First up is Jeff ...

Confucius Say Rest Day
By Jeff Henderson

Would Confucius have been a triathlete?

Though he's choosing to argue otherwise, Timothy would like me to say that yes, Confucius would have been - because triathlon is the ideal, balanced sport.

Is it? It can be.

The essence of triathlon is so simple it almost doesn't require explanation. We grow up swimming - our parents, or the local Y, teach us to swim at an early age and we love it. We play in the water on hot days in July, join the Summer League and attend swim meets, and maybe go on to USS and chlorine hair and the notorious 400 IM.

Somewhere along the way we are given the responsibility of a bike, maybe as a birthday present, and it is our first taste of freedom. The shiny red metal gleams in the living room, and we suffer scrapes and scratches and man-eating dogs on our way to mastering it.

And as soon as we can walk, we yearn to run. No society on earth has members who cannot run. Today, far removed from hunting antelope and escaping predators, there is little of necessity in running, and as we age most of us do it less and less. But the innate thrill of engaging the largest muscles in our body to propel us forward stays with us.

That's all you need to do a triathlon. Pretty simple.

Can you improve on "simple?" Not if you value simple and understand what simple means. But human beings are born with the burden of ambition, and it tends to push us toward the more complicated, the "better," the extreme and the exotic. Unchecked capitalism sells us more gels, more bikes, more gadgets. We find it hard to train for the sake of personal fitness, or race for the sake of personal improvement. In a sport tailor-made for the individual pursuit of betterment, we constantly, obsessively judge ourselves by the yardstick of others.

During the Ironman Hawaii 25th Anniversary telecast, Paula Newby-Fraser says that Ironman defines her. The eight world titles she has won, she states, give her self-esteem. She is a role model. But is this what we mean by healthy? Well-balanced?

Physiologically, triathlon can be close to ideal. Exert major muscle groups one day, give them a rest the next without having to spend the day on the couch. All major systems of the body benefit from the riches of triathlon: respiratory, cardiovascular, nervous. And though we see overuse injuries among triathletes more frequently than we would like, this is not necessarily the fault of triathlon - it is the inability of its practitioners to embrace All Things in Moderation.

If Confucius had a bike and a bent for exercise, what would his triathlon regimen look like? I bet he would do "sprint" races exclusively - those one- to two-hour events saddled with a term wholly unbefitting their length or difficulty. I bet he would not employ a coach, not start the swim like his life depended on getting to the turn buoy first and not practice the shoeless dismount. He might train once a day, maybe missing a day or two, and cut the runs short if his daughter had a piano recital.

Confucius would not own a heart rate monitor. He would opt out of a wetsuit unless he really wanted to attend a race in cold water. He would race close to home and marvel at his body's ability to adapt to the stresses of each workout he crafted for it. Though perhaps tempted to run further and further, he would instead take up knitting, or stamp collecting or scrapbooking with his newfound spare time.

Triathlon can be a beautiful sport. Long ago the ancients discovered that beauty can manifest itself in proportion, scale and balance: the golden rectangle, fractals, the golden ratio. But triathletes are not generally known for their ability to hold life in balance; somewhere along the way we became distracted, lured to wander down the garden path. Getting back to the middle way, instilling our approach to the sport with calm and rationality, will serve us well as we strive for true, lasting health.

T.C., er Triathlon Critic Unbound, counters ...

Moderation in nothing!
By Timothy Carlson

It’s maddening, maddening I say, when my esteemed adversary takes both sides of this issue. An issue I suggested no less, which makes it an even bitterer pill to swallow. With silver-tongued deviltry, he is a con man, a shape shifter, a politician at his core, an equivocator, a fence-sitter, and a literary pickpocket of the persona of the towering Chinese philosopher Confucius. He is Henderson the Drain King, trying to dilute and neutralize my fiery position by kidnapping my kinder thoughts.

And how do I know how devious and equivocal he is on this issue? Because that is more often than not just how I feel. Divided. Seeing the point from both sides—not as a Taliban-like, single-minded, my-way-or-the-highway, fire-breathing, take-no-prisoners kinda guy.

Until today.

Angered by Henderson's reasonable stratagems, his polite shot across the bow, it is my duty in this arena of gladiatorial argument to become Mullah Omar, seeing only triathlon’s obsessions, its self-destructive egoism, its materialism, its heedless pursuit of Mileage and Mayhem.

Ladies and gentleman, I give you Triathlon Critic Unbound. Here goes …

Crazed Ironman Oz finisher

Photo: Timothy Carlson

Look at the finish of any triathlon and you’ll find a lobster-faced dude with saddlebag adipose spilling over both sides of his sliver of a Speedo swapping words with another dude, a mass of ropy abs and a big purple vein pulsing from the side of his head. Through closed eyes, heaving breath and streamers of puke, both are bragging about how dead they are, how much pain they’re in. Like dueling disciples of the Marquis de Sade, these masochists shoot reports, injuries and wounds back at each other like New Guinea warriors launching a fusillade of poison darts:

"Pustule-ridden blisters!"

"Lungs afire!"

"Alien-style cramps!"

"Necrosis of the small intestine - completely shut down!"

"My sunblock wasn’t waterproof - my back is roasted black!"

"I swallowed industrial effluents after ramming my head into a concrete buoy!"

"I crashed on the downhill and sandpapered off an acre of skin!"

"My foot caught in the spokes running out of T2 and I left a quart of blood on the course."

"I got bit by a convoy of Africanized bees and puffed up like an adder before staggering across the finish in anaphylactic shock!"

"Great race, eh!"

"Yup!"

There are also many suspects in our allegedly healthy, balanced sport, such as the prisoners of numbers, the aerobic accountants: "Let’s see, 186 beats per minute times 135 minutes? That’s 25,110 heartbeats divided by $120 entry fee - that’s 209 heartbeats per dollar! Great deal!"

Or there’s the fellow who ran 1,935.7 miles at an average pace of eight minutes, 32 seconds per mile at an average heart rate of 147.2 bpm: "Why, that’s 16,544.25 minutes running and 2,432,004 heart beats in 2007! That’s 28,075 calories expended!"

And there are the addicts of expensive shiny accoutrements, men and women who take out second loans on their houses to get a new Cervélo P5 every year, an indoor pool, reflector shades with a built in GPS and iPod, and the latest skin suit.

Or the crazed Masters of the Universe with enough money to burn on EPO, HGH and a personal gene-splicing doctor to hit the podium at a local sprint race.

Or the kamikazes of low body fat who give the thumbs up as EMTs wheel them off the field of play due to hormonal failure once they’ve reached the Nirvana of 2 percent body fat.

Or the aristocrats of high technology who petition the race director to disqualify the hapless sap who showed up with his surfer trunks, beach cruiser and JC Penney sneakers thinking he simply wanted to have fun.

Then there’s the guy who has to get a morphine drip so he can keep alive his Iron Man streak of 1,978 straight workout days despite the broken femur.

So don’t confuse us with Confucius! This is Type-AA Alpha male and female sport! This is not therapy! This is for immature, narcissistic, self-destructive maniacs only!

Gentlemen and ladies, start your egos!

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