PJH road to Ironman UK: The New Forset and a Wake up call

Wednesday, 2 June 2010

The New Forset and a Wake up call

I set off early this morning for a 90 minute bike ride in the New Forest. The sun was just breaking through the early morning cloud and haze. It was great to be whizzing around the country lanes as the day started to warm up. Speed at around 16.7 mph. So steady but not fast.

When I made it back my attention turned to nutrition. I have a book on sports nutrition and I thought it might be useful to calculate how many calories etc I should be consuming a day and where they should be coming from. I was surprised to learn that (if my calculations are correct) I should be taking in 4500 calories per day. This is quite a shock when I consider that I cannot be eating that much and I wonder what effect it is having on my ability to train and perform. I need to give this some serious attention and look in to the powders and supplements etc that are available.

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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

Wednesday, 2 June 2010

The New Forset and a Wake up call

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