Triathlon – a love – hate affair

There are parts of triathlon that I love and hate.  Not surprisingly this is how most things in life are.  Today I’m writing mostly about things I dislike in triathlon – I’ll save the love stuff for another snowy day!

I straddle two worlds in my day to day life.  One being an uber geek – serving as systems admin in a group that supports over 1200 Windows Servers, 100 VMware ESX Servers, along with doing other geeky things like writing web sites, hosting my own email etc.  The other being that I spend a lot of time pursuing triathlons.

One of the big differences I see between those two worlds is the sharing and owning of information.  The IT world (with some exception) is very open with information.  Much of the innovation is driven by open source efforts, which are available for free to everyone.  There are many, many proprietary things out there, which are guarded very closely.  The direction of the industry is shifting more and more to a service based industry where software is free and "open", and you pay for services.

In triathlon, I see this – people helping others and passing on information, but I have see a much bigger tendency towards "cashing in" and hoarding of knowledge.  In the last 24 hours alone, I have see two comments (on forums/mailing lists) that display this.  One dealt with a person being intentionally vague so as not to give a way proprietary ideas; while the other was "you probably won’t get many responses as people don’t want to give free coaching advice."

Seems foreign to me – if someone wants help I’ll help them.  No strings attached – well one.  Help someone when you can.  Makes the world a lot better of a place.