When do the words "book report" and "Chris McCormack" belong in the same sentence? I was never huge on book reports and with what little free time I have, it was a mountain of a task to get a book read. Let me digress...
It was the perfect storm yesterday. Life in turmoil as the "day job" is demanding more than the typical 40 hours a week with no relenting in site, family health issues, money's tight as the economy is still unstable (aka gas prices are still ridiculous for around here) and other things that add up to more than I can shake a stick at. Then it happened.
My external USB drive made the "click click" of death noise. I lost the last 6 months of data and unless I want to pay $600 for data recovery, then it's gone. You can see on my TWITTER (http://twitter.com/TriJayhawkRyan) feed that I was even asking my computer savvy friends for help. It made me sit back and take inventory of what was important. I'm sure a lot of you have been there.
Was it worth $600 to get that data? Six months of training logs (I veered from online as I had my spreadsheets tailored to what I wanted), 6 months of photos (family and events), 6 months of meticulous tracking of event results, and 6 months of blog articles and stories I have written... all gone.
Luckily I found an escape.
I was tabbed to read Chris McCormack's (www.chrismccormack.com) book, "I'm here to WIN", for EMT. Add that to the list and who has time to read a book, train, work and do the family thing?
I'm one third the way through and I wanted to keep peddling past my 30 miles and skip work today to keep reading it, but I have bills to pay, so I went to work.
I was touched by the first 80 pages. You get a good sense of who Macca is and what drives him to be so bold in interviews and hit or miss in races. Lets be honest, I'm sure there was some editing and PR spin that went into the book, but after watching his interviews I can picture the words coming from Macca right off the pages and speaking to me personally. It was the right book at the right time in my life.
Macca dives into his friendships in the sport, his family life, his triathlon life, and the phases in his life that at some point we all have to deal with. Lesser known to me was how he lost his mother to breast cancer and that become a motivational tool for his racing. After winning Kona the first time, Macca had to find a new motivation outside of himself and the sport. He realized a couple of times in his life that he had lost focus of family due to the pro triathlon lifestyle. No one thing has kept him going in his career and it's not just athlete prowess that keeps him winning.
Connecting the book to me was the fact he has done most of his training on his own. He's been hooked up with teams and coaches here and there, but he doesn't attribute his success to any one man or woman, rather a team of individuals he has met though life.
Seeing that I am a numbers geek, it was interesting to see that in the first 80 pages, he hints at his tools for training and tracking numbers isn't huge on the list. There are some interesting yearly stats but he doesn't seemed hooked or hung up on hitting 20 hours for the week, or getting exactly 150 miles on the bike. That relates to me now and figuring out if it's worth my time to go back and recapture data, or move on and train "spreadsheet free".
So far the book has been somewhat inspirational, which I didn't expect. I was expecting what you see in interviews. Cocky and brash. I thought I would get page upon page of "I beat so-and-so and I'm the stuff". Granted I only get snippets of TV interviews mostly during the Ironman championship in Kona, but that's the impression I had.
You can purchase Chris McCormack's new book on Amazon HERE.
Ryan Falkenrath writes the blog falkeetriathlon.blogspot.com, married father of two young kids, owner of two dogs and trying to balance life, work and multisport. Ryan has participated in multisport events since 2001 from 5k's to Half Ironmans. Ryan is also the Kansas City Endurance Sports Examiner and you can read more of his triathlon thoughts HERE and he collects race reviews at www.Triathlon-Reviews.blogspot.com. Contact Ryan at: falkeetriathlon@hotmail.com or follow him on @TriJayhawkRyan.
*Expressed opinions are not necessarily that of EverymanTri.com
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