Three months later, I ran in my first sprint distance triathlon ( 600 Yard swim, 13 mile bike, 3.1 mile run) and finished somewhere in the 1hr 15 mins range. Not great, but that's all it took to get me hooked.

A lot of you are probably reading this and saying to yourself, big deal, those distances aren't so bad.... You're absolutely right, so the question is, why the heck are you sitting on your asses and not doing it yourself.

Anyhow, the experience of running in my first race was really positive. The atmosphere and camaraderie was great. The most appealing thing to me is that ultimately; the "real part of the sport" is the training leading up to the event. The event itself represents such an infinitely small portion of the training, that it almost seems inconsequential.

My next goal was to run a sprint distance under 1 hrs. So I trained harder and a few tris (pun intended) later, i came in under 1hr (58 mins to be exact). Somewhere in there, I also starting running in Olympic/International distance triathlon (1000 yard swim, 22 Mile bike (40K), 6 mile run (10K) ), and found I could complete those without too much trouble. Generally, I enjoy trying to push the limits of endurance, rather than speed... After all I'm old..

At this point, it was one year (or 60 pounds) later and was in the best shape of my life. I was regularly running in Sprint and Olympic tris and was still digging it. So I quietly decided to start training for the next level up.... a 1/2 Ironman. A 1/2 Ironman (aka: Tinman) is comprised of a 1.25 mile swim followed by a 56 mile bike ride and topped off by a 1/2 marathon.

I quickly found out that my previous training model of "Run a lot, Bike a lot and Swim a lot" wasn't working for a long distance event.