IMAZ 2009 Interview with Tim Bomba.

The day after my Ironman race, radio producer and fellow triathlete Tim Bomba found me at the athlete village and asked me a few questions about the race. Here is that interview.

Vineman 70.3 2011

My father would have been 67 years old on the day I finished Vineman. If he were alive he would have spent the weekend with friends and family enjoying wine country, food and drink, and celebrating. He would be beaming with pride and excitement not just for seeing me race, but because he’d know his son was going to become a father and he would soon be a grandfather.

Ironman Arizona 2010

The sun rose just past six am over the east of Tempe Town lake. The man-made recreational body runs several miles long surrounded on both sides by manicured parks, a running path, with arcing bridges crisscrossing the water. I was positioned at the second to last buoy before the left turn turnaround for the 2010 Ironman Arizona race. As the desert sun’s not quite warming rays pierced through the chilly morning air I had time to reflect on the past year and what had brought me to sitting in a cold puddle of water in a kayak, hovering near a giant yellow buoy, with tears in my eyes.

Your pain means nothing to me.

Pain is subjective. It is highly personal, different for every person. Hospitals have pain charts with number scales and facial expressions as indicators of pain for verbal and nonverbal patients. If you’re intubated (a breathing tube down your throat) you can’t speak. Though uncomfortable, you may or may not be medicated enough to experience pain. You will want a nonverbal pointing chart to tell your doctors to increase or change the meds. When people ask if getting tattoos hurt, I tell them no. Not really. But I know people who found getting their tattoos excruciating. Why? Pain is personal. It is this very subjectivity that confuses people when talking about sCAMs (Complimentary and Alternative Medicine). “Acupuncture took my pain away!” is a frequent anecdotal response. The data is clear – when done in a proper, double blinded study, acupuncture performs no better than placebo or sham acupuncture (twirling randomly placed toothpicks). Someone who practices acupuncture obviously doesn’t understand or care about modern medical practices (or more likely they willingly reject facts). If the practitioner believes in ancient magic (nonscientific), then they don’t necessarily understand or embrace germ theory (scientific). Why risk having them stick needles in your body if you get the same effect with toothpicks?

Bio dad.

Sit down and write your bio. I’ve read many resumes and thrown out most of them. The people I’ve hired don’t necessarily have all of the paper requirements the job demands but all of their resumes showed that there was an interesting person beyond the page. I’d rather work with someone who is interesting and has a hungry mind than someone who can simply do a particular task really well. Maybe that is my liberal arts bias, maybe it’s that I’m perpetually looking for people who remind me of me. But when I turn the question inward I hobble myself by disallowing internal definitions of success.

Don’t be a skeptic.

Active.com is often a good resource for training tips, articles on workouts, diet, and expert opinion. Every now and then it contains garbage, like a factory that processes nuts there can often be a deadly allergen in the product. I don’t self-define as being a skeptic. It’s a loaded term that connects with the skeptical movement that is in itself a response to the lack of critical thinking in this country and the world. I’m an iconoclast. I resist defining myself by association with any particular group because joining with a group often carries with it guilt by association. I am a critical thinker and I apply critical thinking to everything that I do.

Share the damn road.

Today I watched a truck roll into an intersection and slam into a kid on a bike. The kid wasn’t wearing a helmet and is lucky only his bike was run over by the car. The kid rolled into the pedestrian crosswalk and had right of way as a pedestrian. The truck overshot the intersection. The kid was very lucky he didn’t die.

In the spirit of getting drivers to pay attention, these are some of my favorite cycling jerseys: http://www.sharethedamnroad.com