I ran across this quote at the beginning of Peter Matthiessen’s “Shadow Country”, a brilliant novel recommended to me by my friend Brian Hunt. I think it applies quite nicely to triathlon training, and more accutely, to the fact that the completion of an Ironman is much like like the swimming of ducks – no matter how smoothly it may appear to glide across the surface of the water, 99% of the work takes place out of view, known to no one but the duck.   

“Look at the stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without so much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”                                 – Jacob Riis