Everybody gets a medal

I guess it's really not hard to be competitive when there's no objective criteria to judge your performance against.

Brian Townsend has a blog entry about his recent performance in a triathlon. He says

I am very proud of my results

He thinks of himself as a competitive kind of guy, right? So that must mean he did pretty well, right? Not so much.

I finished in 4 hours and 6 minutes which is very good for me.

He doesn't say very good. But, "very good for me". What does that mean? does that mean close to the top? No, not that.

Also the top finishers came in under 3 hours

Is it personal best? He doesn't say that, he just says "good for me", which implies he's probably done better. His explanation is

I am very proud of my results as I hadn't really trained for this at all.

But then right after he says that he points out that it's not really true that he didn't train at all.

I run a decent amount and swim occasionally but I really hadn't done any biking in 3-4 months.

So he did train some, just not enough.

But he's proud of his results.

I guess that's what it takes in todays world to define a winner. Everybody gets to be a winner. The whole world is the Special Olympics.

This guy provides material as good as my previous favorite sources of material, Danny and David.