For the record, I am not now and never have been a part of Team TBB. Brett is not now and never has been my coach. I do not "work with" Brett in any capacity. I do not seek his advice, input, or anything else in any capacity that would further my career. What knowledge I have gleaned from him, I have gleaned from what he writes on twitter, interviews he does, etc. There is no weighing of "well, on the one hand, Brett abused a minor, but on the other hand, he could help me win a lot of races." I have none of that. I do not ask Brett for advice. I have a coach - Michael Krueger. I trust him, and I do not need to second guess what he's doing with Brett. Just so we are clear.

I haven't been brought into any showroom. I haven't bought a load of crap. But you are right that I am human. And in being human I thought about the mistakes that I've made in my life. And some of them have been pretty massive. I've thought about the fact that I don't know this man at all outside of two things - 1) he committed a heinous crime that he owned up to and 2) he seems to care a great deal about making right for a very, very serious wrong that he committed. So I decided that it was not my place to judge him. And I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.

After Ironman Texas, Brett wrote a short but complimentary tweet about me. So I asked Brandon for Brett's email. I wrote to Brett and said, paraphrasing slightly for brevity, "I saw what you wrote on twitter. Thank you. But you should know that I've said some pretty harsh and condemning things about you in very public forums. I feel badly about having done that, because I realized I don't actually know you or really know what happened other than - at best - some 3rd hand accounts. I assumed you were a scumbag because you did something awful. But people change. And based off what I know about you from people whose opinion I value - like Brandon - you don't actually seem like a scumbag. Anyway..."

I didn't really write it expecting much of a reply. I just wrote it because I did not feel good about having sat in judgement - like plenty of folks on this thread have done and are doing - of someone I don't really know. That's not the person I want to be. That's it. That's why I wrote to Brett. And when he wrote back, he wrote something very similar to that letter to Dan. He thanked me, but said he lives with what he's done every day. And nothing can change that. But he's doing his best to try and make up for it. I take him at his word. If you don't that's fine. But ours is not a relationship of personal gain. I don't profit from Brett. And he doesn't profit from me.

I wrote to him most recently - I write about once a month or so - because I enjoyed his blog about kids' sports. And because I didn't know he was a father - he has two sets of kids from two marriages - 25, 22, 21 from #1 and 9 & 7 from #2. We talked a bit about running shoes. And then he asked me to share the post about the kids. He told me that he doesn't really care about people reading his coaching stuff, but that he cared a lot about the way we are affecting our kids through sport, and that he'd appreciate my sharing that post. Now, maybe that's a load of crap. And maybe I bought it. I'll accept that. I just don't want to be that cynical. I don't think the world is that dark. And I hope I never do...

To the poster who said Brett is not Pete Rose, I think you misunderstand the analogy. What Pete did - fundamentally - was to violate trust. That's the same thing that Brett did. Pete violated his stewardship of the game. Brett also violated his stewardship. Now, this is certainly not to equate statutory rape with betting on baseball. It's to analogize that their crimes directly impacted their role as stewards. E.g., if Brett had committed the same crime with a girl who Brett was not coaching, Dan would not have drawn that analogy. It is the violation of trust by a steward that led Dan to make that analogy. If you focus only on the severity of the crimes, you miss that. And I think it's important. I respect that other people may not.

What troubles me about this thread, more than anything, is that everyone assumes that people are acting solely out of self-interest. Have we really all become Homo economicus or some sort of Ayn Rand-ian traders who care only "what's in it for me?" I pray - and I'm not any sort of religious - that we haven't...