My local profesional Tri friend, Lance Pantigutti, recently formed a new company that will try to bring affordable races to the Denver-Boulder area.
You may recall Lance from his spectacular second place performance at the 24-Hours of Triathlon earlier this year.
In case you are in the hood and happen to be looking for an affordable race next year here is a link to his new company's web site: Without Limit Productions.
And here's some recent iPod musing by Lance that I hope you will enjoy.
Ask an athlete who grew up in the 70's or 80's how they met their partner and chances are they'll have a great story of meeting while on a group ride or at masters swim practice. They might even have had
the courage to turn-around mid run to do some flirting. We've all seen the Prefontaine movies and can vividly remember how gutsy that cocky freshman was, to run ahead of his teammates and flirt with his
"future" girlfriend. After telling his teammates to hold up he ran ahead to casually comment on Mary Marx's running stride, while bold it was still a great opener. For someone who ran hundred mile weeks that
boy had some serious "game".
Fast forward to 2007 and pretend another cocky freshman is trying to pull a "Pre" out on the trail. He runs ahead of his teammates all eager and excited only to see a dreaded little device, one we might as
well call a "game killer", the iPod. He tries his best openers, but they just bounce off the Apple force field she put up the minute she pressed play. Why would she want to talk to someone mid-workout anyway when John Mayer is just a play button away?
Training out on the trails and roads use to be a friendly experience, even a chance to get some digits. Well unless you have an iPod scrambler those days are long gone. Things have gotten so bad that
most athletes won't even work out if they left their "game killer" device at home. It's as if this little box has some magic power to make the workout feel pain free and as if it never happened at all.
Guess what folks, people ran long before 2001 without being plugged in to the Billboard top 100, incoming calls, constant heart rate, and pace data.
Let's take a look at our cocky freshman post run. Is he discouraged at running past 4 gorgeous girls with their pink iPod nanos? Ha, not this guy, this gamer still gets to walk back to his dorm during the Baywatch rush hour. As he makes his way through campus, day-game openers' ready, his face turns from shock to disgust. The iPod
epidemic has spread like a malignant virus from the running trails to the sidewalks. When did walking become so tough that we need Survivor or Kayne West to pump us up?
So to combat this growing epidemic what has corporate America decided to do? They find a way to make iPods water proof and small enough to swim with, put TV's in treadmills, and flood the media with more ads. Instead of giving 5 year olds Tonka Trucks we might as well stick an iPod shuffle in their ears, tuning them out to society one playlist at a time. Take note Steve Jobs, endurance athletes won't lay down and sleep alone. We're stepping up our game, we're fired up, and we're getting those digits even if it means running twice as much.
GUTTI