Article: How the triathlon became the new status symbol

I guess everyone wants in to the triathlon lifestyle now, according to this article in Details magazine titled "How the triathlon became the new status symbol":

More subtly than, say, whipping out the keys to his Bugatti, a certain sort of image-conscious striver makes the distinction clear: Prestige comes with being an athletic triple threat.

It used to be that only true He-Men dared call themselves triathletes, but now all manner of aspirant, Type-A personalities are trying on the title. These are the guys who put the "try" in triathlete, who've seized on the once-forbidding sport as a form of social currency, the athletic equivalent of dropping mentions of a Hamptons summer home or a Harvard M.B.A.

I don't know too many people who brag about being triathletes, but I do know a couple people who boast a bit too much about their accomplishments. The "Type-A" personality type is dead on though, there's plenty of those in the triathlon world. Read the full article here.

Swamped

Well, just as I feared I’m getting rocked at work and at school this quarter, and we’re only a month and change into it. This work project is turning into a big clusterf*ck and our whole team is working insane hours to bring everything back on schedule. That combined with this freezing weather is just leaving me drained all the time, and when I do manage to sneak off to VQ I feel like I’m only putting out 75% efforts at best. I know this work madness is going to keep going until April (when we launch our product), so I just need to keep charging on through this rough patch.

Article: Where do triathletes live?

There's an interesting article on Slowtwitch this week titled "Where do triathletes live?". Basically they mined Slowtwitch viewer data from 2008 to 2009 and calculated the percentage growths across the states and metro areas. We all know that California, Texas and Florida have the biggest triathlete populations, but what about the rest of the US?

The big thing they found was that the New York metro area had the most growth in the nation (as measured by Slowtwitch views), followed closely by Denver and San Francisco. Chicago is still holding in the overall top 5 cities, but it did drop two spots. Overall Texas, Colorado and the Deep South states experienced the biggest growth during this period. Read the full article here.

FTP test FAIL

We did a FTP (Functional Threshold Power) test this week at VQ… and I came up way short of my past performances. Argh, such a frustrating feeling. I've been at VQ for 3 months now and I was hoping to see some sort of pop by now. Yes, I know that’s a little impatient, and yes I know I haven’t exactly been consistent in my training efforts but it was still very disappointing to come in so far under my previous levels. And I know I haven’t posted my January training update yet but that’s because I've only been managing to squeeze in 2-3 training sessions a week. Everyone has been telling me that I need to try to get in there ~4 times a week if I want to see some improvements… so I need to step it up some more.