Joining the Tri Crowd

It was an interesting week, with business travel to to Santa Clara for the MySQL conference in which I had a presentation on XAware. On the flight out, I sat next to a pediatrist, whom I found out later is Amanda Shoenberg, a very interesting young lady who practices in the bay area, teaches part time at Stanford and UCSF, and runs an organization that provides medical services in Kenya. In her spare time, she trains and runs in triathlons. She was an athlete at Columbia University, where she played soccer and ran cross country, then went on to attend med school there. She gave me some med school related advise to pass on to Alicia, and also provided the name of someone at Kaiser, where XAware products may be a good fit. Funny, though, first Tim Harvey decides to run a triathlon, now I randomly meet another triathlete.

My presentation at the conference went well, with about 25 attendees. The MySQL coordinator for my presentation, Anna Weihl, is also the partner program coordinator, someone I had met on a couple of conference calls in the past during our MySQL certification process. It turns out Anna is training for a Triathlon, too, an Ironman in Florianopolis, Brazil in May. Hmm, these people are all over the place. I'm beginning to feel like I'm missing something. Maybe I should be training for a triathlon, also? With my bad knees, though, this is probably not a good idea.

Friday morning, I wake up to the morning paper in which Milo Bryant writes about "Building a Triathlete". Another sign. This is all over the place. Now I'm thinking that maybe I could do a small triathlon. I've done an Olympic length triathlon in the past, about 15 years ago, but that was also 3 knee surgeries ago. Running is the problem here. The pounding on my knees would not be good for me. I float the idea to Brenda, and she thinks its a dumb idea, but she says I can do it if I want. I just shouldn't expect her to push me around in a wheelchair when I'm 60. OK, good enough, I'm going to find a short triathlon, with the shortest run possible, something to train for and motivate me for the summer. Swimming won't be a problem, since I swam in college, and biking should be a breeze, since I mountain bike as my main exercise these days. Its just the running. How can I minimize the pounding on my knees and still get in shape enough to make it through a triathlon?