Home
While I have documented much of my last few years in the sport via various web mediums, I thought I would just give a little recap and a 'where I am now' type post for people new to the site or sport who may benefit or perhaps learn from where others may have trodden. Feel free to add you own tales of woe or triumph.
Wave 1
Having played around with triathlon for a number of years mostly socially, I decided I was going to do a Half Ironman then a Marathon. I farted around doing my own thing based on pretty much nothing. I decided that as far as training went, for the half IM I needed to complete the distance of the race twice a week. My weekly plan was 6 sessions. 2x 1.9km swims, 2x90km bikes, 2x21km runs. In reality after actually measuring these, the swim was right, the bike was 81km and the run 17. Oh well. Needless to say the race was a tad slow but totally enjoyable. I paid no attention to nutrition or anything other than swim bike run as per my plan.
The Marathon came along a month and a bit later. After my 2:20+ half IM run leg I decided I needed more distance. I lengthened my 21km (17) to 24km and did it 3 times a week. Seems the 24 was only 19. Again, oh well. In the lead up to the race, I was starting to come down with a bit of something but did it anyway. What an absolutely stupid mistake. I ran the Marathon in 4:30 something with day 2 of the flu. It really knocked me on my arse. I was sick for months. I could not do a thing. Added to this the snot factory also turned infected and I got sinusitis which like herpes follows you forever
. Bad news. 20+ kilos later I was finally getting well enough to do something again. I still remember stopping my bike to call my wife to tell her I just rode 20km for the first time in nearly a year. I was back.
Wave 2
This time I decided I was going to get some direction on what to do so as not to make the mistakes of last time. I found myself a coach and off I went. To make it interesting, I entered an Ironman (my frst) as my comeback race. Problem was I had all of 8 weeks from the couch before race day. Hah. Long story short, 13:51 later I was an Ironman. The fella coaching me is a man who is not one to tell you what to do. He will make commment for your digestion but lets you make your own mistakes if you are not prepared to listen to the message. When he said to me that I should have come to him a couple of months earlier as it was going to be a very lonng day for me I should have listened. This time, I got away with it. No sickness, no injury.
I was hooked. For the next 12 months I was on the program. I did every session bar 1 in that time and I pulled the pin on that one due safety reasons as it was shitting down rain and I had to ride up a big arse mountain. As an aside, 'coach' did the session the next day and crashed on the descent taking him out of the race we were both targeting. Nutrition, scheduling, focus, attitude, ego, humility, understanding and discipline were all there. If I could have bottled my mental and physical state from that year and sold it I would be a Trillionaire. The result came.
I did the Ironman 12 months from the first with a great result. I lopped off 4 hours and finished in the 9:40s. Every leg result was consistent across my age group compared to my finish time. I was the business. I got a bike sponsor, nutrition sponsor, got a 5 page spread in one tri mag, a column in another and made the semi final in the Ironman performance of the year on Ironman Live. What the hell? All this in 12 months. I must be awesome? Right? Hmmm?
Easy to believe that.
Hard to deliver IF you believe there is something that needs delivering.
The next 4 months my one and only goal was to qualify for Kona. I trained my arse off. Infact, I trained my arse out. What woorked before was not enough, I had to do more. I had to do it faster. I had to do it longer. 4 months is not a real long time and suddenlly, I was lining up again for Ironman. Off went the cannon and all I could think about that entire swim leg was how much I enjoy cycling. I mapped out my entire future that next 50+ minutes. I would qualify that day for Kona, just go and race for the experience then cross over to cycling as I really did not enjoy swimming. It wasn't the swimmming I did not enjoy, it was the underlying pressure I was putting on myself thinking that others cared what I did. If you had asked me at the time, I would have said I did not care what anyone else thought that day but in reality on reflection, I did. I was the fella who was going to Kona FFS.......
Or not.
Long story short, I cooked the bike way too hard the first 120km and that was that. My guts gave out and it was a long way from home. I finished around 1 hour out of the Hawaii slots after a fairly humiliating walk around the streets of Port Mac. This was not to be the end of this little saga though.
On my way to Port Mac that year I managed to qualify for the Australian Long Course team via the Half Ironman circuit for a race in The Netherlands. Well, seeing I did not qualify at Port,, the Long Course was to be my retribution. I had to do more. I had to do it faster. I had to do it longer. Due to a roster change at work I had severed my coaching relationship and was going it alonne from around a month before Port. Almere was to be in August. remembber when i said 4 months was not long? Well 5 months is and add that to the preceeding 4 and that was 9 months of extreme training that was poorly suppported by nutrition and attitude. SNAP. I was absolutely broken.
As a basketball player for many years, I suffered tendonitis from time to time in my right knee but got over it pretty quickly. I got myself a dose and it was terrible. I reckon I was one run away from a rupture as I trained through. As I was ovver doing it, I was pumping in the vitamins and supplements which I was getting for free. As a result,, I ended up poisoning myself and stuffing my liver. I had 20 days off wwork in early August with sickness less than a month before race day. I still raced. Good night nurse.
Being as crook as I was, I knew I had to keep doing some activity so focused on cycling for the year. Things went well there and my health was generally OK but it was not what I would call improving. I was constantly lethargic and 7pm bed time was an all too regular requirement when coupled with my shift work.
Since September, I have had a few false starts with triathlon again. I know what I need to do to make it work and am taking it nice and slowly. I don't want to revisit that world of hurt I have put myself in before.
Wave 3
Started today.
Wave 1
Having played around with triathlon for a number of years mostly socially, I decided I was going to do a Half Ironman then a Marathon. I farted around doing my own thing based on pretty much nothing. I decided that as far as training went, for the half IM I needed to complete the distance of the race twice a week. My weekly plan was 6 sessions. 2x 1.9km swims, 2x90km bikes, 2x21km runs. In reality after actually measuring these, the swim was right, the bike was 81km and the run 17. Oh well. Needless to say the race was a tad slow but totally enjoyable. I paid no attention to nutrition or anything other than swim bike run as per my plan.
The Marathon came along a month and a bit later. After my 2:20+ half IM run leg I decided I needed more distance. I lengthened my 21km (17) to 24km and did it 3 times a week. Seems the 24 was only 19. Again, oh well. In the lead up to the race, I was starting to come down with a bit of something but did it anyway. What an absolutely stupid mistake. I ran the Marathon in 4:30 something with day 2 of the flu. It really knocked me on my arse. I was sick for months. I could not do a thing. Added to this the snot factory also turned infected and I got sinusitis which like herpes follows you forever
. Bad news. 20+ kilos later I was finally getting well enough to do something again. I still remember stopping my bike to call my wife to tell her I just rode 20km for the first time in nearly a year. I was back.Wave 2
This time I decided I was going to get some direction on what to do so as not to make the mistakes of last time. I found myself a coach and off I went. To make it interesting, I entered an Ironman (my frst) as my comeback race. Problem was I had all of 8 weeks from the couch before race day. Hah. Long story short, 13:51 later I was an Ironman. The fella coaching me is a man who is not one to tell you what to do. He will make commment for your digestion but lets you make your own mistakes if you are not prepared to listen to the message. When he said to me that I should have come to him a couple of months earlier as it was going to be a very lonng day for me I should have listened. This time, I got away with it. No sickness, no injury.
I was hooked. For the next 12 months I was on the program. I did every session bar 1 in that time and I pulled the pin on that one due safety reasons as it was shitting down rain and I had to ride up a big arse mountain. As an aside, 'coach' did the session the next day and crashed on the descent taking him out of the race we were both targeting. Nutrition, scheduling, focus, attitude, ego, humility, understanding and discipline were all there. If I could have bottled my mental and physical state from that year and sold it I would be a Trillionaire. The result came.
I did the Ironman 12 months from the first with a great result. I lopped off 4 hours and finished in the 9:40s. Every leg result was consistent across my age group compared to my finish time. I was the business. I got a bike sponsor, nutrition sponsor, got a 5 page spread in one tri mag, a column in another and made the semi final in the Ironman performance of the year on Ironman Live. What the hell? All this in 12 months. I must be awesome? Right? Hmmm?
Easy to believe that.
Hard to deliver IF you believe there is something that needs delivering.
The next 4 months my one and only goal was to qualify for Kona. I trained my arse off. Infact, I trained my arse out. What woorked before was not enough, I had to do more. I had to do it faster. I had to do it longer. 4 months is not a real long time and suddenlly, I was lining up again for Ironman. Off went the cannon and all I could think about that entire swim leg was how much I enjoy cycling. I mapped out my entire future that next 50+ minutes. I would qualify that day for Kona, just go and race for the experience then cross over to cycling as I really did not enjoy swimming. It wasn't the swimmming I did not enjoy, it was the underlying pressure I was putting on myself thinking that others cared what I did. If you had asked me at the time, I would have said I did not care what anyone else thought that day but in reality on reflection, I did. I was the fella who was going to Kona FFS.......
Or not.
Long story short, I cooked the bike way too hard the first 120km and that was that. My guts gave out and it was a long way from home. I finished around 1 hour out of the Hawaii slots after a fairly humiliating walk around the streets of Port Mac. This was not to be the end of this little saga though.
On my way to Port Mac that year I managed to qualify for the Australian Long Course team via the Half Ironman circuit for a race in The Netherlands. Well, seeing I did not qualify at Port,, the Long Course was to be my retribution. I had to do more. I had to do it faster. I had to do it longer. Due to a roster change at work I had severed my coaching relationship and was going it alonne from around a month before Port. Almere was to be in August. remembber when i said 4 months was not long? Well 5 months is and add that to the preceeding 4 and that was 9 months of extreme training that was poorly suppported by nutrition and attitude. SNAP. I was absolutely broken.
As a basketball player for many years, I suffered tendonitis from time to time in my right knee but got over it pretty quickly. I got myself a dose and it was terrible. I reckon I was one run away from a rupture as I trained through. As I was ovver doing it, I was pumping in the vitamins and supplements which I was getting for free. As a result,, I ended up poisoning myself and stuffing my liver. I had 20 days off wwork in early August with sickness less than a month before race day. I still raced. Good night nurse.
Being as crook as I was, I knew I had to keep doing some activity so focused on cycling for the year. Things went well there and my health was generally OK but it was not what I would call improving. I was constantly lethargic and 7pm bed time was an all too regular requirement when coupled with my shift work.
Since September, I have had a few false starts with triathlon again. I know what I need to do to make it work and am taking it nice and slowly. I don't want to revisit that world of hurt I have put myself in before.
Wave 3
Started today.
. I was also overweight and drank too much and partied too hard 
. So at the ripe old age of 43 I decided it was about time I started to treat my body a lot better. Through 2007 I started doing a little running and finished my first Half Marathon in July in a little over 2 hours. My legs were destroyed but after a few weeks I decided on another challenge, Noosa OD in November. Did some training on my own and got myself into some sort of shape and managed a 2:46 which I was pretty happy with all things considered. Then I made the fatal mistake of checking out some forums and stumbled across AP and the Cycos lol.
). Onto Busso for IM number 3 and looking to go around 10:30. Well I didn't finish, pulled out during the marathon but I learnt a few things so now it's onto Gundy again where I expect to get down close to 4:40 this time.
