I thought triathlon had reached critical mass in the wider culture a long time ago. If not with the Barry McDermott article on Tom Warren’s win at the 1979 Ironman in Sports Illustrated, the Julie Moss moment on ABC’s Wide World of Sports in 1982, the inclusion of the word triathlon in Webster’s Dictionary in 1983, the simultaneous emergence of four triathlon superheroes - ST, The Man, the Grip and The Terminator - the invention of the triathlon-specific wetsuit and tri-geometry bikes by Dan Empfield in the late 1980s, Les McDonald’s successful fight to include triathlon in the Olympic Games in 2000, then certainly the day triathlon superagent Murphy Reinschreiber handed out “San Diego Mafia” hats to his triathlon buddies in the sport’s epicenter just a few years ago.

Yadda yadda yadda. Everybody knows this.

But when you looked around in 2007, several amazing benchmarks of triathlon’s skyrocketing rise signaled a quantum leap for the once-niche sport. USA Triathlon membership had risen from a sleepy 19,000 in 2000 to 100,000 and climbing. The Ironman brand, which took nearly a decade to offer a second race, now had 21 other Ironman races on five continents and 32 Ironman 70.3 contests around the planet. The sport that originally offered a homemade statue for all Ironman finishers now offered $700,000 for a triathlon in Iowa, $500,000 for a U.S. series, and $560,000 for the Ironman Hawaii prize purse. There were several Ironman and Triathlon Halls of Fame, zillions of coaches online and in person and tons of triathlon clubs.

If you were a tri version of Rip Van Winkle who’d been napping for 20 years, you’d be in shock at how entwined in the popular culture swim-bike-run has become. Take the universal recognition of the shorthand term for our sport itself - tri.

Within the sport itself, there’s the Tri-Tech Institute in Tri Cities, a store for recreational walking biking and hiking; websites like Tri-Newbies Online and Tri It Now geared toward new and would-be triathletes; Triswimcoach.com to coach triathlon swimmers; informative interviews on Extreme Tri aka xtri.com “for triathletes who go the distance”; a multitude of stores such as Austin Tri-Cyclist, TRIALL3 Sports, Tri City Cyclists, TriSports.com, Tri-Tech Multisport Triathlon Shop and Tri Running and Walking.

Perhaps defining the core meaning of the word tri are the adventures of a character who calls himself Iron Kahuna on the popular blog "Tri-Geek Dreams." In several fascinating chapters, Iron Kahuna mixes weird facts with daring fantasies such as the day his blistered and bleeding feet forced him to cancel an afternoon run and a Pilates class, his subsequent surgery for Morton’s Neuroma, the day he dropped and shattered his iPhone after a workout, the stirring formation of the Tri Blogger Alliance. A recent highlight featured the author concocting an obviously fictional movie pitch where Iron Kahuna, played by look-alike actor Jason Statham, leaves his wife and four kids to run off with Melanie McQuaid to Canada. Missing the joke entirely, a horrified Mom Kahuna implores him to return to sanity and his family.

Well you get the drift.

In my enthusiasm for the current ubiquity of tri, I wandered through Google and found tri had burrowed even more deeply into human history than I’d imagined.

I was shocked to find a prehistoric reference to our modern sport - the Triassic Period was in all the encyclopedias! In 1834, German paleontologist Friedrich Von Alberti found fossils in northwestern Europe from 200 million years ago when corals, flowering plants, flying vertebrates and marine reptiles appeared and dinosaurs roamed a single super continental land mass until huge volcanic eruption triggered a mass extinction! Whoa, dudes!

And a mere 65 million years ago, humongous, herbivorous three-horned dinosaurs called Triceratops (later starring in movies like One Million Years B.C. and Jurassic Park, fighting with T-Rexes and weighing up to 13 tons) roamed the Rocky Mountains near Denver! Ancestors of the current triathlon Mecca of Boulder!

But I had no idea how deeply our sport has influenced an amazingly broad cross-section of society until I started looking up all the organizations and businesses which proudly borrowed the sacred shorthand term for our sport - tri.

Tri-ESS International is a social and support group for heterosexual cross dressers.

Then there was Anthony Braxton, who founded the Tri-Centric Foundation - which at first I thought was a brave attempt to free triathletes from an overwhelming obsession with their sport but turned out to be a simple philosophical society.

When I saw Tri-Tronics with illustrations of shock collars for sale, I immediately assumed they were designed to free Tri-Centrics from their addictions - until I saw they were actually tools for dog trainers who didn’t have the skills of Cesar Milan ...

Similarly, when I looked into “TRI - Treatment Research Institute: Science Over Addiction” I thought it was another brave attempt to get triathletes to calm down and spend some time with the family. I was a little let down when I realized it was an system to match drug-involved offenders with community corrections programs.

Still there was a plethora of other business names which offered an homage to our new sport. There as the Tri-Achnid video game where contestants “play as an endangered species of exopod on the verge of extinction in search of safe haven for his young tri-achnid who must fight way out of lithic alps.” TriStatePunk.com was a New Jersey punk band booking registry. Tri 102.5 was an FM radio station in Greeley, Colorado, offering “Best Variety of Lite Rock Favorites!” And, sadly, Tri-Quest was not a mission statement for triathletes trying to qualify for Ironman Hawaii. It’s a purebred goat breeding service which offers “Limited straws of semen” and a custom goat carrier.

For a moment, I was licking my lips anticipating a gourmet triathlon vegetarian meal until I realized that the Deli Chef Tri-Bean Salad was being touted by a FDA bulletin warning the public about some canned food at some Kroger stores which had the potential to be contaminated with botulism bacterium.

I finally realized that the entire world doesn’t revolve around triathlon when I came across the obviously non-sporting nature of Tri-State Basset Hound Rescue; Tri-County Crime Stoppers of Minnesota, Inc.; the Tri-State Swine Nutrition Guide for Michigan State, Ohio State and Purdue agriculture students; the Tri Cities Opera in Binghamton, New York; the Yale Forestry Department’s “TRI - Tropical Resources Institute,” which studies the environmental impact of deforestation and Tri Deltas who exist to promote the Greek system at our nation’s universities.

Finally, I saw many entries in an ancient dictionary that predated the very first triathlon on Fiesta Island in San Diego on September 25, 1974. I wondered: Was triathlon something that was anticipated in the collective unconscious?

“Triarchy” sounds a lot like a beneficent government ruled by triathletes rather than a country with three leaders. “Trichologist” sounds very much like a psychologist devoted to the stresses and neuroses of triathletes - rather than an expert on hair. “Tricorn” sounds like great triathletes from Iowa or a carbo-loading meal rather than a mythical three-horned beast. A “tricuspid’ sounds more like a triathlon love affair than an ordinary heart valve. The “Trilateral Commission” sounds better as an early, obscure version of USA Triathlon than a secret society of world-dominating bigwigs. A “tri-personality” is a natural as a sunny, healthy, aerobically fit person rather than person with three personalities. A “tritheist” sounds like someone who worships the sport of swim-bike-run rather than a person who believes in that precisely three gods rule the universe.

But what do I know? When I see the white winged horse galloping on screen before a major movie, I think that Tri-Star productions is a flick produced and directed by The Grip!