Now is the time for everyone to settle the poser issue once and for all. Use your definition of a poser and pat their heads or spew venom in their face, but stop all the two stepping and cut to the quick of what you find is commendable or grotesque about them and post it here.
In my opinion, calling someone a poser is a way of challenging another athlete’s toughness (this is exclusively male too, just check out the old and new threads about posers). What a joke for someone to call-out “POSER!” and think it proves something about the amount of testosterone coursing through their veins. If anyone thinks triathlons or any sport is a testing ground for toughness, please post why you think so, because I claim such an opinion is indefensible. Toughness is primal and uncontrolled like in wild animals or Nature’s total indifference to all life.
As for people, soldiers are tough, so are firefighters, and anyone with a selfless occupation or hobby with “death” listed as an everyday hazard. But the toughest SOBs I have ever been around are the guys that participate in bare-knuckle, dirt circle fighting. It’s like a gang, but without meetings, signs, handshakes, or any of that other sissy stuff. Ultimate Fighting is hardcore, but anything goes with these guys- fish hooking, eye gauging, biting, testicle hits, everything. They’d fight dinosaurs if extinction hadn’t gotten the scaly bastards first. Now that is tough, calling someone a poser because his power output is 30W less than yours during a TT or triathlon isn’t tough.
If we want triathlon to be a measure of toughness instead of just a physical challenge that is personally rewarding, run the marathon at an Ironman with a mouth full of bees, or do the bike leg with a deep sea diver’s helmet filled with funnel web spiders. Otherwise, suck it up and acknowledge toughness is for great white sharks and crocodiles with jet packs!