Jay and Michelle

Who we are

We're Jay and Michelle Miller: married, in Honolulu, both Army veterans, both age-groupers. We race the local calendar on Oahu plus a few things we get on a plane for. Jay's the faster engine in the house, and Michelle's PRs are the story.

Jay's day job is Hawaii mortgages and has been for a long time. It has its own website, and this one is never going to link there, because the minute a racing log starts trying to sell you something it stops being a racing log.

Michelle's background is hers to tell, and she'll tell the parts she wants to. On this site she's the person who put a marathon on a birthday, won her age group at a 10K, and ran a 2:12 half with Jay sitting on her shoulder.

How it started

Jay did a few triathlons in 2005 and 2006 and didn't like them. In 2014 he talked Michelle into the Honolulu Triathlon, then the Tin Man two months later, and we weren't really training for either one. We hadn't decided this was a life, it was a weekend with a timing chip, and it didn't take.

In December 2021 Michelle watched the Honolulu Marathon and said we should run it the next year for Jay's fiftieth. He'd never wanted a marathon, and the longest run in the house at the time was the Great Aloha Run, 8.1 miles. We trained anyway. Hibiscus Half in May 2022 was the first half for both of us, and the marathon that December was the birthday.

Then 2023 happened: the Honolulu Triathlon, raced for real this time, Michelle's half-marathon PR, Jay's first 70.3 in the lava at Honu, 112 miles around Oahu, the whole Marathon Readiness Series, and the Honolulu Marathon again. We filmed every week of it. A full Ironman was never part of the plan through any of that, and for those first years we were intimidated by the thought of one. It took a hurricane canceling our Augusta 70.3 in 2024, and several weeks of agonizing over the options IRONMAN offered us instead, before we signed up for Texas. Going the full distance tells that story, and the years since are on the seasons pages.

The order matters more than any one race: a marathon first, then an Olympic, then a 70.3 on a hard course, then the bike distance and the swim distance on their own, and only after all of that the full. We didn't skip a step, and Start here has the whole order.

The camera and the log

The YouTube channel was Jay's idea, and so was the name. Michelle edits the videos and gets them ready to publish; Jay does most of the filming and most of the talking, because she's shy on camera. The channel is the camera. It has the bike rack at 4:45 a.m., the finish chutes, the family visits, and the blooper reel, one episode a week through 2023 and then race films and year-in-review cuts after that.

This site is the written log. It exists because a race shouldn't only live inside a thumbnail, and three years from now the sentence about what actually happened at mile 20 should still be findable, in words, with a date on it. The two link to each other, and neither one replaces the other.

The rules this site keeps

• No made-up results. If there's a time on a page, it's the official one, and if there's no time we didn't have it in front of us. We won't estimate a gun time to make a page look finished. Send us the official result and it goes up.
• No coaching and no medical advice. We write what we did, and we don't know your labs, so nothing here is a prescription.
• No funnel, for coaching, for mortgages, or for anything else. We don't sell electrolytes, and if a piece of gear gets named it's because we raced in it.
• Specifics over inspiration. A note about the humidity at a 5 a.m. start is worth more than a paragraph about believing in yourself, and we'll take the humidity every time.

Why bother writing it down

We started late, and we couldn't find the version of this written by people our age, in a place this hot, who weren't selling a plan, so we're writing it. If it gets one couple in their fifties to a start line upright, in the right shoes, with the argument about pace already settled, it did its job.