Some cool stuff from Ironman Austria

I just wanted to share some great stuff from Ironman Austria. Seriously, I can't recommend this race highly enough and, right from the sign up through to all this stuff now, the whole experience has been utterly fantastic.

First up is the official video which they showed at the presentation party the next day and, I think, does a good job of capturing the awesome atmosphere, festival spirit, insane support and even a little of the heat!

Secondly is this super cool and nifty thing called My Page by Marathon Photos. Basically, click on PLAY and you can follow my race and see the pace I was doing compared to (in this case) the winners, Faris Al Sultan and Lindsey Corbin, and the last finishing athlete. However, if your friends raced, you can actually tag a handful of them and see how you did at each point. 

Better still, at the relevant places on the course, it stops to show you any photographs or videos you appeared in. Nice!

Let's face it, an Ironman is an expensive event to take part in but these little added-value extras help to justify the cost and are also great reminders of fantastic days.

NEXT...

I can't believe it's been 6 months since Ironman Wales - in some ways, it feels like it happened to me (that's the best way I can describe that course - it happened to me!) only yesterday; in other ways, thanks to a good racing season here in the UAE and mainly due to joining TeamT2A, it feels like it happened to a completely different athlete a long time ago.

Well, with six months to go to the next IM Wales and the following promo video coming out for he 2012 race (bringing back all sorts of memories - tho the hills and conditions don't look anywhere near as bad on here!) it seems like a good time to rule a line under one experience and look forward to others.

The next two weekends should be pretty fun ones: tomorrow is the final race of the local Aerofit sprint series in Ghantoot and, as I'm not quite back up to full speed, I'm going to vary my pacing a little to see how that affects my overall time.

The following weekend, the team is heading to Al Ain and, more specifically, to Jebel Hafeet for a training camp on the side of a mountain. I've heard many tales from previous editions and it promises to be emotional up there! Looking forward to that and, in between, just getting a full and solid week of training in for the first time in almost two months since before I was ill.

Lots of blogging to come in the next few days and weeks... hope you'll enjoy.

Abu Dhabi vid and a tedious English language lesson

There are two reasons I'm posting this: firstly, in case you've not already seen it, this is a cracking little video of this year's Abu Dhabi International Triathlon, featuring pros and age groupers, and capturing the spirit of the event. Secondly, I just really like the word 'featurette'. 

Although - if you'll allow me to straighten my 'Grammar Nazi' hat for a second - the -ette suffix is generally added to a word to imply 'smallness'; think kitchenette, cigarette, pipette. Alternatively, we borrow the French use which means adding -ette to a word makes it feminine: bachelorette, suffragette...

Not sure what the point of this grammar lesson is (this is what happens when I write a blog post in my five minutes off from editing a guide book), other than to point out that this video's official name 'mini-featurette' either makes it a 'tiny, tiny feature' or a 'small feminine feature', neither of which seems to be true. So, feel free to take this lesson in suffixes away with you, or just ignore it and whisper under you're breath "That Matt... what a twattette!"

Enjoy!

The one where Matt rehashes a load of YouTube clips...

You know when American sitcoms need to buy some time so that their highly-paid team of writers can go off on a ‘team-building and brain-storming retreat’ in Hawaii or Aspen, they always have an episode in which two or three characters find themselves is some ridiculously contrived (stuck in a lift, locked in a cupboard, stranded on a ski lift...) situation. This’ll happen right off the bat and then, just a few minutes in, one of the characters will turn around and say something like: “Hey, well at least it’s not as bad as that time when...”

Cue a giant groan from viewers, a wipe of the brow and snap-shut of the suitcase from the writers, and a chi-ching sound ringing in the ears of the TV station... it’s a lame-ass excuse to just show clips from previous episodes.

Well, I’m afraid to report, that’s kind of what this blog post is. Except I’m bogged down with work and not going to Aspen or Hawaii, and I’m not highly-paid. But I am a writer!

In fact, this particular malignant little wart on the nose of blogland is even worse – I’m just going to pass other people’s work off as my own! Sure most of you have seen these before but, even so, they’re worth rewatching. If you haven’t seen them, prepare for an immersive and yet bizarrely accurate swan dive into the weird, obsessive compulsive mind of the triathlete. We only laugh because they’re true!