On the 19th of April, 2014, I completed my first Ironman distance
triathlon. In the months leading up to the event I dealt with long
periods of self doubt and inner fear about whether I could do an ironman. I questioned myself constantly but eventually
came to a very good place, when in the hours before the event, I was finally able
to allow myself to believe that I could achieve in practice what in theory seemed
impossible.
My preparation for ironman was one of well planned and reasonably
well executed physical training on one hand, and chaos and turmoil on the
other.
I signed up for Challenge Taiwan in October 2013. For me to be confident that I could go the
distance I had to reach a number of training milestones in the time before the race
to give me the endurance I needed to complete such a punishing event. For
a start, I wanted to roll out a 200 km bike ride before the end of the year and
be able to follow that up with numerous 100 km plus rides in the first 3 months
of 2014.
I also wanted to get my running miles up. This is a far greater challenge than
increasing miles on the bike and must be undertaken in a much slower and more incremental
way. Increasing riding distance is pretty easy in comparison to
increasing running distance, because running is far more punishing on the body
than riding a bike. You can overdo training on the bike on one day and
the consequences are generally short term. Over doing it on a single run
can leave you injured and unable to run for months. I wanted to steadily
build my weekly running distance up until I was able to run 30 plus km in a
single outing. In talking to people who had prepared for marathons, I
understood this to be a reasonable bench mark that was predictive of being able
to complete 42 km in the more motivating setting of an "official"
event. My plan was to steadily build my
running distance up to the 30 km effort by the end of March 2014.
About the swim leg I was less concerned. I knew that I could
swim 4 km. I had done this in the pool so I just had to keep maintaining
and hopefully building on my endurance. My key focus for swimming was to
improve my style so that I would be more efficient and burn less energy during
this leg of the event.
Having broadly set my training goals, I doggedly set out meeting
them and for the most part everything went according to plan. Well
nearly.
The bike training went OK from about October to early March.
As any of you who have followed my blog will know, I changed bikes at the
turn of the year, when I got a new DeRosa road bike for Christmas. I had far greater problems in getting used to
various aspects of the new bike then I anticipated, so I got quite a lot of
distance in, but was never able to get in the quality miles that I wanted to as
I struggled with the nuances of the bike.
One of the adjustments that caused some problems arose from the
new bike fit. I purchased the bike in
November but promised not to ride it until after Christmas. At the time I bought the bike I had it fit up
for me. The position of the seat on the new bike was put at 3 to 5 cm higher
than the seat on my old bike. I made an initial adjustment on my old
bike, when I raised the seat about two cm in preparation for me making a
further adjustment when I started riding the new bike.
The initial change in seat height was coincident with a
significant breakthrough that I made in my swimming. After months of
trying to get my body in a more "downhill' position, I finally got to a
point where I was much better balanced in the water. This helped significantly with my kicking,
which surprise, surprise, put increased pressure on my lower back. The effect of these two changes, the change
in seat position on my bike, and the increased load on my lower back when
swimming, led to a massive spasm in my lower back in mid December, leading to
significant discomfort when training for any of the three disciplines.
I had some good rides in the months leading up to April. With
the 200 km under my belt in December I wanted to mix it up a bit to get my
riding distance up in the first few months of 2014. One weekend I rode 100 km on the Saturday
morning and backed up with a repeat 100 km effort on the Sunday. Another
weekend, I did a ride of 140 km. Another,
I rode 100 km and ran 20 km.
The training was good but not all of these rides went without a
hitch. On the day that I did the 140 km
effort I fell in a big hole at the 125 km mark. I was out near Jurong
East and I just could not get my legs to power the bike forward. I had to stop for a while at the local hawker
centre. There I picked myself up some
food and a cup of the local coffee. The
local coffee is a strong filtered coffee supplemented with lashings of
sweetened condensed milk. This gave me enough energy to get home over the
last 15 km. I had a similar experience when I did the 100 km ride
followed by a 20 km run. I ran out of
energy on the run leg at about the 12 km mark. The last 8 km was living
hell. Reflecting on these two sessions
demonstrated to me how crucial the right amount of calorie intake was going to
be if I was going to be able to finish the ironman.
So I felt that getting my energy intake right, more than anything
else was going to be the key. From some
data that I collected on the 200km ride that I did in December, I calculated that
I would burn up over 4500 calories on the bike leg alone. This is a lot of food, and quite frankly, I
get pretty nauseous sucking down energy gels and I nearly choke on the dry bars
that are available on the market. I
found that one type of food I can manage is Snickers bars. I calculated that I
would need to eat 10 of these during the bike leg. That is one third of a Snickers bar every 6
km!
The running preparation went pretty much according to plan. Sure, when I was upping the distance in early
2014, I got some pretty awesome cramps in my calf muscles. These were fortunately only short term setbacks.
I also had some unresolved knee joint
pain that affected my running in September of 2013 when I raced in the
Singapore Triathlon, but this got better over time, until of course it started
manifesting itself as hamstring strain in February. This caused me to have some
minor tearing of my hamstring in March. I was able to manage this injury
by getting a series of acupuncture treatments with a Chinese specialist during
late March and early April, and a physiotherapy session in the fortnight
leading up to the event. Through all of
this I did manage to reach the 30 km run milestone. Actually I think that the run was closer to
33 km and I did this run in late March.
So from that perspective, I felt that I was on track. That is on the assumption that this was an
appropriate bench mark for an ironman run leg.
So it would not be an exaggeration to say that I had the terrors
in the weeks leading up to Challenge Taiwan. Crashing out of the
Metasprint series duathlon in February, when I collided with a slow moving
rider, did not do a great deal for my confidence. I was very scared that I
would not be able to finish the ironman distance either from lack of fitness,
injury or inadequate nutrition or simply going out too hard and not managing my
body effectively.
Even with all of the minor physical setbacks that I faced, the
real turmoil in my preparation was more relational than physical. To quote my all time favourite science fiction
writer, Robert A Heinlein, “it was people that gave us the headaches”. My
elder daughter Gabriella is in her final year of school this year, and it is
quite horrible! There is of course the usual pressure that many final
year high school students must go through:
high workloads, lots of assignments and so many assessments that it is
almost overwhelming. So there is a huge
fear that taking time out from study will have an irreparable negative impact
on the final result achieved and future life success.
I will admit it. I made a
mistake in December, when I booked flights and accommodation. I used the
NSW school calendar to work out when the midsemester holiday would be. So
I thought my girls would be on holiday in the week leading up to Easter, as is
the case in NSW. The week leading up to
Easter was in fact, week 1 of the second term and there were planned, a number
of significant evaluations to take place in Term 2 for the Year 12 students.
I was still able to rationalize that it was OK to take the girls
out of school for a couple of days, when the Friday was a public holiday, without
being the cause of some major academic catastrophe. My elder daughter did not
want to go to Taiwan for four days. This
is not unusual. Seventeen year olds are
not keen, as a rule, to spend extended time with their parents on holidays. My
beautiful wife was in broad agreement with my daughter, and was concerned about
her missing school. I however thought it a great idea because I further rationalized
that the experience of visiting Taiwan was going to be enriching and the trip
represented a great opportunity for her to get some distance from the pressing
requirements of schoolwork.
Gabriella’s reluctance to travel in the first week back at school
was heightened by the fact that she had a heap of assignments to do during the
midsemester break, including designing an exercise physiology experiment, a
theory of knowledge essay, history assignment and a 4000 word extended essay. Unfortunately, she did not make significant
progress on these tasks. For these
reasons the whole idea of the family travelling with me to the triathlon was a
cause of contention and angst. In the period leading up to the restart of
school, there was some debate about whether Gaby could stay home alone.
We parents were not altogether in favor of this, but it was something we
were still tossing around.
These considerations were overshadowed and rendered moot when one
of Gabriella's school friends died on the eve of their return to school after
the mid semester holiday. The fallout from this was profound. Of
course with this new development, the option of Gabriella staying home alone was
completely off the table. I favoured Gabriella coming away with us as the
best option. However, the unfortunate girl's funeral was set down for
Friday the 17th and Gabriella made it clear that there was no way she would not
attend. So after much hand wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth it was
decided that I would go to Taiwan with Sophie and Claire stay behind to look
after Gabriella and attend the funeral.
My last duty on Tuesday night before heading off was to help
Gabriella with her exercise physiology experiment which she had designed but
for which she needed data. She planned to do an analysis of heart rate at
various loads of effort. She needed a "trained athlete" and
some way of controlling for effort. So I became her experimental subject.
We set up my bike on a wind trainer. Variable load was achieved by
changing gears on the bike and I rode until the increase in load led to
fatigue. And I was winded and my legs like jelly at the end of that lot! This
done, I packed up the bike ready for shipment. The next day I headed off with
Sophie to Taiwan.
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| Sophie and I travelling by train for Kaohsiung to Taitung |
We traveled by plane to Kaohsiung via Hong Kong on Wednesday
morning, and from there by train to Taitung. Kaohsiung is on the Southern
part of the island and this area is predominantly rural. The train
journey took us through fields of tropical fruit plantations and aquaculture farms
and eventually up the rugged south east.
We arrived in Taitung after dark and made our way to the hotel just in
time to crash out for the evening. Sophie and I each had a room to ourselves for
the duration of the trip because Claire and Gabriella did not come along and I
could not get a refund for the booking.
I was not too unhappy about Sophie not having to share with me, but Sophie
was stoked.
On Thursday morning, I spent an hour or so rebuilding my bike
after the getting it out of the hard case.
After breakfast, Sophie borrowed a bike from the hotel manager and we
went for a ride down to Flowing Lake to check out the swim course. There I swam
one lap of the swim course, covering 1.9 km, which I would do two times during
the iron man race on Saturday.
At the end of my swim, I caught up with and said “Hi”, to Belinda Granger who had also been out for a swim.
Belinda had trained with Jack Pross’s middle distance/distance squad at
Sydney University at the same time I was training on Number One Oval in the
early 1990s. Since then she has been
world Ironman champion a number of times and won the Challenge event in Taitung
in 2013. There has been a lot of water
under the bridge, so I am not surprised that she did not really remember
me. She was very nice none the less,
telling me how much she loved the course and how picturesque it all was.
After the swim, Sophie and I fooled around in the water for a
while and headed back to the hotel for lunch.
It’s fair to say that we mostly ate western style food while we were
there. The Taiwanese cuisine is quite
specialized and it is hard to know what you are eating. We had a hot pot for dinner and we were
really nervous, especially as I could not identify quite a few of the ingredients. So from that time on we stuck mainly to
pastries and coffee at meal time.
On the second day in Taitung, the day before the triathlon, we
went down to the lake again. I went for
a shorter swim just trying to soak up the ambience and get a feel for the water. It was then, the day before the event,
sitting on a pontoon in the middle of the still lake, I was able to quietly
contemplate that which lay before me. I looked
back carefully on the preparation that I had undertaken in the months leading
up to the race. In that quiet moment, I
finally came to a firm belief that I could complete the full distance of the
event the next day and that I would, a little over a day hence, be able to call
myself an ironman. That moment was very
empowering and from then on I approached the event without fear. From the lake, Sophie and I rode out to the
hotel where the organizers were going to hold the race briefing and where I
picked up all my gear in preparation for the race.
Saturday morning the race was scheduled to start at 6:00 am. As it was Easter weekend, I set out Easter eggs
that I brought with me from Singapore for Sophie to have an Easter egg hunt in
my room. Some of the chocolate egg I had
brought at Harrods in London when I went there for work-related training the
previous month. I was hoping that this
would be a big surprise.
With the Easter eggs all distributed in strategic places around
the room, I went down to the hotel reception where I had arranged to be picked
up at about 5:00 am. While waiting for the
bus I had some toast and 2 cups of coffee.
The start of the swim was uneventful. The swim leg was held in freshwater lake fed
by springs and very broad and it was possible to find a line to swim that meant
you did not have to struggle with large numbers of swimmers. The officials had announced at the race
briefing that wetsuits were permitted for the swim leg, even though the water
temperature was 24°C. I don’t own a
wetsuit, having done most of my Triathlons in tropical waters, so the decision
for me was only of academic interest and I swam unaided. I did feel a bit cool at the middle stage of
the swim but I was not at any risk of developing hypothermia, so I soldiered
on, pretty much unaffected by the water temperature.
At about the 3 km mark I started to feel some serious bladder
discomfort. The 2 cups of coffee that I
drank in the morning were coming back to bite me! After ignoring the pain for a
while, I decided that I had to take time out for the greater good. This slowed me down for a couple of minutes, and
then I was back on my way.
At the end of the swim I climbed out of the lake and I gauged that
I was in good condition as I jogged into transition. So with some relief I felt confident in
continuing to the bike leg. A 180km bike leg.
The fact of the matter was that this was to be the longest ride I
ever did without a rest stop. I had done
the 200 km ride in December, but that incorporated a 30 min lunch break at the
halfway mark. So I was moving very much
into the unknown.
All was good until about the 15 km mark when my left knee started
to hurt. The pain was reminiscent of
that I suffered on my first long ride about 3 and a half years earlier when I pedaled
from Sydney to Wollongong. The weird
thing was that I had not been troubled with this pain since I sorted it out
with some strengthening and flexibility exercises in the intervening time. Then I recalled the exercise physiology
experiment that I had performed with Gabriella.
It must have been that my leg tightened up from the heavy load I placed
on it to reach fatigue on the exercise trainer.
The pain was to haunt me throughout the cycle leg. Every time I got the balance of force wrong
on my left leg, I would get a shooting pain through my knee. So I rode the last 165 km of the cycle leg
with at best, 1.8 legs.
At the 135 km mark of the cycle course, there was a short uphill
section. I could see a couple of guys
ahead of me starting to struggle as the incline steepened and I thought to
myself, “I should have a crack here.” I
got out of the saddle, but when I did both quads cramped. So I thought, “No. Best not.” From that point on, the ride was just an
exercise in conservation. The sole goal
of which was to get back to the transition point and see if I could still run.
From the bike to run transition I found out, much to my amazement,
that I could still use my legs to run. Huzzah! The run however was a slow grind for 42 km
that took me nearly 6 hours. I had
planned to use a running style that I dubbed, “the Patty Burke shuffle”. Patrick was another of Jack Pross’s training
squad and I would sit out the back of the pack with him. We would do 12 X 400 m with 60 second
recoveries. The recoveries were supposed
to be 50 m walk and 50 m jog. Patrick
was an expert shuffler and was able to get his feet moving so he looked like he
was jogging, while actually moving at a slow walk pace. Using this technique he was able to stretch
out the recovery to 90 seconds. With my
legs, particularly my left hamstring playing up as it had in the lead up to the
triathlon, I thought that this was a perfect running style for me to adopt to ensure
that I finished the 42 km run.
It was a pretty course, at least in the daytime. It consisted of 2
loops of the town of Taitung. There were
aid stations every 2 to 3 km or so and all very well organized. One aid station in particular stood out in my
memory. This was a station we passed at
the 19 km point. The locals who were
running the stall gave out, in addition to the bananas and drinks that were
provided at stations throughout the course, sushi rolls with salty pork that
they had prepared themselves. I ran
past, absent mindedly picked up a roll and ran on. But when I tasted it I hastily ran back for a
second. The taste was fantastic and
obviously just what I needed at that time in the race.
The second time around the course it was dark and I was practically alone. The same aid station organizers had prepared a delicious soup with pork dumplings. I ran up to the aid station and was offered a bowl of soup! I really had not expected this so I took the bowl and started to try and guzzle it down. They very quietly and politely suggested that I slow down and pointed me to a chair and told me to sit down. So delicious and healthful was the soup that I took them up on the offer. I sat down for a minute and when I was finished I felt mightily revived.
The last 8 km were just a grind the sole purpose of which was to
keep moving forward. I started to get
paranoid that I would not finish, so I walked from time to time over the last 5
km to be sure that I did make it to the end, which eventually I did. 14 hours and 46 minutes after I started, I
crossed the line at the railway museum in the centre of Taitung.
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| The final steps to the end of the run. The only time all day I had a smile on my face |
I pulled up, exhausted but elated.
Immediately after I crossed the line I was greeted by Luigi, an Italian
athlete from Shanghai who was staying in the same hotel as Sophie and me. Having done the half iron man, he was
showered and rested. It was really nice
to see a familiar face and I was grateful for his camaraderie. I wondered to him how we were supposed to get
our gear back from the transition area.
We had finished in the middle of town, but all of our gear was on the
edge of town at the lake. He told me
that we had until midnight to pick up our gear from the transition area.
Curses!
So after a few minutes, I made my way back to the hotel, which
fortunately was only about 4 blocks from the finish point, showered, said “Hi”,
to Sophie and caught a cab down to the lake to pick up my gear. Then I had to walk my bike, with my clothes stacked
up on the aero bars, about two kilometers, back to the hotel. This was when I
knew I was truly an ironman.
The
next morning, I was up early again. I
had to dismantle my bike and pack it into its case to transport it back to
Singapore. By nine o’clock we were back
on the train to Kaohsiung. And in the
afternoon we started our overnight flight back to Singapore via Hong Kong, and
arrived at Changhi Airport at around 6:00 am on Monday morning. The pain in my legs was at an all time peak
when we got off the plane. From that
point on I was on the mend, and my first iron man experience complete.
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| Finishing. What it's all about! |
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