Subaru EPIC Half Iron Triathlon - I'm helping

I've been racing triathlon for about six years and have been pretty active with my club's triathlon for about four years.  The Navy Tridents' Triathlon & Duathlon is very near and dear to my heart.  We have a great club that donates their time to make the race happen each year.  

One of the smarter things I did as the race director was to wear my kilt on race day.  I knew there'd be a lot of people needing to find me and the easiest way for them to find me was to tell them to look for the guy in the kilt.  It worked like a charm!

Not too long ago, the organizers of the Subaru EPIC Dartmouth Triathlon  asked me if I wanted to be involved in their race.  They are adding a new distance in 2015 and want someone to look after the transition zone and swim portion of the half iron distance.  The Subaru EPIC races have been been running for three years and are going strong with an entire weekend of races.  

It turns out that I know most of the core organizing crew from the race community and am getting to know them better.  Their concerns are exactly the same as the Navy Trident race, except the Navy Tri is a sprint distance (750m pool swim, 20k bike & 5k run).  The EPIC iron distance race (3.8k lake swim, 180k bike & 42.2k run) is so spread out, it creates an entirely different set of organizational challenges.

I'm amazed at the level of detail they have gone to ensure that all of the racers' needs are met.

The organizers are really smart.  They've put the swim  of the new Subaru EPIC Half Iron Triathlon almost rate at the turn around for the full iron bike course.  The competitors do the swim and transition to the bike and then bike along the same route as the iron competitors.  Then everyone uses the same run route.  This eliminates any duplication of efforts.

I'm playing a small part of the race but am really excited about it.  

If you decide to do the race, let me know how it goes.  I'll be the guy in the kilt.

Creative writing on twitter

 A while ago, my daughter came and showed me something she found on the internet.  It was a quote that said something along the lines.  “If I was a mortician, I’d tie the corpse’s shoes together so when the zombie apocalypse happens, it will be hilarious!”

I knew that there was a joke in there and I just had to put it together.  I couldn`t think of a good introduction though.

Later, at work, I thought that I`d use TweetDeck to post snippets of my journey to become a mortician and then finish the story off with the punchline of tying the shoes together.  I used the scheduling feature in TweetDeck to post the tweets at intervals of  about twice a day.  It saved me a bunch of time so that I didn’t have to remember to post each day.  

I started and spent my lunch scheduling posts.  After about fifteen minutes, I said to myself: “This is stupid!  Nobody is going to read theses.” However, I had fifteen minutes into this so I thought I`d finish it up. 

However, I didn`t get to the end of my story during my lunch break.  I had to spend another lunch time finishing it up.  When I finished, I had twenty-seven tweets spread over thirty-four days. 

The story was a firsthand account of my journey to find an on-line mortician school, take the course and then obtain a job as a mortician.  There were hurdles along the way as I discussed the studied topics and took tests. 

I wasn’t sure if anyone was reading the tweets, but then I was followed by a funeral director’s magazine and a funeral parlour in the states favored a couple of tweets.  I figured that it was going well. 

Then I realized that I was causing confusion to people who knew me.  My nephew was talking to my sister and thought that I may be looking for work.  As funny as confusing my sister is, I had to explain to her why I took the time to write this story and also had to explain that I wasn’t an idiot.  (This is a common conversation we have)

I also had a person wish me luck on a test and I genuinely felt bad about misleading her. And another person entered into a serious discussion with me about dealing with raw emotions of people with recently deceased friends and relatives. 

I honestly didn’t believe that anyone would take the tweets seriously and was concerned about proceeding with the story.

If I was to do this again, I would certainly create a new account so as to not confuse anyone who knows me. But I still don’t know how to address people who take the story seriously.  Nobody likes to feel tricked.

Below is a transcript of the tweets from fist to last.  I still think there are some fumy bits in there, but of course if I didn’t think it was funny, I wouldn’t have written it.