and so it begins...

318 days until the beach to battleship iron distance event. The fact that it's not called an ironman is one of the reasons I am doing the event. It's not a branded event, and thus I don't have to commit to it a year in advance, it won't sell out in 1 day, won't cost an arm and a leg, and won't be filled with 2000 people. I won't go into all the details about how much I dislike what is going on with the leadership at usa tri and how they are trying to get triathlon to be a more mainstream sport and ruin it like the NFL ruined football by making it more about the money and less about the sport. The owners of the ironman brand have been doing a great job of that for a while now and I don't see an end with their events selling out so fast even though the fees are going up and the quality going down people are still flocking to it. That at least is a good thing.
With my daughter turning 7 next year I suspect this will be my last chance for the next 10 or so years that I will be able to selfishly put in the hours to train for an ironman so it's now or wait and since you really never know what is going to happen I am going to do it now. I'll be tracking all my training miles on the blog and hope to update it regularly. Even though my training for this really started over 10 years ago, this years training started today with an easy 1 mile swim.