Why I love BT

No...it's not because of COJ, even though I like that forum a lot. This'll be long, but bear with me.

This is why I love BT: I got into triathlon back in 1983, after I watched the infamous Julie Moss IM Hawaii broadcast. Seeing Julie do that race in 1982 made me, a then 15yo kid want to do an Ironman. In 1983 I did my first triathlon, the Bud Light Triathlon Series race in Atlanta. I was a good swimmer, but that's all I did to "train" for that event. It was a 1.5K swim, 40K bike and 15K run. I was second out of the water, to a guy named Djan Madruga (who was a Brazillian Olympian in the 1500 free). BUt the rest of the day I was passed by literally the entire race. It was a suffer-fest of the most exquisite kind. It taught me that, no matter how good of a swimmer I was, to do well in this sport you had to be more.

After that race, it was back to swimming full time. I finished out my high school career and swam for 3 years in college until a shoulder injury finally forced me to stop. After college, I basically laid around for 3 years getting fat and lazy. In 1993, the triathlon bug hit again. I needed to lose weight and get back in shape, so I bought a Specialized Sirrus Sport for cheap and entered a race...a sprint tri at Stone Mountain, outside of Atlanta, the same site as my triathlon debut 10 years earlier. I did the tri thing for about 3 years with IM in the back of my mind, but eventually the desire for the sport faded. In part because it took so much time, but also because I just wasn't having any fun. I didn't have any friends in the sport, and after a career of the team atmosphere of swimming I wanted more. So I gave it up and swam Masters. That was fun, and I continued it after Amy and I packed up and moved to Californina.

In Pasadena, we met a group of people at the gym we joined who raced mountain bikes. They took us on a ride and we were hooked. So for our brief couple of years there, we raced in the dirt. It was awesome. Climbing in the San Gabriels, early in the morning in the winter with the crisp, clear skies, the Pacific Ocean coming into view 40 miles to the south, with our friends was one of those singular experiences. It was heartbreaking when we learned we had to move again, this time to Houston.

We ditched the mountain bikes when we got there because, well, there are no mountains in Houston. But I got a road bike in exchange and set down the triathlon path again. I raced a bunch of local sprints and after a year, caught the IM bug again. I enetered IMFL for November 2001 and trained a lot, and really well. Six weeks out though, running trails during the week at lunch, I landed funny and sprained my ankle pretty badly. I couldn't bare weight on it for two weeks, so I was out for the race in Panama City. A lot of you reading htis probably think I was heartbroken. But I actually wasn't. In fact, I was kind of relieved. Because, although I was close to accomplishing one of those life dreams, I again wasn't having any fun doing it. My training was solitary. I again didn't have any friends in the sport, so when I went to races it was just me. Show up, warm up, race, go home. Drudgery almost.

A couple of months later, a new job brought us here, to Augusta, GA. It was a great move because not only was the job good, it bought us back home (or close enough). With our new daughter, it was hard living with the closest relatives 6 hours away by car. But in Augusta, Amy's entire family was just 80 miles away. It was ideal. It took me about a year of long hours to settle into my new job, and after that I was ready to get back in shape. I got a brochure in the mail from TNT, ironically just a month or so after my granpa was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma--how did they know? I took it as a sign and signed up and actually got to be a mentor because of my previous TNT experience. I trained, got a stress fracture but completed the San Diego Rock-n-Roll Marathon anyway (I guess when you're racing for a dad and grandpa with cancer, you don't let injuries stop you).

After that marathon, I took some time off to heal and in the meantime was offered the chance to coach for TNT the next season. I took it, and in the process we signed up a few triathletes. Since Augusta had never had a TNT triathlon program, we intitially turned them away. But then I offered to coach them as well, since I had a pretty good background in troiathlon, running and swimming. And if I was coaching, I had to walk the walk. So I again got a road bike and started training. And it was fun! For the first time since I had started down the triathlon road 20 years earlier, tri training was fun. And, in the process of lookiing for resources for my athletes, I found this website called "beginnertriathlete.com."

I poked around here for a while and even posted a little and very shortly found out what a great place this is, and what great people hang out here. The information provided was nulike anything else I found, but the support offered to anyone was, well, it was just... The people here became more than just annonymous names and words in the ether. They became my friends. So now, when I go to races I'm not alone anymore, doing my own thing. Not only do I have my TNT buddies, but I have all of these great people with names like Comet, and TrTakeMeAway, Sue7013 and GatorGirl22, and SouthernAquaGoddess and GullahCracker and the others that I've met IRL, and it's just awesome.

And now that I'm again training for IM Florida, knowing the huge BT presence that's going to be there, and reading Jess' IMAZ race report...I'm just in awe of the sense of well-being and excitement and confidence and expectation I have. I'm absolutely going out of my skull in anticipation of November. And it's all because of this place. Reading Jess' report, over and over again she talks about how much it meant to have Haley and Liz there for her, and to be racing with Aaron. To me it made her extraordinary experience orders of magnitude better. And I can't wait to experience what she did.

November in Panama City is going to be amazing.

And April in St. Pete isn't going to be bad either.

So thanks, BT. I'm still a triathlete because of all of you.