This Saturday (October 9th 2010) around 2000 iron men and women will compete to finish the Ford Ironman World Championship Triathlon in Hawaii. This post is not about a celebrity participating in the event; after all, would anyone famous other than sports celebrities be able to compete unless they won the ticket lottery?

Obviously, this post is not about a celebrity with a disease either so please don’t be misled by our website name.

Matt Cutts, one of Google’s first 10 employees and definitely a celebrity in the search engine business, seems to be perfectly healthy and is certainly a very friendly guy provided you are not an internet spammer.

It comes as something of a surprise that this busy man finds any time at all to exercise given his heavy work schedule. Apart from his normal work as Google’s chief anti-spam officer, he spends a large part of every day (and night) twittering , recording YouTube-videos for Google, speaking at conferences like SES and SMX and also blogging about personal and professional subjects.

Frankly, when I stood next to him in person in 2008 he did look a bit on the chubby side, but maybe that’s just heavy bones. In preparation for next year’s triathlon he has managed not only a regular gym workout, but in order to be fully fit he must have spent at least 2-3 hours circuit training every week for many months.

No one (unless in really, really good shape or with particularly good genes) can finish a triathlon without repeatedly grinding out laps in a pool, cycling at high tempo on the road and completing several 4-mile-runs every week. And he did not too badly at all as his Sprint Triathlon times show:

Total time in the TriForReal was 1:53:02 for 700 yard swim, 18 mile bike, 4 mile run (which is equivalent to 640 metres Swimming, 29 Kilometres biking and 6.5 Kilometres running)

That breaks down into
Swimming completed in 15 minutes
Biking completed in 51:53 minutes
Running completed in 40:00 minutes

Not bad Matt! I did not do much better in my triathlon this year although I tried very hard!
Good luck next time when you go for the Iron Man!

Click here to read about how to avoid triathlon troubles and train safely.

Images: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Matt_Cutts-uncropped.jpg, private