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”!