Triathlon Results

Expanding my Substack

Welcome to another edition of The Mueller Report!

Updates

I began this newsletter on yet another flight earlier this week (heading home). In December, I started using TSA Pre-Check. I highly recommend it. You don’t have to take your shoes, sweater, or belt off. You walk through a metal detector. And the lines tend to be much shorter. Also, it’s easy to sign up for – you don’t have to go to an airport or government agency office to get it. And if you have an airline credit card, they might cover the ~$80 fee.

Last weekend in Florida I did an Olympic triathlon (1500-meter swim, 26.2-mile bike, & 6.2-mile run). It was my second triathlon following a Sprint I did about eight years ago. You might think that since it was in Florida, it would be nice and warm. That was not the case.

While the air temperature and sunshine on the day of the race were excellent, the water was extremely cold. So cold that if the temperature had been five or so degrees lower, they wouldn’t have been able to have the event (the water temp was in the low 60s). I hadn’t planned on a cold-water race and didn’t have any gear for it. With the day before being cloudy and cold, I worried about how the swim would go. So, I ended up buying an insulated cap and gloves (which were too small) at the last minute.

The water was shockingly cold. Fortunately, we started from in the water, so you had thirty seconds or so to stop gasping in shock before the race started. It’s always dangerous to add gear or activity that you didn’t train with at the last minute. The chin strap for my insulated cap gave me a pretty wicked welt on my neck. Fortunately, I didn’t really notice it until after the race.

Overall, the triathlon was a success. I wasn’t very close to my stretch goal of two hours and thirty minutes, but I broke three hours handily. My final time was two hours, forty-five minutes, and thirty-six seconds (2:45:36). The swim took me 29:22 minutes (1:47 per 100 yards), the bike took 1:22:49 minutes (18.9 mph average), and the 10k run took 49:25 (about 7:57 per mile). My transition from the swim to the bike was 2:58 and from the bike to the run was 1:00.

Improving each leg by five minutes would bring right up to that two hour and thirty-minute mark. Swimming will likely be the easiest to drop five minutes from, followed by the bike. The run will be the most difficult because it will mean running almost a minute faster (about 7:05 minute miles). The winner, who just crushed it at 2:01:47, ran under 5:30 minute miles for the entire 10k after the swim and the bike!

During the (rather painful) run, I came up with the following thought: Triathlons are really bike races with some swimming and running thrown in to give the rest of us the chance. Or to torture the cyclists. The question I am thinking about now is whether I want to become a cyclist, with the costs and lifestyle that comes with it, in order to become a better triathlete. I’m on the fence at the moment.

Writing

We’re solidly into the New Year and so I’m back at the writing desk. 2025 has started off well in terms of getting pieces out the door. I had a book review, a piece at The Daily Economy, and a piece at the American Spectator come out in the first ten days of the month. I also have op-eds slated to come out at Fox News (tomorrow) and the Washington Examiner (Saturday). So, I am well ahead of my goal of one published piece per week.

There are some longer projects I am working on – a keynote talk at a business conference in Kansas in March and a panel presentation at a conference in Viriginia, also in March. I’ll be writing a few other longer pieces for AIER this year too. The biggest stretch goal, though, is trying to get slots on a couple Fox broadcast programs.

I’m also re-thinking my Substack and social media strategy since broadcast invitations often relate to one’s presence online. I plan to start republishing my written pieces from 2024 (if the relevant publication allows) here on Substack. So, expect to start receiving quite a few more pieces direct from me and feel free to pass them along to friends and family who may be interested in the topic.

January – Letters to the local editor

February – American Spectator pieces & book reviews

March/April – Daily Economy pieces on monetary, environmental, and other economic topics

May – ESG series

Reflection

This week’s reflection will be brief. I’ve been struck recently by how much of our lives are pre-determined by our circumstances and commitments. Sometimes I wonder why most people don’t reflect more on the direction of their life and what counts as success and meaningful. But then I’m caught up in the rush of life myself: dishes, bedtime, getting to the airport, meetings, training, meals, grocery runs, doctor visits, fixing things that break, taking care of this or that work item, sitting down with someone from church, and then I think:
“No wonder people can float through life ‘skimming the surface.’ Where do you find the time to make changes and to add more meaningful activities to your life?” Dropping most entertainment and social media is the low-hanging fruit. But what after that?

While there are certainly still wasted minutes I can squeeze out of my day, I’m increasingly convinced that my best option is to find and train more help – especially with my kids. I don’t have much to report on in this area yet but definitely have some plans for changes to make in the next few months.

Bookshelf

I started re-reading a fantasy series called Eragon over the holidays. The plot moves quickly, and the print is large, but so are the four books (each is over 500 pages). They are similar in length and style, to the later books in the Harry Potter series. In fact, I describe Eragon as Harry Potter meets Lord of the Rings. There is a sweeping epic element to the story with various races and a seemingly impossible foe like in LoTR. But there is also much more magic and superficial dialogue and character thoughts like in Harry Potter.

If you like both of those series, you’ll like the Eragon series.

I also have a few more thoughts on Lewis’ Four Loves. First, I think that most people today do not experience the Friendship love Lewis describes. There is a lot of “companionship” where people hangout and/or share interests. But the depth and intensity of connection Lewis describes of friends is rare. And it is also “unnecessary” for survival and so has been denigrated over the past couple of centuries as “unnatural” or “thin” compared to the deeply emotional and/or sensual loves of Affection and Eros.

And those loves are primarily what is left when friendship is absent. And Eros, as Lewis describes it, is also rare. Eros has a spiritual dimension of desire for another. Sex, what he calls Venus, can come into play but it is not Eros. If anything, sex is only one possible extension or application of Eros among many. Most of the great love stories, especially from the medieval period, don’t involve much physical consummation of love.

In the great tragedies, it is usually absent altogether (think Romeo and Juliet). Yet it would be silly to say these stories are not about romantic love. Unfortunately, with the explosion of pornography and increasingly prurient content of movies (and books), what people call romantic love today tends much more towards Venus than to the more noble Eros.

One final observation, then, is that most people’s relationships and experiences of love are based on Affection – which arises from contact and familiarity. There is nothing wrong with affection, but people’s relational life built upon it leads to two problems. One is a militant NIMBYism or status quo bias. People hate change largely because they tend to appreciate things for their familiarity. Change means replacing the familiar with the unfamiliar (at least initially).

The other problem, especially within families, is that Affection can be a poor vehicle for maintaining relationships with those who are distant. It is also a poor vehicle for feeling close to family members as they grow from children to adults. And the reason is the same – as children become adults, they tend to change a lot and thereby become less familiar to their parents and siblings.

Game Corner

During our all-staff week last week, we broke out some games in the evenings. One game we played because of its thematic nature was QE (Quantitative Easing). Players represent one of five countries: U. S., Japan, China, UK, or the EU. The basic game play involves blind bidding on distressed corporations. There are various bonuses you can achieve by bailing out companies from your own country and from various industries.

The kicker, though, is that there is no limit to what you can bid except that whichever country (player) spends the most money bailing out companies at the end of the game loses. There are also no parameters for how much you can or should bid. The winning bids ranged from $30 million to $650 billion.

So, it’s not a complicated game, but it leads to some interesting developments in terms of bidding. Ironically, in our game the player who ended up spending the most also had the fewest points. He had been outbid the whole game and then won two enormous bids near the end that made him the highest spender.

Have a good holiday weekend!