As a teenager I briefly entered the world of competitive swimming with relatively little success. Most notably, I quit without breaking the wall of 1 minute on the 100 freestyle and I then rarely swam in a pool for the following ten years.

That’s why the assessment of my last five years of Master Swimming (2006 – 2011) goes beyond any expectation: I haven’t simply broken all my previous personal records and swum 100 freestyle in 56 seconds. More importantly, I’ve found the experience of being a late achiever incredibly rewarding and motivating.

Triathlon is the next challenge I want to take up.

It’s a far tougher one, with two disciplines (especially cycling) sitting completely out of my comfort zone. The fact that I’d like to progressively move all the way up to long distance events doesn’t help either, because even in swimming my best performances have always been in the area of 100 / 200 meters. I need to completely reset myself as an athlete… or perhaps to turn into an actual one. I can’t help myself though: I’ve got the bug!

A brand-new Tumblr blog called “The Tri Bug” will be my online mirror of this new path. Its latest posts are shown in the right column of this web site, some more are hosted on this page of my web site and the complete archive is accessible at TriBug.tumblr.com.