The Aussie Prime Minister till a few years ago Tony Abbot completed several Half Ironmans while in politics and I think while opposition leader, maybe not as PM but did a heap of cycling. He never had any security or any carry on, just did the races like everyone else.

Though American, I live in Hong Kong. I wish the Chief Executive was a cyclist. We have lots of areas that could be great for cycling if so designated and it would be great if the government would educate people about cycling laws.

If you grab the average local driver and tell him that bikes have the right to be on the road and they don’t need to move over if unsafe they would think you are crazy and flat not believe you.

It would be very hard to comprehend. That’s not to say most aren’t cool and give you room because HK people are supremely risk averse but you do get a lot of people honking like crazy and who get incensed if you don’t allow them to pass you unsafely.

Cam Wurf. Much better social media posts.

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http://www.sfuelsgolonger.com

He finished Ironman Oz 2010 in Port Mac in just over 14hrs

Bernie Sanders qualified for Kona when he was younger, nuff said. :D

You know what you need to do.

I'd like to meet his tailor.

I can honestly say if a President (Nominee) were an active Triathlete, I would not vote for them. I am all about a President staying in good shape, but if they were spending that much time training for races, then that's all that time they are not in the office running the country. Just my opinion.

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- Jordan

My Strava

Why not just go with Blagojevich? Dude was a low-3s marathoner at one point, and my understanding is that he's eligible for the office again.

Same


If Carrie Lam tried to get more people here to ride bicycles, cycling in Hong Kong would be dead in a month.

A self centered ego driven person who tells anyone in listening range about their achievements?

not much different to the situation now.

You can finish a sprint triathlon by training less than an hour a day, so I think it would be fantastic if the U.S. president did several sprint tris each summer. He or she would even have time to enjoy a big dish of beef chow mein after the tris.

A U.S. president trying to qualify for Kona while in office would be a different story.

Remember, there are triathlons that are much shorter than an IM.

Ahhhh-oooooh

I'll bet it ain't Love The Pain

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"What's your claim?" - Ben Gravy
"Your best work is the work you're excited about" - Rick Rubin

Good news is, no actual work would get done. I mean, if you're really trying for a fast IM finish, you are not even mowing your lawn, never mind spending all day in meetings with people you don't know.

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I'm closer to the feathered end of the spear than the point.

Do you know how much golf trump plays? Some games can take as long as IM winner time...

Btw just because you are triathlete doesn't mean you have to do 70.3 or higher. Better yet what if president was crossfit athlete?

Yeah, I hear ya. Luckily for me, I do not endorse golf either. lol

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- Jordan

My Strava

 

He was at (and I believe finished) Breck Epic the last time I did it (2017) and a pretty common face at some of the local grassroots endurance mtb events around NM.

I couldn't imagine the security. Your mention of George W. Bush being an avid MTBer made me think of something I saw a couple summers ago.

I went mountain biking on a weekday in summer of 2018 at Kettle Moraine State Forest Southern Unit when Paul Ryan (Speaker of the House at the time) decided to go mountain biking. He had a team of seven for him and his son. Five of those seven were visibly armed and all had earpieces. A forward team arrived with six Trek bikes hanging off of a sparkling clean SUV as I was putting my bike on the rack. It was super weird since there were only two of them and they weren't wearing riding clothes. Ten minutes later, two armored SUVs came in fast, ignored all 50 parking spots, and then four armed men hopped out and started walking around and inspecting the area while radioing each other. Eventually they came back to one vehicle, faced outwards, a door opened and Paul Ryan hopped out in an old softball shirt. Then a slightly smaller version of himself came out too. They sprayed some bug spray on each other, were handed mountain bikes, and then the six of them pedaled away.

I didn't have a clue who was in the vehicles or why armed men trying to look as tough as possible were walking around with radios. I thought I was witnessing something I shouldn't be and nothing made sense until I saw a tall skinny guy with "Ryan" on the back of a softball jersey. The security seemed a little over the top when there were three whole vehicles parked there including mine and I was the only person visible.

The Ryans and company were done mountain biking in maybe 15 minutes. I was ordering lunch at the shop next to the trails when they all walked in behind me.

While he’s never been even floated for the office former Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown’s a decent triathlete. Moderate Republican from a very blue state. Could be an interesting choice...

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I still lapped everyone on the couch!

Scott Brown - I used to see him at our local races. Now he's the ambassador to New Zealand.

He was/is a decent triathlete. Put up some good times.

Ai_1 wrote:

Are you drawing a distinction between governance and rule?

Yes. The great non sequitur by defenders of the state: to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the state.
Society is a voluntary scheme of mutual benefit. The state is a compulsory scheme of mutual exploitation.


There is nothing wrong with rules, there is everything wrong with "rulers". Anyone voluntairly submitting (not acquiescence) has a leader. There is no choice, and there is no social contract.

The useful collective term “we” has enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over the reality of political life. If “we are the government,” then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical but also “voluntary” on the part of the individual concerned. If the government has incurred a huge public debt which must be paid by taxing one group for the benefit of another, this reality of burden is obscured by saying that “we owe it to ourselves”; if the government conscripts a man, or throws him into jail for dissident opinion, then he is “doing it to himself” and, therefore, nothing untoward has occurred. Under this reasoning, any Jews murdered by the Nazi government were not murdered; instead, they must have “committed suicide,” since they were the government (which was democratically chosen), and, therefore, anything the government did to them was voluntary on their part. One would not think it necessary to belabor this point, and yet the overwhelming bulk of the people hold this fallacy to a greater or lesser degree.

Ai_1 wrote:

What alternative do you propose?

Freedom. More specifically: private law. Or contract.



The state operates in a legal vacuum. There exists no contract between the state and its citizens. It is not contractually fixed, what is actually owned by whom, and what, accordingly, is to be protected. It is not fixed, what service the state is to provide, what is to happen if the state fails in its duty, nor what the price is that the “customer” of such “service” must pay. Rather, the state unilaterally fixes the rules of the game and can change them, per legislation, during the game. Obviously, such behavior is inconceivable for freely financed security providers. Just imagine a security provider, whether police, insurer or arbitrator, whose offer consisted in something like this: I will not contractually guarantee you anything. I will not tell you what I oblige myself to do if, according to your opinion, I do not fulfill my service to you - but in any case, I reserve the right to unilaterally determine the price that you must pay me for such undefined service. Any such security provider would immediately disappear from the market due to a complete lack of customers.

Ai_1 wrote:

As for those needing a ruler not being competent to choose one, that's just imbecilic nonsense, and a straw man.

It may be objected that, while the average voter may not be competent to decide on issues that require chains of (economic) reasoning, he is competent to pick the experts - the politicians - who will decide on the issues, just as the individual may select his own private expert adviser in any one of numerous fields. But the critical problem is precisely that in government the individual has no direct, personal test of success or failure of his hired expert such as he has in the market. On the market, individuals tend to patronize those experts whose advice is most successful. Good doctors or lawyers reap rewards on the free market, while poor ones fail; the privately hired expert flourishes in proportion to his ability. In government, on the other hand, there is no market test of the expert’s success. Since there is no direct test in government, and, indeed, little or no personal contact or relationship between politician or expert and voter, there is no way by which the voter can gauge the true expertise of the man he is voting for.

As a matter of fact, the voter is in even greater difficulties in the modern type of issueless election between candidates who agree on all fundamental questions than he is in voting on issues. For issues, after all, are susceptible to reasoning; the voter can, if he wants to and has the ability, learn about and decide on the issues. But what can any voter, even the most intelligent, know about the true expertise or competence of individual candidates, especially when elections are shorn of all important issues? The only thing that the voter can fall back on for a decision are the purely external, advertised “personalities” of the candidates, their glamorous smiles, etc. The result is that voting purely on candidates is bound to be even less rational than voting on the issues themselves.

Not only does government lack a successful test for picking the proper experts, not only is the voter necessarily more ignorant than the consumer, but government itself has other inherent mechanisms which lead to poorer choices of experts and officials. For one thing, the politician and the government expert receive their revenues, not from service voluntarily purchased on the market, but from a compulsory levy on the inhabitants. These officials, then, wholly lack the direct pecuniary incentive to care about servicing the public properly and competently. Furthermore, the relative rise of the “fittest” applies in government as in the market, but the criterion of “fitness” is here very different. In the market, the fittest are those most able to serve the consumers. In government, the fittest are either (1) those most able at wielding coercion or (2) if bureaucratic officials, those best fitted to curry favor with the leading politicians or (3) if politicians, those most adroit at appeals to the voting public.

Can we just imagine for one moment what a Cam Wurf vs. Trump twitter war would look like? Triathlon's finest hour

Well they wouldn't be while they were in office, no way they could race. And honestly, I don't care if the President is a triathlete or not, just that they do a good job. That's the ONLY thing that matters in a President, it's not like they are gonna make Triathlon the national sport. Politics doesn't have to be in everything.