This one’s kind of a gimme: the author is a family friend (my brother and I went to high school with his kids) in addition to being my stepfather’s former medical partner. Pendergrass is about 10 years younger than my stepdad, and has always been substantially more athletic, so to say people were SURPRISED when he announced he’d start doing triathlons in his sixties would be incorrect. What surprised them was his plan: to do six of them, at the big-boy Ironman level, one on each (populated) continent, all before his 70th birthday.

N.B., if you didn’t bother to click that link, what “Ironman” means in this context:

• 2.4 miles of open water swimming, followed by
• 112 miles on a bike, followed by
• a goddamn marathon, i.e. 26.2 miles running.

Yeah. Right. I’m 43, and can’t image one of them, let alone six, but John nails it. In Arizona, Brazil, Switzerland, New Zealand, and South Africa, he finished well ahead of the official cutoff time. Only in his last outing — at a miserably hot site in China — did he come up at all short. But even then he finished the race. That’s amazing and incredible.

The story is interesting, and it’s a fun read, but it also shows that the author is a physician by trade, not a writer. That matters less when you’ve got something clear to tell, and John certainly does. Obviously, too, this is the sort of thing a man in his sixties can really only contemplate if he’s already pretty well off — tri bikes are very expensive, to say nothing of the travel involved. It’s hard to gauge if this would be fun to read if you don’t know John, but obviously enough people think so that Random House bought the book, so there’s that.