Not what I thought it was

Ok, so my "news" piece aired, and it wasn't what I expected at all. When I was contacted, I was told they wanted to do a story on me. They told me my story was inspiring and thought their viewers could benefit from hearing it. After 2-3 hours of an interview about how much my life has changed, along with sending a cameraman to New Orleans to get footage of me doing the race, I really though the story was going to be about me, and I was hoping my story would inspire those struggling to change their life. Here's what actually aired. I am in the second video. It is basically a piece about the military spending millions on weight loss surgery, and the people trying to stop it, and how tax payers shouldn't have to front the bill for this. They also neglected to mention the fact that I am a war veteran with 2 Iraq tours.

Needless to say, I am hurt by this. I should have been told from the get-go what this piece was going to be about. I was completely misled. Not to mention, why are they picking on weight loss surgery as wasteful military spending? The military sponsors race car drivers, dumps money into a ridiculous performance called the Soldier Show, and many other wasteful spending expenditures, but they are not "investigating" these things. And the guy saying to "build more fitness centers" for morbidly obese patients as a solution seems to not understand that many people have medical issue that keep them morbidly obese. It goes back to the general idea that the morbidly obese all got that way only from eating poorly and not exercising, and we all know that there is so much more to morbid obesity.

So maybe one day I will get to really tell my story. For now I will just keep training hard and racing hard, its my passion and what I love to do. Joel and I are doing the Turtle Crawl Olympic Triathlon on Jekyll Island tomorrow, for both of us this will be our first olympic. Seems funny saying that considering I have done an ironman. Olympics are hard to come by down here, but DRC sports just added a bunch of olympic races to their North Florida schedule, so we can check some of those out next year. The olympic tomorrow has a slightly longer bike segment than a standard olympic, the bike is 28.5 miles. The run is still 6.2, the swim is still 1500 meters (in the ocean) so same standard distances in both other disciplines.

Monday night I stayed up until midnight to secure my spot in this year's Army ten miler. I made it in, and the race sold out in less than 9 hours, 31000 people. Joel was already registered from priority registration. This will be my first "big" running race so its pretty exciting.