumps, just above the letters USA, we had might as well have capes.

We're not pros. We're parents. With full-time jobs, and a dog, and a yard and professional colleagues who shake their heads and bless our hearts when they hear how we've spent our weekends. Eddie is an insurance agent. I'm an editor with an office job. We work hard, we train hard and we try our best to do it without neglecting our kid.

"How do you feel?" asks my husband, Fast Eddie, whose nickname is not ironic.

He puts his race-number-stamped arm around my shoulders, still dripping from the pre-swim, and we squint through our goggles at the forest of restless limbs around us. Some 316 athletes from 17 countries have come to race on this clear, sunny day in middle Alabama, where the Appalachian foothills are studded with lakes and blessed with world-class cycling spots.

"It's weird," I reply. "I'm not nervous. I'm excited. For the first time in my life, I feel totally prepared."

We've trained harder and smarter than we've ever trained -- seven days a week, with a coach, for months. We've eaten the right things at all the right times. We're hydrated. Rested. Mentally prepared. And on top of all that, we have home-court advantage: This race course winds through our training grounds, the trails where we run and ride every week, 16 miles from our home. Every rock, root and switchback turn is drilled into muscle memory. As far as athletic opportunities go, this is a miracle dipped in karma and deep-fried in good luck.

Eddie nods. He feels it, too. The race gods are smiling upon us. We know better than to jinx it by voicing the words, but at this moment, we feel the same thing in our guts: This race is ours to lose.

***

For the amateur athlete, this moment ranks on the Awesome Scale somewhere north of "graduation" and shy of "first childbirth." Having the worlds play out in your own backyard, in a year you're able to qualify, well, that is the stuff of lottery dreams. Last year this event was held in Spain. Next year: The Netherlands. This year: Pelham, Ala., just south of Birmingham, a football town with an Xterra secret: The pros of off-road triathlon call it "perhaps the best course in the nation."

Eddie and I lucked into good athlete genes, but we've never been world-class material. In what seems like a past life, I was a national champion water-skier, but in 14 years of serious training, I never made the U.S. team. Eddie competed in two Eco-Challenges -- multisport adventure races that run on longer than a Faulkner sentence, affording in five or six days of straight racing a few measly hours of sleep in a puppy pile of teammates. Simply finishing was a victory. When we met, in our younger, childless years, our dates involved summits, finish lines and/or stitches. Triathlons were our version of brunch.

Wearing the red, white and blue of Team USA made Kim Cross and Eddie Freyer feel invincible. Courtesy of Mary Lou Davis

Then we married. Had a kid. And life changed, as it does. But we never relinquished our inner athletes. That first excruciatingly sleepless year, we claimed to be "sleep-deprivation training for adventure races." After Austin turned 1, we qualified for, and completed, the 24-hour USARA Adventure Race Nationals. Training hard for something -- anything -- is so deeply ingrained in our DNA that we can't imagine life without it.

This spring, when we qualified for Team USA, we decided to go all-out. We hired a coach. Committed to a daily training plan. Gave up frivolous things like date nights, lunch hours and beer. (Well, mostly.) The money we might have spent on clothes, restaurants or trips to the beach we saved for things like heart-rate monitors. Fancy bikes with lightweight components. Custom-blended sports drink mix with our own electrolyte secret recipes. And an ever-rising food bill.

We talked to our coach every day about what we ate, how we slept and how our workouts went. He knew our resting heart rates, whether we pooped and, if we were sniffling, the color of the snot. He was our therapist, nutritionist, cheerleader, health care adviser and occasional marriage referee. He'd scream drill-sergeant screams through interval workouts that sent our heart rates zigzagging like a seismograph. He knew us each well enough to yell different things.

The plight of the amateur athlete is a curious one. We don't race for money, fame or sponsors. In the winningest season we could fathom, we could recoup just a fraction of what we invest. We kill ourselves to be the cream of the crap, the best of the rest. We have nothing to gain but the chance to stand on the podium for a brief, inconsequential moment, celebrated by a crowd in which the athletes outnumber the fans. Few of us have a shot at winning. Most of us are racing ourselves.

"I wish I could go back in time and race my 20-year-old self," said Eddie, faster and fitter and slimmer (if less hirsute) at 40 than he was at half his age. "I'd kick my younger ass."

It's not about vanity, ego or pride. We don't do it for Monday morning war stories, medals to hang in the Man Cave or the way our calves look after weeks of hill repeats. (Though these certainly are pleasant side effects.) It's not even about the way a finisher's medal feels against our pounding hearts.

It's about everything leading up to that. And sometimes the agony just after. It's about the lifestyle that makes us feel so damn alive, and the example it sets for our son. I have learned all my best life lessons through sports: How to suffer. What to sacrifice. When to compromise. Why teamwork matters. That falling is an art. And that sometimes, what you learn from losing can be even sweeter than winning.

Some secrets are found only in the pain cave.

***

Eddie's wave is 30 minutes into the swim as I take my place at the starting line. Usually I choose to start mid-pack, off to the side and out of the fray. But today I am brimming with mojo, so I elbow my way up front. Even on an off-day, my swim is pretty strong. Today -- I can feel it -- I'm gonna crush it. I'm grinning as I wait for the starting gun.

BANG!

Kim Cross heard eight dreaded words when she finished her swim: “You can make it up on the bike!” Courtesy of Mary Lou Davis

This is the part that many triathletes dread, these first five minutes of underwater chaos, when your heart rate spikes with adrenaline and you're choking down soggy gulps of air in a tangle of thrashing limbs. You're swimming blind through a froth of bubbles and mud. You feel bodies all around you, clawing your feet, knocking at your ribs, kicking inches from your face. Sometimes your goggles get kicked off your face.

I love it.

I often go out too fast on the swim, at the risk of blowing up, having to do the backstroke to catch my breath. I play a song in my head to help me find my rhythm, breathing every third stroke. The pack stretches and thins. I throttle back to a pace I know I can sustain for a mile. I am in the zone.

Suddenly, something white flashes in the dark water below. My heart jolts, and I'm breathless. Then I recognize it: a remnant of the old slalom course anchored across this lake. Seventeen years ago, when I was 9, I entered my first water-ski tournament here, carving an arc of spray around this very spot. I take this as a very good omen, like Mother Nature is ringing a cowbell.

Nearing the end of the mile-long swim, I'm feeling strong. It's hard to tell where you are in the pack, but my gut says I'm where I should be, in roughly the top third. I emerge from the water, rip off my goggles and cap, and jog toward the transition area feeling like a ringer. Then I see my coach's eyes.

"It's OK! It's OK!" he yells with a half-hearted clap. "You can make it up on the bike!"

***

When most people hear about what we do, they shake their heads and mutter something like, "I wish I had the time." I have learned to bite my tongue. What I want to say is, "You do have the time. You just choose to spend it on other things."

I call them the hidden hours, those chunks of time when sensible people are drooling on their pillows, heckling a Kardashian or otherwise squandering good training time. I squandered these hours once, too, until parenthood robbed me of the option.

The best ones begin at 4:30 a.m., when I can carve out a four-hour block of time without cheating my family. I can bike, run, dress, gossip with the girls in the locker room, grab coffee at the Piggly Wiggly and finish checking email at my desk before most folks finish their Wheaties.

The wonders of nature -- like mushrooms and rocks -- took priority for Austin and Kim during training sessions/adventures. Courtesy of Kim Cross

After work -- tag! -- Eddie gets his turn. I solo it through dinner, bath time and a dramatic bedtime reading of "Skippyjon Jones." By the time Eddie gets home from his after-work ride, I'm snoring softly on Austin's floor with a children's book splayed across my chest.

Eddie and I never train together. That would cost us precious time with our kid. Our dreams should not come at his expense. So instead of pawning him off on a sitter, we tag-team. On weekdays, we have fleeting conversations through driver's-side windows, passing each other coming and going. Weekends find us rendezvousing at trailheads, in YMCA parking lots and the neighborhood pool, where we switch gears from stroke drills to cannonballs.

Lest our kid grow up feeling like a relay baton, we don't pass him off -- we involve him. As a baby, he came to track workouts in the baby jogger. We'd alternate 400-meter intervals with recovery play in the triple-jump sand pit. When he was a toddler, he would nap in the bike trailer as I towed him up a 3-mile hill.

When Austin was 2, Santa brought him a balance bike -- no pedals, Flintstones-style brakes -- the modern answer to training wheels. At 3, he declared, "I'm a single-speeder!" at a local kids race. Just before his fourth birthday, he transitioned to a pedal bike. It took him two minutes.

By now a veteran on the pedal bike, Austin sets the pace of family runs at the city park, on the wooded state park trails or in the neighborhood. When he's with us, training never trumps fun. We stop to look at mushrooms, poke critters with sticks and fill our pockets with heart-shaped rocks.

We often let him lead, so he can learn what that means. Sometimes he leads us out of our comfort zone. When he set his heart on riding Rattlesnake Ridge, a rocky, somewhat hilly 4-mile trail, I suggested we do the Family Trail. He begged. He negotiated. He melted down. I gave in, with two conditions: No whining, and Mommy is not a bike sherpa. The going was hike-a-bike slow at times, but the kid powered through whine-free.

As parents and athletes, we believe that most of the time, our worst obstacles are the ones we create -- sometimes in our own heads. That anyone can pull off a seemingly impossible dream by setting the right priorities. Eddie's Man Cave, where I am permitted to train, is decorated with quotes. This one sums up our outlook best.

Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard.

***

The first few miles of the mountain-bike course are always exquisitely painful. My legs scream, my heart aches and my lungs burn. It hurts, but I ride like a girl on fire because I have some serious catching up to do.

I'm way behind. The transition area never lies. The evidence: Empty bike racks. Lots of them.