Over the last week, I've gotten several emails to the effect of "Wow, great job at Ironman Arizona!  You crushed it and you're going to Kona!"  Yes! Yes!  Tell me more!  Unfortunately, there's a back story here. See, there are three guys by the name Shawn Burke currently doing Ironman.   That's results for three different people there. Two of us did Ironman Canada last year.   All of us are getting faster.   One of us has his ticket punched for Kona.  One of us has the domain name shawnburke.com, and that's the only one I know. Ironman turns...

I'm very lucky in a lot of ways, but one of them is that I'm able to build most of my life around things that I enjoy.  My work-life is interesting, engaging, and exciting.  My personal life is filled with great people, and my personal time is filled with, well, mostly pain and suffering.  But in a good way, for some reason I like that stuff. But everything is relative and there are always going to be aspects of things you do - even things you generally enjoy - that get old or entail doing some groundwork that isn't that...

When someone finds out that I'm one of those crazy Ironman people, they often react by listing off all the reasons why such an endeavor would be "impossible" for them.   I think for most people, it's a mixture of being faced with something that seems completely out of the bounds of normal, and a way to try to be complimentary.  It certainly doesn't bother me, but it's an interesting thing how frequent the reaction is. Of course, the main assertion is "I could never do the swim", and I was definitely someone who originally had the same anxiety.  But people...

Lately, I've been spending a lot of time considering what things I can do to make me a better person, specifically in terms of what my net "existence footprint" is, in kind of a overblown, wholistically hand-wavish way.  Some of these things have become cliche - carbon footprint, energy footprint, waste footprint - and some are just the net-effect of being on the planet for a little while, both positive and negative.  I think that if you're a thoughtful, observant person, these things are hard to ignore.  But it turns out that no matter what you do, you can...