I am.

A while ago, someone told me that completing a Half-Ironman is equivalent to completing a marathon in terms of the stress put on your body. If that is true, then the next two months are going to be one of the greatest physical and mental challenges I've faced in my life. This coming Sunday (August 9), I will complete my first Half-Ironman, the Spirit of Morgantown. On September 27, I'll complete my second Half-Ironman, Ironman 70.3 Augusta.

In effect, over the next two months, I will put my body through more physical hardship than it has ever experienced. Not only will both races be a challenge, but my training volume and frequency won't let off until after the second race. More importantly, these two months are nothing compared to next year's full Ironman.

Am I ready?

Bill Bryson, in a great book entitled A Short History of Nearly Everything, describes the precariousness of human life:

"Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn't easy, I know. In fact, I suspect that it was a little tougher than you realize. To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you.

The bad news is that atoms are fickle and their time of devotion is fleeting--fleeting indeed. Even a long life adds up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modest milestone flashes past, for reasons unknown your atoms will shut you down, silently disassemble, and go off to be other things. And that's it for you.

To be here now, alive in the 21st century and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of biological good fortune. Of the billions and billions of species of living thing that have existed since the dawn of time, most--99.99 percent--are no longer around.

Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely--make that miraculously--fortunate in your personal history. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, everyone of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result--eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly--in you."

Fleeting. That is what we are. Fleeting. We have few opportunities in life to make a difference, in our lives and others. Life can be easy and futile or it can be hard and exciting. We can either mundanely survive our way through each day or we can savor and value all that is around us. We either accept life as it comes or we challenge ourselves to change it.

Am I ready?

Yes. My 650,000 hours will be spent pushing myself intellectually, physically, and emotionally.

I will find truth in the suffering. And my atoms will know, when they disperse to become some subsequent wonderful example of life, that I wore them out.

If you live in Morgantown or are in town on August 9, please come out and cheer me on. I'll be on the course 6-7 hours.

Woot!