If you don’t know, Mike Reilly is the Voice of Ironman. Ironman has its own Get Ready to Rumble; it’s Gentleman, Start Your Engines; just, it occurs at the end of the contest. More notably, it’s not about a small few who’re about to commence their competition, but about thousands, after they’ve survived it. Reilly has uttered that phrase more than 400,000 times and Finding My Voice is the story behind that phrase, and the stories of those to whom he says it, by the man saying it.

Here comes another book from our founding generation and why not? We like to write about ourselves! But after finishing Finding My Voice you’ll realize the one person Reilly’s book is not about is Reilly. Ironman is the accelerant that grants ordinary people the path to achieve the extraordinary, and a large part of Finding My Voice describes the dreams animating the journeys that have ended with, You Are An Ironman.

I found out a lot of things I didn’t know, such as, when that phrase was first spoken by him. It was spontaneous, not planned, strategized, nor focus grouped. But it was instant lightning based on the crowd reaction. So, what does he say the first time a woman crosses? He describes the thought process, a decision he needed to make in seconds, not minutes.

That phrase generated its own head of steam, and meant much to many, such as for the couple who asked him to record, “You are MARRIED!” for their wedding ceremony. For the deaf athlete who wasn’t looking at Reilly when he signed to her as she crossed, he videoed his message after the fact, letting her know she was an Ironman.

If you’ve been touched by the Hoyts, John Blais, and others, you’ll read their stories with details of which you were probably unaware. About Jim Howley, full blown AIDS, dying, but got off the couch to train for an Ironman. He credits the extreme training we do – and that he did – with keeping him alive until Pharma caught up.

As I read Reilly’s book, with all the stories of redemption and healing, it occurred to me that for every life that is lost in the pursuit of our avocation, by a death on the water, or a cyclist getting struck by a motorist, there is another, or several, or many, stories about lives saved. Many are told here, in this book. Soldiers returning from combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, for whom it was a bullet in the brain except, maybe, how about this thing called Ironman? Wait until you read about Frank Farrar. Or maybe not a life saved, but a life optimized, as with the case of a chain smoking, overweight office worker, who went on to win the Hawaiian Ironman 6 times.

Reilly reminds us that not only are ordinary people made extraordinary via Ironman, but the reverse is true. How many marathon winners stick around to greet finishers up through midnight? But Ironman’s winners do, and Reilly singles out Jordan Rapp, who won Ironman Arizona, broke the course record, broke his bike course record, who left the finish to return a couple of hours later with a box full of In-N-Out Burgers for the finish line workers.

I lost my cookies 4 times while reading this book, and I’m not the sentimental type. That’s the nature of our sport, and what Reilly means to it. There were lot of stories I didn’t know. Including one about Jordin Sparks. You’ll have to read the book to find out about it!

Ironman, like all really successful events, is headlined by someone with a heart. (This is why modern business interests can’t engineer a successful mass participation event as a start-up.) Mike Reilly first announced Ironman in 1989 and that was fortuitous for a reason beyond his announcing talent: From Ironman’s beginning to that year, Valerie Silk was Ironman’s heart. She sold the event in 1989 and exited, and in retrospect the heart of that race passed onto Reilly and has been there since. Here’s a phrase buried somewhere in the middle of the book: “It’s all about the athletes; they are all that matter.”

Twelve or fifteen years ago I remember watching the Ironman from a little way out on the Queen K, hours after the first finishers. It was already pitch dark. As runners made their way back to Palani Road all I could see where green glow sticks, back when the organizers tied a glow stick around everyone’s waist. All I saw was a river of bouncing green glow sticks. (Not people, just the sticks.) It struck me that every one of those bouncing lights represented a story, a journey, a dream. Maybe that was the moment when the Ironman changed for me; when I understood that the Ironman’s center of gravity was not the podium, but that several-thousand-person river of individual dreams.

Reilly describes each athlete in this glow stick river as, “The mortal god who just lassoed the moon and wrestled it to the ground.” Finding My Voice offers the best description of I’ve read that captures what we do; why we love it; and why—to so many questions that might be asked of us—this is answer we give.

Mike Reilly: Finding My Voice, with Lee Gruenfeld, foreword by Bob Babbitt, is 232 pages, hardbound for $27.99, Paperback for $19.99, Kindle $8.99. There’s an audio version coming, and if there’s one person whose voice you might like to hear narrating his own story, I can’t imagine who else it might be. You can buy the book here as well, and hear a passage from the upcoming audio version.