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Ironman South Africa 2008 - Learning to do things a different way

2008-04-20
I've been meaning to write this for sometime now. To be brutally
honest, I didn't want to write it until I had completed the Ironman because my
nature is that I don't like to talk about things that I don't know for sure
that I can pull off. Even on the starting line, last Sunday morning, I wasn't
sure that I would be able to manage despite the training I had done.

The fact that I was standing on the starting line at all, I told Chris while
we were putting on our wet suits before the race, was because of an ex-
colleague by the name of Werner. He had found the video of the 2006 Kona,
Hawai Ironman World Champs and had shown me a copy. It's hard to watch that
and not get inspired. So that planted the seed but the reason I decided to do
it went quite a lot deeper.

I've always been blessed, or sometimes I think cursed, with a more than
average natural ability. So things like running and most sports come quite
easily to me. What hasn't come easily has been the the gritty determination to
keep going year after year, season after season and to keep focusing on one
thing.

I was the schoolboy who did almost every activity at school. I ran, swam,
played hockey, rugby, cricket, badminton. table tennis, tennis, squash, cross
country, rowing and in fact most sports saw me making an appearance at one
time or another. Most of the coaches commented that I had good natural ability
and could go very far. This was usually my cue to move on to something else.

Compare this to my partner, Gary, who will readily admit that there were many
people who had more natural ability than him at cricket, but what he excelled
at was the professionalism, diligence and tenacity to keep practicing and
working harder than anyone else to get ahead, which he did, eventually playing
more than 100 tests for South Africa.

So I decided that the way I learn best is by experience, so why not take on
something that I couldn't do on the seat of my pants. An event that without
training, would flatten even the most talented athletes. The Ironman requires
skills in swimming, cycling and running while most people focus only on one.
The bottom line was that if I didn't prepare with diligence and tenacity, I
was going to be left lying on the side of the road.

My objective - to experience preparing for something over a long period of
time, sticking with it when the going got tough and seeing it through to the
end. I initially hooked onto the idea of the Ironman in 2005. I took the
decision to do it at the end of 2006 and started my initial training in Jan
2007 for the April 2008 event.

My initial training was a bit all over the place and despite employing a
coach, I didn't get any real traction until late in 2007 when I locked onto
the Ironman 70.3 (this is a half Ironman consisting of half of all the
distances - 70.3 miles is half the total distance of 140.6 which makes a full
Ironman).

Early in 2007 I went through a number of false starts where I started
training, trained for about a week, caught a cold or flu, took a week off to
recover and then started again. Clearly something wasn't working.

The 70.3 was in East London in Jan 2008 and I wanted to use it as a major
milestone towards my major goal. I employed the services of
www.markallenonline.com and set about
training.

The style of training was really good for me. My natural style is "no pain -
no gain" which the Mark Allen program immediately dispelled. In fact his
program was counter-intuitively the opposite. While it was hard to keep to the
eight sessions a week, the actual sessions were not painful at all. Through a
technique where I managed my heart rate, I gradually increased my speed and my
ability to exercise fast at lower and lower heart rates.

Up until the Mark Allen program, my training runs had consisted of heading out
my front door and up the mountain where my hear rate quickly climbed to 150
and then averaged in the 180's for most of the run. I now started exercising
at a heart rate of no more than 133 for my long runs and was amazed as my
speed gently increased while my heart rate stayed low.

Back to East London in January. The 70.3 was a tricky race because it is short
enough to push quite hard and the pacing challenge is to go fast enough to do
a decent time while slow enough to last for the 6 or so hours that it will
take. Needless to say I ignored my heart rate goals and pushed hard in the
cycle. Starting the run, my heart rate was off the charts and I didn't give it
any time to settle down, I just pushed on. Before I knew it I hit major
exhaustion about 2/3 of the way through the race. My last 7km lap of the 21km
run was agony as I felt nauseous and had severe cramps.

It took me a few days to reflect on the race and work out what had happened. I
was happy with breaking 6 hours but wasn't happy with how I felt at the end of
the race. I was a bit confused and unsure how I would tackle double the
distance.

My intention when setting out to do the Ironman was to do something different
and when I got down to basics, the 70.3 wasn't any different to how I had done
previous races.

After the 70.3 my body was clearly taking strain. I suffered an ankle injury
doing a long run a few weeks later which niggled my running and prevented me
from doing speed work for the rest of the lead up to Ironman. I also suffered
a ham string injury on my bike while doing a training ride which is still with
me and had me in agony on the day of the Ironman. It only hurt when I peddled,
but at roughly 90 turns a minute for 6 hours, I had about 5400 jolts of pain
to keep me focused :-)

I really believe that the injuries, I suffered, while not being serious enough
to stop me competing, were all as a result of how I had done the 70.3. I
believe I put my body under severe strain, more so than was necessary, and I
wanted to know if I could do better not only in time but also in how I
recovered afterwards. I still wondered how I could possibly keep going for at
least another six hours, while doing another 70.3 miles. I certainly couldn't
have done it on the day that I finished the 70.3.

Leading up to the full Ironman I took some time to write down my strategy for
the race. I wanted a strategy that I could refer to throughout the race and it
would guide me in the decisions that I needed to make. Different decisions to
the ones that I had ever taken previously.

I knew from experience that at points my brain would become fuzzy and I
wouldn't be able to think clearly. At those points, I wanted to make sure I
had guidance. I decided that if I worked towards a time at any cost then I
would be affecting my ability to finish the race as I could exhaust myself
early in the race which would have severe consequences later.

I took a different approach by writing down my strategy. See my previous
post . To
summarise it consisted of:

On the day, I had taken some advice from a friend Janel who did a very
impressive sub 11 hour Ironman a few years ago. She said not to get too manic
at the start and in the transitions. She had walked down the beach into the
water and had used the transitions to catch her breath between each stage.

Following this advice I did a good swim at 1h10mins and then climbed on my
bicycle for the 180km cycle. The initial 15km's were uphill which pushed my
heart rate up above my 139 limit. I slowed down and averaged a pedestrian
19km/h to the highest point 183 metres above sea level.

From there it was downhill for a fast section before easing into undulating
hills which lead out to turn point about 25km's out. From the turn, the wind
got behind us and I quickly made my way back to the start for lap two. That
wasn't so bad. My knee/hamstring injury was sore but not bad when I peddled
continuously.

I'd like to say I didn't think about anything other than what I was doing and
the next lap but that would be lying. My main thought in the cycle was 'will I
be ok in the marathon'. I was constantly surprised that I was still alive as I
had built up a fear of the cycle. By the time I finished the last lap and
climbed off my bike to begin the run, I felt surprisingly good.

The run started well, it was a relief to be off the bicycle. I got to see some
more of Dee as I came past a little slower on foot. Even stopped for a big
kiss at some point. Lap two was about the hardest. Running past the finish and
seeing people coming in and knowing that I still had another 28km's to go was
hard. My friend Chris had an awesome race and grew his lead as we passed each
other a few times, each of us hanging in.

My legs got more and more stiff and sore but my energy was still good and I
was nowhere near the sheer exhaustion that I felt when I did the half Ironman.
It started getting dark as I went into the last lap and made my way out to the
furthest point of the loop. It was starting to get a bit messy out there with
people vomiting and lying around in pain, there days ending sooner than they
had planned.

I heard the announcer and the crowds and knew that I was less than 3km's from
the end. My legs were sore and not working all that well but kept me moving
forward. And then suddenly I was there, coming down the carpeted shoot and
over the finish line to finish the 42km run and complete my first Ironman in
12h31.

I recovered remarkably well and after a good meal, a bath and some relaxing I
was felt pretty good. It took me a day or two and the stiffness in my legs was
gone.

While the Ironman was a great achievement which I feel good about, the real
value I got was my learning of the real power of having a simple strategy to
guide my actions. I lecture strategy to final year business science students
and run scenario planning exercises for companies so I understand the
importance of strategy for business. This was however different, this was my
personal strategy around the event.

Now how much more powerful would that be if applied to my whole life.

Watch this space.