Holy crap! In one month I'll actually be competing in an ironman. I still vividly remember thinking a few years ago several hours after I completed my first Half Ironman that I would still have several hours to go for a full ironman and there was no way in hell I would ever do a full. It wasn't that I didn't think I could, I had no desire to ever put myself through that kind of torture.
Well, It's amazing what a year of marriage will do to you. After a year of marriage, a full ironman can't be all that bad, it's only 15 hours or so :) haha!!!! I hope rachel reads this.
But I digress, it's truly amazing to look back and what I've accomplished so far. Before getting into this the longest I ever swam was about 1.5 miles or so. The longest bike ride I'd done was 68 miles. I had run a marathon, however, running a marathon first thing in the morning, after a nice breakfast, on fresh legs in 55 degree weather and dressed exactly how you want is a whole different affair than starting out in late afternoon, god knows what kind of weather, after 1.5 hours of swimming and 6.5-7 hours of cycling, and likely food deprived and slightly dehydrated. It's truly a war of attrition with yourself. Nothing can really prepare you for a run like that. Even in training you don't come anywhere near running that distance after a ride like that. Hell, you don't come anywhere near that distance with fresh legs. I'm likely to max out around 16 miles tomorrow, and that'll be first thing in the am on fresh legs.
That all being said, I'm feeling super confident. Some of my milestones so far are multiple 4000 yard pool swims, which is about 2.3 miles. I did an open water swim of about 2.2-2.3 miles in 1 hour 15 minutes and it felt super easy. I did my first 100 mile ride, as well as several 80-90 plus mile rides and although i didn't run far after them I did do short runs afterwards and my legs felt surprisingly good considering. When I look back several months ago, before training even began, I was looking at the weeks I'm going through now and wondered how I'd ever get through this month. I'm currently 3 workouts away from completing the most tortuous section of the training schedule. So far this week I've done a 35 mile ride, a 25 mile ride, a 2 mile swim a 6.5 mile run and a 4 mile run, plus the 25 mile ride came right after 1 mile swim. Still left ahead of me this week is a 16 mile run tomorrow morning, an hour long swim, then on monday the beast, a 6 hour ride with a 25 minute run. Best guesses are I'll be around 105 miles on the bike and a 2 mile run. Four months ago the idea of that would've terrified me, but sitting here now I'm not remotely worried. I'm not really looking forward to the ride cause 105 miles on a 10 mile road that you go back and forth on over and over is one of the most boring things imaginable. But the good thing is that every minute I ride, is one minute closer to closing the chapter of Base 3(hell month). Just today I had an extremely encouraging ride. It was fairly windy and my past few rides I haven't been very disciplined. I had been intending to keep my HR down, but as I watched my speed, the HR thing sort of flew out the window and I wound up hovering around 150 most of the time, far far too high for such a long period of time. Come race day I have GOT to keep my HR down if i want to be able to run a marathon after the bike. Today I finally stuck with it and focused on keeping my HR in check. It was a shorter ride, but I've never kept my HR down this low for 2 hours, and I wasn't overly slow either. I was right at 17 mph and kept my HR in the 120's for teh whole ride. There were a couple spikes, which is to be expected since there are a few tiny climbs(enough to make you work) and there were a few patches of stiff head winds which forced me to work a bit. All in all it was quite encouraging and I hope to be able to put that to the test on monday, which will really be my final bike test.
It's been quite a ride so far, and it's weird to be this close after so much work.
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