It’s mostly all behind me now, not going to make any major improvements in fitness now. It’s time to focus on do the final preparations to my body to get it to the start line at its current full potential.
That’s probably the most philosophical way to look at the current situation but the reality is that I feel like I’ve pretty much nailed most of my key training and a definitely feel better prepared and more experienced to have the rematch at Ironman that I owed myself.
For those guys that are interested my main key week of training involved twenty nine and a half hours with reasonable weeks in the lead up weeks as well. During the longer rides a continued to grow in confidence that I’ve done all the right things as I seemed to get stronger the longer I went over five hours. The Runs my legs just kept on going holding a constant pace and no signs of weakness. To top things off the swim has improved through some technique changes that I’ve implemented on myself.
All this aside the one thing that made a difference to this prep was a small paragraph that changed my outlook on training. While out doing some run training with Daniel and Robin, Robin mentioned to me that Triathletes and especially Iron distance Triathletes get too caught up in distance and or time and this means that they do “too many junk k’s”. This made me stop and think and I had a light bulb moment, I had succumbed to this mindset. From that moment on I made every session have a key important part and made sure I did that to the best of my ability to make it count and to cut out the “junk k’s”. This didn’t mean that I stopped doing long stuff, it transformed my long stuff to aiming for quality and not going out for a free ride amongst the bunch but doing a bit in the bunch for a social catch up then 70% to 80% by myself with nowhere to hide. Doing my long runs to really work to hold my pace as the runs got longer and stay mentally focussed and upbeat. As you could imagine my resurrected frame of mind really rings true when put into the shorter high intensity training whether it be on the stationary bike grunting away in the living room. Or continually having to try to run down Daniel in our run training not knowing if I’m going to throw up or shit myself at the end of every effort. It all made sense to me now with this re-kindled interest in hurting myself for the greater good.
On the topic of everything else involved in this expedition I’m felling quite relaxed as I haven’t left anything to the last minute and have all plans in place to get to the race relaxed and as ready as possible. Having the experience behind me now of numerous half’s and IM Aus things are second nature of knowing on what’s required to get the bike myself and all my gear ready to compete in such an event. I’m sure that I’ll get a few distractions that I’ll have to sort out because of the travel but hopefully I’ve got most bases covered.
For everyone wanting to follow the progress on March 3rd Bianca will be doing the job of super WAG and hopefully posting up some fresh pictures and updates during the race also the race site is www.ironman.co.nz and there could possibly live streaming through www.ironmanlive.com . The race starts from 7am in NZ which is 4:30am Mt Gambier time. Thanks to all that followed me this time around and all that have helped me get to this stage I’ll keep some posts coming once I arrive but for now its time for me to go and enjoy the Taper
Cheers Toby
WAG Bianca's race day attire
