5 days to go!!!

I'm staring to get ground rush!!! After months of training, race-day is nearly upon me (or me on it). The weather this week is appalling, with high winds, torrential rain, and the decisive drop in the air and water temperature. I live about 100 km from Copenhagen, and unfortunately the weather is essentially the same there. But, if I'm going to find the conditions challenging, I'm damn sure others are going to find it crushing, and that difference gives me an edge over some of the field at least!!!

This week has involved light and easy sessions of biking on the indoor trainer and then heading out for short, fast runs, followed by a 1 or 2 km swim later in the day. Nothing too strenuous, but enough to keep me on my toes.

One week to go

In exactly one week from now I'll be out on the bike section of Ironman Copenhagen. I did my final hard session yesterday, a 90km bike in ferociously windy conditions followed by an 8 km run. All felt good, with the bike pace close to race day target, and the run much faster (although obviously a much shorter distance!). This morning I swam 4.4 km in a local lake, going through the Ironman swim distance (3.8 km) in a little over an hour. So from a fitness perspective, I'm feeling good. 

The bad news is that Hunter, my 6 year old son, woke-up this morning with a hacking cough, so the pre-Ironman challenge for me is to try to dodge his bugs!!! Bring in the 'juicer', which Camilla bought yesterday. I'm sat here blogging in the kitchen, as Camilla and my daughter Grace blend vegetables, citrus fruits and berries, to make a variety of nutritious drinks, which hopefully will help cut short any unwelcome sore throats or coughs I might pick-up this week.

The weather has also turned autumnal, with an air temperature of 14oC, rain and high winds forecast for the rest of this week. Let's see if things improve by next Sunday for race day! If not, then the race strategy will change. The objective of going under 10 hours, whilst still possible, will take a back seat, with my primary focus being on performing well in the conditions and not letting myself (or those who've supported me in the past few months) down. This will mean finding my physical and mental limits, and making sure that when I cross the line I have nothing left to give. Whatever time I end up finishing in will just have to be good enough! Let's see!

    

11 days to go

Back from my first session of the day, a 3.2 km (rather choppy) sea swim. The wind was blowing quite hard this morning down in the bay, but I had a pretty good swim nonetheless. Back at my desk now working on a grant application, but will find time for a bike-run session later today!!

In the bank

Two weekends have elapsed since my last blog, during which I've covered about 1200 kms in the water, on wheels, and by foot!! I ratcheted the training volume up again to a final big weekend, two days ago. 

The weekend before last (Aug 2nd) I headed out early Saturday morning and biked the full Ironman distance (180 km) on a hilly (1200 m elevation) course. It was dry but windy, so the conditions were far from great, but I came home in about 5hrs30mins, which is about 15 or 20 minutes slower than my target for race day. As soon as the bike was over, I changed shoes and went out on a 15 km run, averaging around 3hrs15min marathon pace (my race day target is just over 3hrs30, so the pace was all good!!!). The next morning, I woke early and ran 30 kms at around 3hrs20 marathon pace, followed by another 7 km:s at a similar pace later in the day. So the grand total was 180 km biking and 52 kms of running (not to mention the one hour trek I did with my boys on Saturday afternoon!!). That was a big weekend, after a fairly hard week's training, so even I was starting to think I'd gone crazy... until this past weekend that is :-)

Last week I cranked out a bunch of big bike-run sessions with a few swims here and there. I felt strong and light on my feet, running  faster directly after a hard bike than I have done for a couple of decades! As Saturday approached, I knew this would be my last hard weekend's training before race day. I've had a busy summer with many major work deadlines, as well as keeping some time reserved to spend with my family during the kids' summer break. So seeing the end of the training process was something of a relief, as juggling these three big commitments has been a major challenge for me and my wife! 

I got my head down early on Friday night, skipped setting the alarm and resolved that whatever time I woke-up would be the start of my last long weekend. Early the next morning, my eyes creaked open and I squinted at the digital clock next to the bed, just making out the digits 03:30... damn, it was early, but a deal's a deal, so I crawled out of bed, threw my bike gear on and some food down my throat, and set out on the bike just after 04:00 hrs. I'd arranged to ride the last section with my wife Camilla (who's also training for another Ironman in October), so I wanted to get as far through the 180 km ride as possible before she set out to meet me at 07:00. 

As it transpired, first light wasn't until 05:30 and it was pitch black out, which hadn't crossed my mind the night before, so I rode in the darkness for the first 40 or 50 km. The wind was picking up again and the hills seemed steeper than the previous week, perhaps because of too little sleep! At around 110 km I spotted Camilla biking towards me. As she u-turned to join me, a surge of motivation kicked in driven by the sense of relief that I'd have company for the next couple of hours at least. 

The final climb on the circuit is about 20 km:s from home, dragging up over Hallansåsen (a ridge-back in northern Skåne county) for a few km:s. Camilla had sat in behind me since joining the ride some 60 km:s earlier, but as she occasionally pulled-up alongside me and then sat back in, I could tell she was growing impatient with the pace. As we hit the final climb, she edge-up to my front wheel and flouted a slightly mischievous grin that said "GAME ON"!!! The next few km:s hurt like hell, as she pummeled my legs, lungs, and ego by keeping one or two wheel-lengths ahead of me for almost the entire climb!! Together we raced up and over the summit, and eventually down the other side and across the flat land for 15 km:s until we were home. Finish time a few minutes slower than the previous week (5hrs37)... but much more fatigued - mentally and physically!!! And then the run...

In days before, I'd determined  I should up the distance for the 'brick' (bike-to-run) to 20 km:s, which seemed like a good idea at the time. As I biked the last few km:s into a headwind home, all I could think was that 20 km was a dumb idea, but that I should at least put on my running shoes and go round the block, or I'd be truly irritated with myself the rest of the weekend. So off I went... 1 km past by, then 2 and then 3... "seriously", I thought, "you can't turn round now"... ..."run at least 10k!". But then 15km seemed like a better idea, to equal the previous week's distance, and by the time I'd got to the turn at 7.5 km, another 2.5 km seemed doable. So by the time I arrived home, I'd run the 20 km I'd initially planned, and at 3hrs20 marathon pace. Not too bad considering how tired I'd felt earlier in the day, and I was back home by noon, in time to spend the afternoon with Camilla and kids, followed by a dinner party with friends (although I wasn't exactly the life and soul of the party!).

Sunday morning came 'round quickly, and before I was properly awake I was out running again; this time a 30 km run (15 km alone, and the second 15 km with a friend - Viktor). As I approached the half-way point, I was knocking along at just below 3hrs20 marathon pace, but with Viktor feeling in high spirits, this soon picked up considerably, and the final 5 kms were close to the 3hr marathon mark. A quick shower, breakfast, and I headed out with the family on an excursion to some old ruins on the coastline where the kids love to climb, and back home by 5pm for the second run of the day. 

This final session of the 'last big weekend' would be a fast 12km run. The wind was blowing pretty hard as I stepped out, and during the first km I felt sluggish, with the 50 km:s of running and 180 km:s of biking of the past 36 hrs lingering in my legs. But as I warmed up, so did the pace, and soon I was close to 3hr marathon pace, with the final 2 km:s around 2hrs40 pace, as planned. And then that was it, 62 km:s of running and 180 km:s of biking were over and so too was most of a six week Ironman training odyssey, all in the bank! 

These last 2 weeks will involve less mileage and more rest, which is called a "taper". Still quite some sessions to go, but I'm now essentially ready for the big day on August 24th! More to follow...         

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!