They say imitation is the highest form of flattery. But I am not flattered, I am just angry.  Look, I am not the best triathlete out there, but I am proud of my writing.  I am learning, reading, working so that each time I can become better at it.  My effort has value.  I give it value.

So when I see a Blog Post (now removed) reviewing the author’s experience at Miami Man Half IronMan I am all over it!  After all, I posted my race recap early this week; you can read it here.  It’s fun to chat with other people about how their race went, it is even more fun to read other people because there is more detail and you can really follow them through their race.

Except that I began reading and things sounded vaguely familiar.  Am I imagining this?  I gave the author the benefit of the doubt.  Then I came across this passage …

“If you follow feet, you draft during the swim, which makes your swimming effort easier.  Miami Man has a two-loop swim.  You swim the first loop of .6 miles, get our of the water, go through the timing mat, and return into the water for another .6 miles.  As I got out of the first loop, I heard people cheering for me, I heard my Coach and my friends but was very confused, I paid attention to the time on my watch which was 18 minutes, this put me exactly where I….”

Some words are exactly like mine “If you follow feet” and “Miami Man has a two-loop swim”.  Okay, so its hard to come up with different ways of saying the same thing.

Then came this:

“…finally started to get into my rhythm stroke, stroke, breath, stroke, stroke, breath.  I started going faster again, passing more people and before I knew it, the swim was over, I finished in 38 minutes which was about my target time.”

Other than the finishing time, those are my words! Really? You could not have come up with a better way of saying “stroke, stroke, breath”  and “before I knew it the swim was over?”

But the clincher was speaking about the wetsuit strippers, and then even copying the way I wrote how I came back to transition.  Though I must give myself credit … I wrote “discombobulated” to describe my wetsuit stripper experience … she chose “confused”, and really … which one do you think is more descriptive?

“I headed out of the water, and again I could hear my friends cheering for me.  I took my goggles off and heard someone yelling about the wetsuit strippers.  I didn’t even know they had wetsuit strippers for the race, someone yelled to go to the strippers, and when I looked confused they turned me around told me to lay out on the ground and pulled my wetsuit off as quickly as possible.  I then ran into transition confused from the whole experience, I also …”

Maybe I am literally reading too much into this.  But I know the author, and I know for a fact she would have read my post.  I don’t think I am an incredible writer, but I do think that I put effort into this, an effort that is my own.

Plagiarism is theft, and right now I am feeling cheated.