In my home office closest, gathering dust and the fur of my support staff, sits 23 years’ worth of Triathlete Magazines, 1987 to 2009. Recent life events had me staring at the carefully dated boxes. What made me start keeping the magazines and why are they still in my house?

1950’s fitness guru, Jack Lalanne, argued wrongly that “I can’t die; it will ruin my reputation.” The American icon lasted 96 years and three months before he passed quietly in January of 2011. At the root of any discussion on the cultural history of health and fitness, you will still find the name, Jack Lalanne. Increasingly, however, Jack Lalanne’s nine and one-half decade tenure stands anomalous to a troubling trend of athletes dying before their time.  

On the last weekend of August, 2015, like thousands of other men and women across the globe, young and old, rich and poor, in all shapes, sizes and colors, across the continuum  of fitness from barely there to fiercely (and for most, naively so) competitive,  my 23-year old daughter McKenna finished her first triathlon. It was a lowly sprint-distance race held on a somewhat awkward course in Oakland, California. The finish line announcer didn’t call her name. There was not, in fact, a finish line announcer.

We thought our readers would enjoy this look back at Mike Pigg by Scott Tinley, on the occasion of Mike's well-deserved induction into the USAT Hall of Fame. -- Ed 

MIKE PIGG TRAINED HARD. Where Molina did mega-miles and Dave Scott applied NorCal mystique and Mark Allen used a focused periodization, Pigg suffered. In the annals of raw, gut-level, in-your-face work, Pigg stands atop the pinnacle of journeyman efforts.