Triathlete Magazine's Guide To Finishing Your First Triathlon by T. J. Murphy (GRADE: B+)

I just finished Triathlete Magazine's Guide To Finishing Your First Triathlon by T. J. Murphy.

This book is for beginners, which is good because I am a beginner.

The book is essentially broken up into five parts:
(1) Introduction.  The gist of this section is this: YAY!  YOU CAN DO IT.  I liked reading this part.  It got me really excited about doing a TRI.
(2) The Equipment.  This section gives you a good overview of what you need to buy or have in order to do a SPRINT Triathlon.
(3) Nutrition.  I liked this section because it gave practical information as well as technical information.  Such as a guy should eat about 3000 Calories a day during training and this is an example of a typical meal, etc.
(4) Technique.  I really liked the section on swimming which is my weakest leg of the TRI.  The running and the cycling parts were fine but the information was basic.
(5) Thoughts and advice on the actual race itself.  I liked this section because it gave a good idea of race day and the common errors people make.  Hopefully, I won't make the same errors because I have the information in this book.

The book has thick glossy pages.  It is fully of great pictures.  It is written well.  This is the kind of book that a person will actually read cover to cover.  It has great information and it doesn't assume that a person knows anything about TRIATHLONS.

I have also bought some other technical books on TRIs.  I thought that this book was good to have because the writing is inspirational and the text doesn't assume that you know anything about the sport.  It was actually fun to read.

Overall, I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is trying out TRIs for the first time.  I thought it was a great book.  I grade this book a B+.  It would be an A if it had everything that I wanted in a TRI book but it did not.  I had to supplement the information in this book with other TRI books.  This book lacked a lot of the technical aspect of the sport but my guess is the author deliberately left that stuff out to make the book more accessible to beginners.  But overall, a great book.