Old Stuff

Triathlon Archive

My involvement in triathlon extended from 1995 through 2000, when I completed an Ironman Triathlon. The progression from abject inability to completion is chronicled in a series of race reports that were de rigeur for participants in teh rec.sport.triathlon newsgroup, and the Dead Runner's Society mail list, in which both I actively participated. The stories I wrote for those venues are collected here.

During that time, I expressed my technical side by delving deeply into bicycle science, and was also active in rec.bicycles.technology and the Hardcore Bicycle Science mail list, which was run by the late Sheldon Brown. The industry leaders, not all of whom were famous at that time, were all active on those forums, including Dan Empfield (Quintana Roo bicycles), Mark Hickey (Habanero Bicycles), Sheldon Brown (the author of the most important online bicycle technology resource), Jobst Brandt (an HP scientist who was the brains behind Avocet components and first to truly understand the non-intuitive structure of bicycle wheels), and Gerard Vroomen (Cervelo Bicycles, and now Tour de France royalty). My engineering understanding of bicycle science, and my frequent storytelling on the forums, led to an invitation by Dan Empfield, who was influential at Triathlete Magazine, to invite me to author columns on bicycle technology topics every couple of months. His influence waned after about a year and so did my involvement, but the four articles that I wrote and published still contain information that is not necessarily intuitive and therefore good for triathletes to know.

I'm not involved in the sport any more but I still get emails from people who wander in based on a search for information. So, here they are. I'll leave them up as long as there is any evidence at all that people read them.