Ironman epic a painful and sadistic sideshow

A mate once told me the best way to experience sailing was to stand in a cold shower tearing up $20 notes.
I shudder to think what he'd have said about Ironman New Zealand in Taupo on Saturday but it wouldn't have been pretty.
Something along the lines of swimming up Huka Falls in July might have come close? Maybe playing bullrush for 10 hours with a herd of walrus?
Whatever it was, the teeming rain throughout the day turned the 226km triathlon epic into a sadistic and painful sideshow. And that was just for the spectators.
The most vivid memory I have is looking up from the laptop at 10pm in the hotel room, peering through the bucketing haze and spying a wrung-out string of staggering figures trudging out on the second of two 21km laps.
The Taupo Lakefront, usually riddled with hardy supporters, was barren as another heavy rain-bomb swept through, a full 15 hours after the race had started.
Our hardy ironman heroes, deliriously dreaming of the finish line, were utterly alone and miles from comfort, let alone home. My pity showered down on them, mingling with the heavy droplets of water ... then I shrugged and crawled into bed.
Earlier in the day, after the 1500 athletes had exited the foggy lake waters and headed out on the bike towards the equally hazy climes of Reporoa, I'd marvelled at the spectacle.
Grim-faced elite riders flashed by, pursued by the wafer-thin age-groupers, then the sturdy former rugby/netball-playing tri-guys and gals and finally the good old Kiwi battlers, bringing up - and nursing - a stretched and painful rear.
How could some of these people put themselves through this? It looked as if a few would've struggled to bike down to the nearest shops for a family sized bucket of KFC, let alone perform two 90km loops along a sodden white line, then run a full marathon.
For these weekend warriors, it's much less about athletic ability and much more about sheer bloody-mindedness. But why is it such a rite of passage for so many people to tick the ironman box, then move on?
If they were after some form of meaningful self-discovery, why not join the SAS? Go base-jumping in Tripoli? Become the face of the NRL?
I've never experienced such a profound sense of superiority watching a sporting event as I did when I zoomed past the soggy cycling hordes while on the back of a media motorbike.
That attitude, of course, says as much about my own training ethic and goal-setting abilities as it does about the futility of the long-distance athlete. I will not ever be an ironman, which may mark me for everlasting damnation at the gates of multisport heaven but will guarantee my knees sing my praises for eternity.
I respect those who go out and do it but I'll never get the ironman buzz. On my sporting to-do list, it's up there with bodybuilding and ballroom dancing.
Give me a slippery multihull with a full spinnaker, a sizeable Lotto win and an industrial paper-shredder any day.