Over the course of nearly fifteen hours, Chris Bintliff swam, biked and ran through wind and rain to complete the 2006 Ironman Wisconsin. During the race, he had more than a dozen people shooting photos and video of his progress, resulting in a virtual mountain of raw images.
"A few weeks after Ironman I sat down to organize everything, to put it in some kind of presentable way to share with all of them and with kind of a scrapbook in mind," he says.
What resulted was Becoming Ironman, an hour-long documentary about the triathlon.
A web designer based in Minneapolis, Bintliff completed the documentary several weeks after the triathlon and subsequently published it online. He also shared it with his readers at Becoming Ironman, his training journal.
"It's been really fun to share it with people who are training for their own races, or are triathletes, and stumble upon it," says Bintliff. "More personally, Ironman was (as it is for all athletes, especially first-timers) a major life event for me, more than it was just simply a race. As I got to working on the video, I found myself wanting to express that however I could -- when I began, I thought it would just be race-day footage, but ultimately it became about the whole three year journey." He also created it as not only a record for posterity, and as a thanks to his family and friends who supported him through his training and in the rainy conditions during the race.
The prologue along with the rest of Becoming Ironman follows below.
