Qualfying for Kona by Raymond Britt

Raymond Britt is an age group triathlete who has competed in 29 IM races, including several races at Kona. In Qualfying for Kona he describes what he did to qualify for the big race, and then he desribes what you need to know (in his opinion) to race well at Kona.

The book is autobiographical. Britt draws from his own experience, and assumes that his success can be replicated by your average Joe triathlete. This premise is faulty, and so his book falls short in its claim that it can tell you just what to do to qualify. Perhaps more problematic, however, is that Britt qualified for Kona in the early 2000s, when qualifying for Kona was not nearly as competitive as it is today. Case in point, he qualified for the first time at IMLP in 2002, where he completed the race in 10:33. This earned him 13th place in his AG division of M40-44. Compare that to 2010. In M40-44 in 2010, the13th position went to Vinu Malik, who finished more than a half hour faster than Britt in 10:05, a time which did NOT get him a Kona slot, by the way. With his 10:33, Britt would have placed 29th in his AG in 2010, which is a far, far cry from a Kona qualification. The book should be more aptly called Qualifying for Kona in 2002 than simply Qualifying for Kona.

Before Britt became a triathlete, he was a runner, and a good one. He poo-poos his running achievement as average, but the truth is he is/was capable of running a sub three-hour marathon. I'm sorry, but your average Joe triathlete does not have the kind of run speed in his back pocket. Britt really glosses over this. If he can do it so can you! But he doesn't quite get at how you can do it... he only gets at how HE did it, which was simply to log a few miles and race quite a bit, apparently. If it were so easy, we would all be running sub-3 hour marathons, now wouldn't we?

His approach to success was/is to race frequently, but to do fewer than the average amount of commonly prescribed hours in training. He reprints his rather rudimentary logs of training so you can see just how few hours he actually did to prepare for most of his races. Not surprisingly, the times he increased his training hours corresponded with his fastest race times. 

I don't mean to be thoughtless and mean in dissing Britt's book. It's quite a nice little autobiography of a man and his racing history. It does not in any way instruct one on how to qualify for Kona, however, and in that way it is a disappointment.

The Rules of Survival by Nancy Werlin

Nancy Werlin writes young adult suspense fiction. Her best book, in my opinion, was Double Helix, a thriller about a young man who realizes he carries a very interesting and somewhat scandalous genetic history.  I also liked The Killer's Cousin, which dealt with a little girl capable of attempting murder. The Rules of Survival was not quite as good as those, but I still enjoyed it. It's about three kids growing up in South Boston with an extremely unstable, evil, mother. It was a page turner, like most of Werlin's books. I wanted to know when and how the kids would break free of their mom, and so I couldn't stop reading.

Still, it wasn't a completely satisfying read because the characters were not fully developed.I didn't quite understand what made the mother so crazy. I wished for more explanation on that. She was off her rocker but didn't have an identifiable mental illness. The kids weren't colorful enough either--just kids trying to survive.

I did like that Matt, the protagonist (the oldest child) comes to understand that he, like his mother, is capable of great evil. This is something Werlin explores in her writing; that even children have the capacity to commit horrid acts. Humans are also capable of great goodness (as witnessed in the character of Murdoch, who helps the kids), but most humans need a significant push to do great goodness, and spend most of their lives complacent.

This is a very quick read. We get a taste of these characters, and then the story ends. It's a page turner, but ultimately not complex enough in its plot or character development to warrant high marks.