Getting down to it!

I now have less than four weeks until the Ironman and training is going well. I knocked out about 800 km of biking, 160 km of running and 28 km of swimming in the past two weeks, all squeezed in around a fairly hectic work/life schedule. Two more weeks of this, and then it will be time to ‘taper’ – the process of resting-up, refueling, and recovering from the hard weeks of training that precede the event. A good taper can really boost performance, but tapering for too long can leave the mind and body feeling sluggish, so the key is to squeeze just enough out of the training phase, but not so much that you leave your best performances on the road behind you.

            Partly because I’ve been keeping fairly unsociable training hours (out at 4am some days) I’ve done almost every session alone. One of the tricky parts of this has been motivating myself to crank-out long hard sessions and not lose focus on keeping the tempo high. I’ve also been running directly after each bike ride, and last week I stretched these runs out from 5km the week before to 10km. On Saturday, for example, I biked 150km hard (in a little under 4.5 hrs) and then ran a hilly 10km (in 46 mins). It was an especially hot day (about 30oC), so finding the drive to do this required me to dig deep. Sunday’s long run (30km) was also tough, as my legs were tired from Saturday’s bike-run session, and required a lot of goal setting to get through it in good form. I’ve become quite the expert in this, and play all kinds of mind games to get through the sessions, from simply setting multiple distance goals by carving-up the total distance into bite-sized chunks, to telling myself that a 30km run is short… compared with the 42km run I’ll do in the Ironman :-)… I can only imagine how bizarre all this must seem to those of you who don’t do endurance sport!!

The upside to pushing through mental barriers is that even though racing the Ironman will be harder than any of the training sessions I’ve done, I should be well prepared to find the extra stuff you need to do well on race day. If all goes well (including the weather), I hope to break the magic 10 hr barrier for the Ironman; the closest I’ve come is a 10hr 21min Ironman 19 years ago (when I was 22), and I’ve done come close to that time a couple of other times in the past few years. I’d be lying if I said going sub-10 wouldn’t mean a lot to me, but I also know that doing so will require a near perfect day, some elements of which I can’t control (like the weather and ‘mechanicals’ on the bike). But as Wayne Gretzky once said, “you miss 100% of the shots you never took”!

Things are starting to hot-up!

I started back at work the day after returning from holiday in France, with a two day meeting in Copenhagen to plan a large grant application for the European Union's (EU) Horizon 2020 funding call. The project, focused on the effects of pregnancy diabetes on the metabolic and cardiovascular health of the offspring, is being led by colleagues at the University of Copenhagen and I've been asked to collaborate, along with other scientists from across Europe. The EU will give a number of grants this year (of around 6 million EUR each) to European scientists working in the public health sector. Our project passed through the first stage recently and within the next couple of weeks we'll need to submit the second stage proposal for full evaluation. Around 170 other projects also passed through to round 2, so there will be fierce competition. Fortunately I'm also involved in three other projects that made it through to the second round (all related to diabetes research in one way or the other), so the odds are reasonably good that at least one will get funded. 

The down-side to being involved in international research (there are many up-sides I should add) is that the Swedish vacation month of July doesn't end-up being much of a vacation. So I've worked full-time since getting back from France. Despite the hectic work schedule, I've also managed to fit in 20 hours of training this week :-) This included running 16 km at 5am on Monday and Thursday mornings, biking  200 km to and from work on Wednesday (early enough to get me to my desk by 8am!!!), and biking and running 150 km and 30 km respectively during this weekend, not to mention several kilometers of swimming in the evenings and a bunch of other shorter runs and bikes slotted in here and there. 

Clearly my Ironman training has gone up a gear - and it needed to, with only 5 weeks left until race day!! - but for now at least I feel strong and motivated, and I've seen tangible improvements in my fitness. The 150 km bike ride yesterday was a bit of a test, with the aim of riding a little below Ironman race pace for the duration (target time 5hrs 15 mins for the 180 km), which I achieved without too much discomfort, followed by a 5 km run as soon as I'd finished the bike session. This morning's 30 km run was another test, to see if I could run a good bit quicker than race pace with tired legs - my target in the Ironman is a 3hr 30 min marathon, and my pace today was around 3hr 19min pace. So for now at least, all seems to be going well. I'll end today with a 3 km sea swim.

Tomorrow is a rest day, and on Tuesday I head up to northern Sweden to work on a huge pile of grant reviews for the Swedish Research Council and to write a paper about a new public health genetics study we have underway called VIKING. When we land, my plan is to bike the 115 km from the airport to where we'll stay for the next week, followed by a 10 km run. Let's see how that goes!!

Ironman France 2014

My plan to update this blog weekly fell down in the past couple of weeks, but I’ll aim to get back on track now.

The chateau in Le Bar-sur-Loup

A week after returning from San Francisco (see blog entry below) I headed down to the south of France with two of my three kids to meet Camilla my wife and our other son. We landed at Nice airport very late on Friday night and sped up the windy roads into the foothills of Alpes-Maritimes to a 10-bedroom chateaux in Le Bar-sur-Loup, a small and beautiful alpine village. Over the next few days, about a dozen friends and their kids also arrived to share the vacation with us.

About 18km into the run

The vacation was a little different to the norm though, as Camilla was competing in Ironman France, one of the toughest and most established Ironman events on the circuit. Like all Ironman triathlons, competitors swim 3.8 km (in the sea), bike 180 km and run a full marathon (42.2 km). One of the things that makes the Ironman in Nice one of the toughest though is the 2,000m+ elevation competitors soak-up on the bike course, as they climb up into the Pre Alpes. To make the event tougher still, a big storm hit the region on race day, leaving the alpine roads slick with water and strewn with rock fall – and especially treacherous to descend! Nevertheless, Camilla had a great race, cranking out a 4hr 10min marathon to end the event in 10^th position in her age-division. With two Ironman events under her belt for 2014, Camilla now tops the Ironman points ranking for Swedish women!

My boys after finishing the IronKids event,
which takes place on Ironman day

Like me, Camilla is also fund-raising! Whilst I’m raising money for diabetes research, Camilla is raising money and awareness for childhood cancer. Almost exactly three years ago, Camilla was diagnosed with an aggressive form of skin cancer called malignant melanoma. About a week after the diagnosis, before we knew if the cancer had spread and how bad the situation was, she decided to sign-up for an Ironman. A bold move, not least because she’d never done a triathlon of any length at that stage and couldn’t swim a length! The summer was stressful, with four weeks spent waiting for the full diagnosis, which felt like an eternity, followed by surgery, and months of recovery from complications, during which Camilla couldn’t train at all. But by January 2011, she’d had the all clear and set about learning to swim!! After a couple of months of tuition, she acquired the basic skills and her Ironman training began in earnest. By June 2011, Camilla had packed in as much swimming, biking and running as any working mother of three young kids whose husband travels perpetually could ever hope to!! I stood on the beach at the start of the event not far from the athletes enclosure, trying to feel completely confident Camilla would cross the finish line but anxious that she might have bitten off more than she could chew!! Unbelievably though Camilla didn’t just finish the Ironman on that day, but ranked high enough to qualify for the Swedish women’s team the following year for the ITU Long Distance Triathlon World Championships, where she finished 9^th in her division and top Swedish woman. It’s safe to say, she’s gone from strength to strength, placing top 10 in all of the international events she’s entered since, topping out with a 7^th place finish at Ironman Switzerland last year. So if you wondered why I’ve found my passion again for triathlon, the answer is perhaps now clear – when you spend time around such an inspirational person as Camilla, it rubs off!

A very happy and proud family at the end of the Ironman

And so it is that for the past three summers, the deal between me and Camilla is that she competes early season, and I focus on work and taking care of the kids, and once she’s done, I pack in a few weeks hard Ironman training and compete later in the summer. So the day after Ironman France, eight weeks before my Ironman event in Copenhagen, I woke early and set out on the bike for a ride up into the mountains, and biked and ran daily for the remainder of the holiday!