PJH road to Ironman UK: Reflections on the scale of the challenge

Sunday, 28 February 2010

Reflections on the scale of the challenge

After a good nights’ sleep I thought that it would be useful to get an early swim in today. I am not sure how far it will be useful to run today and so a swim would keep me to my weekly training hours. It was a good one (3 sets of 40 lengths or 3k) however there was some very strange politics from the "Fast lane Mafia". I switched into "their lane" when the one I was using became over crowded with people doing breaststroke. This I thought was fair since for the past 15 minutes they had all been chatting at the wall. When I did so one individual followed me and raced past me at the end. As I hit the wall another exclaimed "he beat you", I replied that I wasn’t aware that I was racing and carried on. Did it bother me, it shouldn’t but I guess it did since I am writing about it now!

All this aside I was hit by the fact that I was really tired when I finished and I hadn’t even completed Ironman distance (3.8k). This made me think, the swim is going to be a real drain on my energy and afterwards I will be biking for another 6+ hours and then running a marathon. I am wondering how on earth is my body going to adapt to that over the next 20 or so weeks? My goal all along has been to get to the marathon fresh and able to run the full distance, I am wondering how realistic this actually is?

This evening my calf was feeling ok and so I ventured out thinking of a maximum of 30 minutes very gentle pace, 20 yards down the road and I could feel the specific area of my calf begin to complain. Like a sensible boy I stopped turned around and walked home. I can see this is going to take longer that I thought.

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A maintenance challenge

After completing the Ironman the question of what next. I have a few half marathons for the Autumn and will probably enter a couple of duathlons. However, my main aim will be to keep building on the fitness that I have acheived. I appreciate that this next month will be about recovering. Although my legs are feeling pretty good, I have a pain in my right knee that will need some careful management. Tempting though it is I am not going to imediately enter another Ironman. I will give it a few weeks and give it some serious thought.

Why Ironman?

This is a big question and one that I am unlikely to be able to answer fully until maybe after the event. Maybe somehow it goes back to being useless at sports at school, picked last etc, being called “Porky” by my mates etc, but that can’t be all of it. Perhaps it is being surrounded by high achieving athletes at work who have and are still achieving amazing things, or a better understanding of the psychology of performance and setting and achieving goals. Perhaps it is a place to go to when life becomes difficult and the pain of training numbs that. The lyrics that come back to me time and time again are:
“This is my church, this is where I heal my hurts”
Or maybe it is all of these combined with entering the London Marathon in 1983.
When I was 22 I heard about the event and decide to enter, I had never been a runner, detesting cross country runs at school. However something appealed to me about the run.
Once I had completed it and done a couple of half marathons, I heard about the Ironman in Hawaii. In some ways I felt that my achievement had been eclipsed by the triathlon and somewhere deep inside me I knew that I had to do it. This was buried somewhere in my memory and only came out later in 2009 over 25 years later. In the spring a few friends from work convinced me to compete in the Henley sprint distance triathlon which I did. I then started open water swimming really enjoying the distances. My belief in my ability to swim began to grow and two friends from work who had completed the Ironman quite separately said that they believed that I could do it. It was then that my memory of hearing about Kona was awoken and the question “Can I do it?” came into my head. Since then other distances have emerged but for some reason they seem to be only preparation for the full distance. I if wonder once I have completed the event I August will that feel complete until I have made my way to Kona to do the original. Who knows?

PJH road to Ironman UK

Sunday, 28 February 2010

Reflections on the scale of the challenge

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