 
Prof Competes in
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Imagine swimming 2.4 miles, then biking 112 miles and then running 26.2 miles. Sound like fun?
Dr. Brian Mitchell, the Reinert endowed chair in natural sciences, doesn't have to imagine it. He recently competed in the Ironman Triathlon World Championship held along the Kona coast of Hawaii. The event is considered the granddaddy of ironman distance triathlons.
Mitchell, 63, previously had competed in several shorter triathlons, the first one in 1980.
Nearly 1,500 people participated in the Ironman event. It was televised on NBC in November.
"After the race I felt tired, but I felt reasonably good," he said. "I stayed at the finish line until midnight to watch the last finishers come in."
Other than a swollen Achilles tendon, Mitchell said he suffered no ill effects from the strenuous event.
Mitchell completed the race in 14 hours and 17 minutes. Just for the record, that was one hour and 36 minutes in the water, seven hours and 15 minutes on the bike and a run of five hours and 15 minutes.
"Relative to the other people, I do the worst on the bicycle," he said. "In Hawaii, however, because it follows a 112-mile bike ride, I found the run to be the most strenuous. But my time on the run portion, relative to the times of my peers, was better than for the two other events."
Mitchell's training began in earnest last winter, when he started lifting and working with weights. Training reached its peak this summer, when he would swim two nights a week with a master swimming group at the Mid County YMCA and one night a week at the Simon Recreation Center. He also biked three times a week, up to 200 miles. Then there was the running, too -- 35 to 40 miles a week, usually starting at 6 a.m. three mornings a week, with a group he regularly runs with at Forest Park.
Now that the event is over, Mitchell can relax a little.
"I've cut way back," he said in late November. "I just took my bike out of the shipping box."
Always the scholar and researcher, Mitchell also had business while in Hawaii.
He visited the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory in late October and met with its director to discuss a possible cooperative research project that could include the placement of a new beam balance tiltmeter in Hawaii. Mitchell and Sean-Thomas Morrissey recently obtained support from the National Science Foundation to develop that instrument, for which Morrissey already has constructed a working prototype. The goal of the research is to develop a means to remove tilt noise from signals recorded by modern broadband seismometers. Placement of an instrument in Hawaii will represent an extension of studies currently being conducted in the central United States.
The following weekend, Mitchell competed in the triathlon.
Will he compete again?
"I am considering it, perhaps two years from now," Mitchell said. "In my age group I was 20th out of 28. If I had been two years older, I would have been second in the 65 to 69 age group."
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