57: Reflections

The long lapse between posts, while not outright in revealing the last 6 weeks of my life, quietly speaks in its own way. The weekly volume has gone from 10 hours a week, to 12, then to 14, and now to almost 16. Peak mileage totals for running are now 30+ miles per week, and nearly 150 miles per week on the bike. Swims are never less than an hour. To be blunt, shit is getting real.

Rather than a standard post, I’ll reflect on a few smaller items that have occurred since the last post:

-After playing a waiting game with the oil spill in the Gulf, and some serious concerns as to whether IM Florida would even happen, things are looking much more positive. In the last week I booked my flight and a place to stay, right on the beach in Panama City, half a mile from the start/finish lines.

-The training is going well. I am 6 weeks into the 12-week Endurance Nation Ironman plan. Lots of Zone 3 rides and runs, and everything else is very easy or very hard. It has changed my perspective on training, for the better. Before I thought I knew what a hard effort was on my bike, but I can barely see straight after many of the EN workouts. Same with the runs, all the tempo/work portions in the beginning, so that I am putting in the final miles on tired legs. Worth every penny for the self-trained athlete who doesn’t have the resources to hire a coach.

-The fear of “can I really do this?” hasn’t faded, but neither has the excitement I am feeling for November 6th. There is no doubt I am in the best shape of my life, running faster times than I have in 10 years at almost any distance, and having no trouble putting in 100+miles at a time on my long bike rides. But I have no idea if all of this will be enough. If I arrived at the start-line with it being a fore-gone conclusion that I would finish strong and all would be well, I guess there would be no point to the training. That is obviously the goal, but the element of chance is the ultimate decider, and racing for 11-13 hours leaves a lot of time for things to go wrong.

-The Marathon…where IM dreams go to die. After my long rides on Saturdays, sometimes totaling 5-6 hours, I transition to run for 6-7 miles. I can’t get over how shredded I am after these workouts, and shudder to think that I’d still have to run another 20 miles if this were the actual race. There is going to be a time during Ironman when I cross into a very dark place…a place I have never experienced, and quite likely, I will never find myself again. It could be at mile 85 of the bike, or mile 14 of the run. How am I going to respond?


Apologies for the Existential ramblings, but when you start to spend most of your waking hours on a bike or pounding the trails, you have a lot of time to think. And in my case, I have 57 more days.