devashish_paul wrote:
Anyway, I do get the challenges and frustrations on the men's side. I did 12 Ironmans before my first KQ and missed several times by as little as 8 second to 5 minutes. You walk away beating yourself up about what you can do better. Many of my peers from that time with the dream of Kona walked away from the sport, so when they see slots rolling thru the women's field, it almost feels like "we" are getting slighted by "women". This is why we see the venom. Had I been less persistent and quite after Ironman number 10 thinking, "I will never qualify" and then sit here 17 years later seeing many women waltz to Kona, would I be as supportive of their road to Kona. I would like to say "yes", but we're human and there is a degree of jealousy in every human for someone who has or gets what we don't have. Whether someone is richer, faster, smarter, more beautiful, has better toys, a more attractive spouse, all star kids etc etc. We all have a degree of jealousy for what other humans have that we don't no matter how objective we want to be. So the volume of push back against women in Kona is explainable but that does not make it justified.
This goes back to one of the points I put in parenthesis in the article about this, but...
...nobody "deserves" anything. Nobody is getting slighted. It's merely a pivot in IM determining that it's more important to have an equitable solution versus an equal one.
I hope that at some point I get to qualify for one of the IMWCs. But I'm not going to begrudge somebody else for being able to get there because their circumstances are different.
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