Seriously?!?

So it's no real secret that my training this summer is not what I had planned it to be. Not being able to run in over a month, or do any hard training rides, has been incredibly frustrating and not at all helpful in training for my 1st Ironman. But my foot has to heal. And just as I saddle up for a decent training ride and tell myself that there's still hope...I crash my bike, leaving myself concussed and incredibly sore. It's just not my year. So what do I do? Well I started to crunch numbers the past few days. My "worst case scenario" numbers. I should amend that statement slightly. What WAS my "worst case scenario" numbers are now my best case, if I make it to race day numbers. With this never ending stream of times and situations clouding my brain, I found myself on Slowtwitch the other day. With all the drama surrounding the recent Spirit of Racine race, which I had planned to race before I broke myself, I had found myself reading through the forums. And I came across this: Re: IM - What happens after 17:00:00?

Yes there are many that finish later but why do they bother. As eloquently and convincingly determined by many on this board, they aren't real ironman if they finish after 14 hours. They are really just fat bastards who are only slightly better than all those sloth people who make health care go up. Actually they are worse because they make it hard for the real athletes to get into the good races. Those people make a mockery of everything that doing a race is about. I like to go back around 15 hours to laugh at them and tell people around me that those poor saps don't even know its over: Heck, I finished four hours earlier. Maybe had they not even bothered training for the run they would be faster.


Now to set this up, the initial question had seemed innocent enough: What happens after 17:00:00 (the IM cut off)? There were all sort of insightful posts and then that. Really?! Seriously! Are there people out there that really think that way? WTF?! I am kind of disgusted by this.

Do triathletes really think this way?