Couch Potato To Ironman

13 and Finish strong

2012-01-15T14:07:00.001-08:00

Just finished the last of my 13 days of training in a row to kick off the new year.
On Friday, the thirteenth, I got the tattoo pictured above. Its nothing too deep or significant, more a bit of fun than anything else to be honest. Kinda fun to have got it done in the middle of this 13 day session.

The other day I was chatting to my boss who is training for his first marathon. He was asking for a few tips and one of the tips I gave him was something I've said to a good few people and something I try to do myself. Try and train to finish strong. Most people start out fast and strong and fall to bits at the end. Its a good idea to train yourself not to be like this. Finish strong in training and you'll finish strong in a race. Today I lived to to this myself by ensuring the last day of the 13 days training was my strongest and fastest run. It felt good.

Tomorrow I have a rest day then on tuesday night the boxing training starts. Dont forget to pop along to sponsor me!!!
http://www.justgiving.com/AustinTanneyTheFight

simple update

2012-01-12T23:16:00.000-08:00

Just a quick update.
Off season is officially over. I'm planning the season out. Starting out with the boxing, then three half ironman. Distance then hopefully a marathon to finish the season.
The formal boxing training starts next week so until then I've kicked in my own base training to get a bit of shape and conditioning back.
The off season was too long and I've lost too much fitness, but I'm getting focused again. I've now trained 10 days in a row with bike, run and strength training sessions. I'm aiming to keep this little string of sessions going till Sunday totally 13 days in a row. After that I'll take one day off then the boxing training kicks in and I will definitely blog on how that goes :-)

Taking a detour?

2011-12-16T14:36:00.000-08:00

Its hard sometimes to come back and write a blog post when you leave it too long.
Ive had a few things I wanted to blog over the last while, but life has been busy and the longer I leave it the harder it gets. Tonight Im biting the bullet and getting writing...
Im planning out my next season.
My "off season" has been a bit too off.. Ive been barely training at all and drinking too much and eating too much.
Next year I had a few things planned, but recently something came up that has caused me to take a slight detour from my planned training journey.
The other night I signed up for an event called "The Fight"
This is white collar boxing. 30 people who have never boxed before have all signed up to do the same thing...
On the 17th of January we will all commence an 8 week intensive training program which culminates in a big fight night.
All of us will get in a ring in front of around 800 people and fight.
Im no figher, in fact im actually a pacifist. The main reason I am doing this if for charity.
I like to do something for charity once in a while. I dont do it too often as it gets annoying to ask people too often too support you to do these things. I never ask people to sponsor me to do triathlons or running races a these are the things I do for pleasure. I might as well ask people to sponsor me to watch TV and drink wine.
The Fight is different.
Doing this genuinely scares me. The training is no big deal. Ive heard its intense and tough going, but I know I can handle it. In fact while training for this I will continue to train for triathlon, so in addition to the boxing training I will still run, bikle and swim as I will be doing at least another 3 half Ironman races next year and probably a marathon. The full detail of the remainder of the year wil be a subject of another post at a later stage....
The thing that is gonna be tough about this is the final event.
I will get into a ring and face an as yet unknown opponent who will be intent on knocking me down and knocking me out.
Im 36 years old. I will be 37 in a few weeks. How many people do you know who, at the age of 37, get into a ring in front of a huge audience and trying to avoid getting the absolute crap beaten out of them?
3 years of full on training for running and triathlon has not in any way prepared me for dealing with being punched in the face. Repeatedly.
Seriously, when did you last get punched in the face?
Its going to be an intense expereince and a hell of a journey.
Im looking forward to it in many ways, and i am hugely nervous in other ways.

So, do me a favour, click the link below and start off by giving a few quid now. I will blog more on this over the coming weeks, and I will be a bono-level pest about this as I have a pretty big target that I really want to hit. Im not getting the crap beaten outta me for nothing.
:D
http://www.justgiving.com/AustinTanneyTheFight

Galway Ironman 70.3

2011-09-06T16:04:00.000-07:00

This is a long one with a fair few pics :D
Finally.. my A-race of the season.
Well.. this was always my planned A-race. However it ended up being a joint A-race with Groomsport. My main aim for the year was to complete 2 half Iron distance races 2 weeks apart.
I hit that objective.
The scale of the event in Galway was phenomenal. This was the first Ironman branded event I have been involved in and it really was huge. Just for context... this is the third half iron distance Ive done this year. The first had around 40 entrants. The second had 130. Galway had over 2,000
Wow.
I got up early on Sat, got the bike sorted and drove down to Galway. Sadly Steph had to work so she and the kids couldn't come along as support.

I got down in the afternoon and headed for registration and instantly the scale of the whole thing hit me. I walked into the registration hall and saw the massive Ironman banner and the scores of people and staff and was part excited, part nervous.

After registering and picking up my Ironman branded bag (with disappointingly little swag in it) I went out to sort out my gear into bags. This whole concept of having specific bags for each discipline and packing them and registering them the day before is new to me. All the other races Ive done over the last 3 years Ive just turned up on race day, dumped my bike and box of gear and that is it. For this you have to have far more organised. Once I got the bags packed though and headed to rack my bike I could see why.. and this is when the scale of it really hit me.

Bikes as far as the eye can see. The length of the bike racking area was huge. After racking the bike and registering the bags i went for a walk to see the distances involved in the transition. I reckon the distance from swim exit to bike mount was going to be easily over 1km. There would certainly be no fast transitions going on. I then went and checked into my hotel and pottered about until it was time for the race briefing. The briefing was the next stage in the whole thing being HUGE. I was in the second briefing. the first was for the first thousand. Mine was for the second thousand. The host was Mike Reilly, "The Voice of Ironman", the commentator at all the major Ironman events including the world championships in Hawaii. The briefing was actually fun and entertaining and afterwards I felt a huge mix of excitement and nerves. Which is weird.. i mean, I had done this distance race just 2 weeks previously but the scale of all this definitely had an impact.

RACE DAY.
Race day was an early start. My alarm call was for 4:30 am. I headed out of the hotel and noticed a few other triathletes in the breakfast area. I joined them for some porridge and coffee then wandered out through the lobby which was still full of people drinking and partying who were at the hotel for a wedding. That was a bizarre moment!
When I arrived in transition it was still dark but T1 was busy.

I racked my bike and just wandered around absorbing the atmosphere.

My wave was due to go at 7:05am.. just 5 mins after the pros. It was cold and very windy. I got changed into my wetsuit and headed down to the swim start. It was shortly after this that Mike Reilly came on the mike to inform us that due to the weather and the waves, there were a few changes. First of all the start was being delayed by 30 mins... secondly the swim was being cut to 750m. There were general mixed feelings on this. I myself had mixed feelings.. What bothered me most was the delayed start. At this stage it was about 6:40 and with a 30 min delay that meant standing about in the freezing cold and wind for nearly another hour. At this stage I was getting more worried.. I hadn't packed any additional clothing into either of my bags. The sun was starting to come up though, which was good as I didn't fancy swimming in the dark. The time passed slowly, but eventually we made our way down to the water. My age group was split into two sections based simply on the first across the mat. I was eager to go as soon as possible so pushed forward. Many weren't so eager and held back so it worked out OK. We watched the pros go of then went into the water. I dropped down to flush my suit and fill it with water.. something that usually takes your breath away with the shock of the cold, but the water was actually around the same temp as the air and it seemed OK. Finally the horn went and we were off.

The swim was tough enough. The waves were big enough to make it really difficult to get into any kind of good rhythm, and to make sure I ended up swallowing a lot of sea water... but on the whole it was OK. My first ever open water swim at Causeway Coast tri last year was about 10 times worse. In retrospect I am glad that swim was so bad.. as everything since has been fine. Even this swim which was considered a safety risk didn't really seem that bad and I exited the water feeling fresh and not overly exerted. It was slow though. There has been talk since that the swim was probably closer to 1km.. and as it took me just over 22 mins I would be inclined to believe this. This would be slow for me even to do 1km, but in rough conditions I think that is about right. Any time that I gained by having the swim cut short was rapidly lost in the massive transition. My T1 time was 7:40!!!!

I headed out on the bike and the conditions really were rough. It was cold, it was grey and it was raining heavily. I had opted to pack my prescription sunglasses into my bike bag and had checked in my normal glasses and it really wasnt a day for sunglasses! Despite the harsh conditions, I enjoyed the bike, as you can see from this photo, captured by the guys at Irish Triathlon.

The first 40 or so miles I had managed to sustain an average speed of over 20mph. I was really happy with this.. but the last section became really tough. The rain really started to drive down and a big headwind came along to really hammer us on the last section. There were quite a few accidents and crashes and I saw at least 2 ambulances out on the course. For the last 10km or so I started to harbour dark thoughts of DNF... the cold and wet had got right to my bones. My feet were numb blocks of ice and I couldn't feel my fingers, and it was getting tough to even get the bike up to 16mph on the flat due to the headwinds. Despite all this I managed to massively beat any of my previous times on the bike and came in at 2:56:54... easily beating my perfect race day bike target of 3 hours.. and a full 16 minutes faster than Groomsport two weeks previously. When I made it back to transition. I dismounted and ran the long bike area on numb stumps, buoyed by this time and kicking those dark thoughts out of my head. Others came in at the same time and we joked with one another about how numb we were. I racked my bike, ran out, grabbed my run bag and sat down to change shoes. The atmosphere in T2 was great despite the conditions and when I jokingly yelled out "can anyone feel their feet?" i got a resounding reply of "NO!!!" yelled by about 15 people at the same time. One guy happily shouted "I've got dry socks though.. I've been looking forward to these for the last 20k!"

I knew what he meant. I don't wear socks on the bike and my bike shoes had filled with puddles of water about 10km into the bike and had stayed that way the rest of the course.

I headed out on the run on my cold numb feet and just hoped like crazy that I would warm up.

The run course was really nice and the number of people on the course was amazing. It was 3 loops in and around Galway city and the atmosphere was fantastic. The supporters cheers helped keep the pain at bay, the buzz was great and the volunteers at the aid stations were amazing. The whole lot of them were so enthusiastic, cheering us on as they handed us water, coke and gels.

The run, for me, was good. I was solid and didn't walk, other than to knock back some coke and water in the aid stations. My overall pace was better than in the last race and I felt stronger and better. I had nailed the nutrition on the bike a lot better too and thus had more left in the thank for the run. The only thing that made the run really tough was a few sections where the wind was just incredible. On the sections where the headwind really kicked in, my pace was slowed massively. My pace dropped from around 8:150-8:30min miles to around a 9:30-9:45min mile. Overall this knocked a good few minutes off my overall time, though I still beat my time from Groomsport here too.

The final run up the finishers chute was AWESOME. The cheers of the supporters was incredible. Running along getting high-fived by the kids in the crowd was such a buzz.. and hearing Mike Reilly shout my name as I crossed the line was just brilliant. The volunteer at the finish put the medal round my neck and I was damn proud of myself.

Overall.. it was a TOUGH race.. but it was all the better for being tough. Despite the crazy conditions, I knocked lots of time off my previous bike times and even managed to knock almost a minute down off my run time in Groomsport which was my best time to date. Overall my finish time was 5:28:48. My dream time for the day was 5:30. The swim being cut short obviously means that I didnt do the full distance.. but the time lost in transition and the battle against the elements means that Im very happy to take this as definitely hitting my target.

Thats 3 half ironman distance races done in one season. Two of them done two weeks apart. PR's set and smashed. Thats a happy end to my 2011 tri-season.

Splits:

Swim: 22:08
T1: 7:40
Bike: 2:56:54
T2: 6:06
Run:1:56:02
Total: 5:28:48

Groomsport 2011 Half Iron

2011-08-22T06:29:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I completed my second half-iron distance race of this season. I had done this race last year as my first. It was very tough and I was hoping that this time it would be easier. Realistically, I wasn’t sure what to expect though. My training has been a bit on and off and has seriously lacked in consistency or planning. On the positive side, when I have trained it’s been mostly good training and I’m not injured or hurting in any way.

This race was the first of a double A-race session, the second of which is another 70.3 in Galway in two weeks. So I had to pace this right. I couldn’t just go out and wreck myself and not be able to race again in two weeks.
As a result of this, I paced the race much more carefully. I took it easier on the swim and held back just a little on the bike. In honesty though I didn’t hold back THAT much.

I started the day by meeting up with Lisa and Greg which was great. It was nice to have some friends to hang out with pre-race. The atmosphere was good and everyone was in good form.

The swim was an uneventful 2 lap affair (yes.. 2 laps Greg) and I came out of the water in 34:42. This was a few minutes slower than last year (last year was 30:10) but I went harder last year and besides, I’ve only swum 5 times in the last 12 months, and 4 of those times were in races.
T1 was fine, a few seconds slower than last year, and I headed out on the bike.
On the bike I felt good. I got some food in and enjoyed it. I kept a stead 19 MPH average for the first lap, got passed by a few people with aero helmets on tri bikes and passed about as many as passed me. On the second lap… pretty much the same probably dropped to about an 18.5mph average (I think) and a few people passed me and I passed a few.
The third lap I clearly started to show that I haven’t been cycling enough. By then the field had spread out and I didn’t see many people for that whole lap. I started to tire and I just started to feel heavy and slow. There was more of a headwind and my speed dropped to around or below 17mph. this is where I really decided I needed to be smart and pace myself. That was the speed that I could do with the same effort level and when a few people passed me in the last 10 mile stretch, rather than push and stay with them I let them go. Last year in the race I was happy with my performance as it was my first, but I fell to pieces on the run having put too much into the swim and bike. This time I wanted to run better.

I got off the bike in 3:12:57 (slower than last years time of 3:09:32) and was also slower in T2. So.. at this stage I’ve already lost nearly 10 minutes off last years time. At the time I didn’t know this level of detail, but I had a fair idea I was a good bit slower. However I also knew that I was going to do the run better.
I set out running and felt ok.. My real target for this whole race was to run the whole run section (walking the aid stations to drink water doesn’t count). In both previous races I was forced into a run/walk strategy due to the pain and exhaustion… I didn’t want to do it in this race, and it worked. I ran the whole thing and only walked the aid stations. I aimed to keep a 9 min mile pace for the whole run. As I progressed I started modifying my goals a little. In addition to not walking, I also wanted to do a sub 2 hour run. Then, after a few miles, I realised that if I kept the 9 min mile pace going I could beat last years time by a few minutes.
The run was tough… but I managed it and hit my targets. I did the run in 1:56:34, an average pace of just under a 9 min mile. My finishing time was 5:50:28. A ten minute improvement over last year.

Last year I had really died on the run… so despite losing time on every other part of the race, I still managed a 10 min PB. Triathlon is a complex thing.. there are so many factors to consider, but it just shows, any weakness you have in any discipline really becomes apparent over longer distances. I am not really any stronger in any of the 3 disciplines than I was last year. I had a prolonged period of inactivity due to injury and since then have been sporadic in my training. All I really did on the day was pace better, have a better mental attitude and had the experience of 2 races of this distance under my belt. It really made a difference.
Today I’m walking easily and have not real aches and pains. I have some stiffness in the legs but overall I feel good and will be able to race in Galway in two weeks.

My friends Lisa and Greg did fantastically. Lisa did her first 70.3 and did it in the fantastic time of 6:35. Hugely impressive.
Greg is a machine and was finishing his tri-season, which included the full IM Lanza course, and he finished in the top 20 with a 5:20 race.
A great day all round.
Swim: 34:42
T1: 03:33
Bike: 03:12:57
T2: 02:45
Run: 01:56:34
Total: 05:50:28

Oh, and for anyone who has read this far, I am going to keep this blog going, but am posting much more on my Google plus profile. Feel free to add me on there.

Causeway coast triathlon 2011

2011-06-20T12:15:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I did my first Olympic tri of the season. This was actually only my second Olympic ever.. and the second time doing this particular race. Last years race was pretty hectic. The sea was nuts.. lots of big waves and sharks. Seriously.. SHARKS. The swim nearly killed me and took an insanely long 43 mins.

I had been undecided about doing the race again, not because of last years conditions which were mental but enjoyable, but because it was only 2 weeks after my first half iron of the season and last year the half iron distance race screwed me up for a few weeks.

Well, the half iron passed and went well as mentioned in the last blog post and I recovered well. I was out on the bike 2 days after the race and actually did a 10 mile TT in just under 30 mins... and then went on to do a total of 19 miles. I also ran twice and did another hard bike session on my new bike.
Oh.. yeah.. I got a new bike.. but that warrants a blog post of its own so it will have to wait.

At this point I realised that I was totally fit for an eager to do the causeway race again. Sadly I had left it too long and registration had closed. Thankfully though the race director is a legend and I dropped him an email and he registered me no problem.
I threw in a few more hard bike workouts and some run speedwork then took a few days off to "taper"

Strictly speaking this is a joke.. I didn't taper, I had some work related travel that took up a few days and then I took one extra rest day :D

The day of the race arrived and despite being last to register, I was one of the first to arrive on race day morning. I met up with my good buddy Lisa and we hung out and chatted, registered, set up transition etc. Her race report is excellent and she WON HER AGE GROUP, so go read it)
The race itself was excellent. The sea was lovely, the swim was much easier than last years, which was clearly evidenced in my time. Last year it took me 43:35 mins.. this year it took me 24:29. Yeah... that's right.. 19 minutes faster. Crazy. And its not from training, cuz I haven't done any swim training.

The bike was good, pretty hilly and sadly on the downhill sections it was windy so I was a bit slower than last year. The bike leg took me 01:16:03. Average speed of 19.7mph this is decent for me but a few mins slower than last year (when I did it in 1:12:26.) This slowdown was partially the conditions, partially some annoying hip pain i developed for the last 8 miles or so but probably mostly due to the fact that last year this had been a bit of a priority race and not something that I did at the last minute two weeks after a half ironman and with 3 hard bike workouts in the short time between the two races. Considering all this I'm actually VERY happy with the time.
The run was OK too.. I haven't done a lot of speedwork and managed the 10k in 48:22. This is OK.. an average pace of 7:48 which is faster than Ive run for a while. Last year I actually did the run in 43:52.. but it was a shorter and easier run course, so again I am happy.

My overall race time was 02:33:52... which I'm very happy with indeed. Nearly a 10 min PR.

The only thing I'm not happy really about with this race was my transition times... it seems petty but T1 was 3 mins and T2 was 2 mins. 5 mins transition in an olympic is a lot, and for me its over 2 mins longer than I should have been, and indeed was last year. It came down to bad prep and not really thinking about what I was doing. Knowing this I know that I can easily shave this time down below two and half hours without too much work.

One thing I'm really happy with, as with the last race, is the swim. There were lots of much faster swimmers.. but the overall winner of the race only beat my by 1 min 45 secs on the swim. He beat my by 33 mins overall... hell I wasn't even close.. but it really shows me where I can make up lots of time and its really not one swim. Its EVERYTHING else :D

I should really learn to swim properly tho.. it would make sense.

Overall it was a great race and a great day out. As always, the organisers and the participants were a lovely bunch of people and the whole thing was a fantastic experience. Even the post race food was lovely and very plentiful. This is one race that I will really try and do every year if I can.

Eskragh Half Ironman

2011-06-06T03:33:00.000-07:00

©Shane Molloy Photography

Saturday was the first triathlon of the season for me.
The approach to this race was a bit of a mental battle.
It was my first race since the broken wrist, my fitness levels still aren't where they need to be and on top of all that I developed some kind of random and inexplicable problem with my hip.. it hurt to walk. No idea why or how it happened.

In the month or so running up to the race I went through a variety of plans.
initially, due to the fact that I hadn't had a swim in about 8 months, I figured I would skip the swim and just do a long bike ride and run. However in the last few weeks I managed to get back in the pool twice. The first time was a 1500m session, the second was 3000m. So having concluded that I might manage the swim without drowning, I decided to give the whole thing a go. Then the hip problem kicked in. So I figured that I would try the swim, and maybe the bike and not run.

In the last few days coming up to the race I seriously considered just dropping it. However I got some great advice from my mate Iain, the nutter who calls himself a "lazy triathlete" but who qualified for and raced Kona last year :D
Iain's exact words were (and this warrants a direct cut and paste from the email)

Maybe do this weekends race but have it in your head that if the leg gets too bad you'll stop. That's what the Pro's do, Chris Lieto dropped out when he was leading IM Texas last week because he's carrying an injury. Jodie Swallow did the same in St George. They got in a solid swim & bike training session then put a few miles in their legs.

This made a lot of sense to me. I guess in a lot of ways I probably had a lot of psychological blocks against doing the race anyway.. First race back after a serious injury.. Is a half ironman too ambitious? Can I complete a half ironman with nowhere near enough training? etc etc etc...
Anyway.. I turned up on the morning pretty convinced that I wouldn't finish the race. I always try to set a series of goals, the biggest goal being the most achievable.
Normally my first goal is to finish...
For this race, my main goal for the day was to start.
My next goal was to finish the swim, then to finish the bike.
In honesty.. that was about it. I didn't really even expect to start the run.

So I turned up on race day and wasn't even really nervous. The field was STRONG. I mean.. you could tell by the bikes and the look of the folk who were there. It was a small race, around 40 entrants. Still though, everyone was very friendly and the organisers, "Tri-limits", are really nice guys. If you ever get a chance to do one of their races I highly recommend it.

The nerves kicked in a little when I stood and looked out at the lough. I've only done two open water races before, the causeway coast Olympic and my first half ironman at groomsport last year. In both cases the swim was 2 laps, which was nice as it gets you out of the water and gives you a few seconds rest from swimming. this was one lap, and looked LONG. A photo of the lough is at the end of this post. Still though, my aim was just to start, and there were lots of people out there to rescue me if i started to really struggle, so I racked up my bike and got myself ready to give it a go.

The swim turned out to be really nice. The water was warm and clear and as there weren't too many people it was pleasant. No one swimming over you, kicking you, punching you.. and no insane waves or tides. Just a nice little swim in a lough to start the day. In all honesty I think the swim distance was a bit short as I completed it in 25 mins and I'm NOT a great swimmer. the last 70.3 I did it in 30 mins and I hadn't done any training to explain any significant improvement, so I'm assuming it was short but am happy to have done it. I came out middle of the pack, took my time in T1 and set out on the bike.

©Shane Molloy Photography

The bike course was lovely. No real winds, nice rolling hills that weren't steep enough to really push you on the climbs but were steep enough to get well over 30mph on the descents. I actually really enjoyed the bike and felt good and strong for the first 46 miles. The last 10 had a bit of a headwind and a few too many hills which slowed me down a fair bit. However I still completed the distance in 3:06, a 3 minute improvement over my time in the Groomsport race last year which was a 3:09. Overall I felt better on the bike in this race too.

Now, to be honest, by this point my goals for the day started to change. I started the day giving myself about a 15% chance of finishing. However from about the halfway mark on the bike, I knew I had PRed the swim and was starting to think I might PR the bike. Despite the slowdown for the last 10 miles, I still finished pretty strong. The big challenge, of course, would be the run.

I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to run at all, and dreaded feeling anywhere near as bad as I did in the last 70.3... However when I racked the bike and set out on the run I actually felt OK. Nothing hurt and I was running at about an 8:30 pace. I forced myself to slow down and just kept going. It was a 4 lap course and I ran the first lap solidly. I walked the water stop, for about 10 seconds, then ran the second lap solidly again. From about mile 8 on I had to do a little bit of walking on each mile, but I had managed to avoid walking for the first 8 miles, whereas in the last race I had been walking from the start.

I finished the run in 2:08... an 11 minute improvement over the last time (2:19).

©Shane Molloy Photography

So.. I set out to start, and didn't think I'd finish. I ended up PRing every distance and running a much better race than last time. The swim may have been a bit short but the bike was fine with a small improvement there and the run was a massive improvement. My previous finish time was 6 hours. This one was 5:39. I'm very happy indeed with this.

Thanks to the guys at Tri-limits for putting on a great race and thanks to all the friendly participants who made it a really pleasant race. And a final thanks to the guy who actually recognised me from this blog.. which was great as I didn't realise anyone really read it ;) I was buzzing so much from finishing that I didn't catch your name so if you re reading this, drop me a comment...

Sorry this has been a bit of a long one... Thanks for reading :D

Not sure who took this, but I look a lot more laid back... found this pic on the Irish Triathlon website.

My own photo of the lough.

Back on form...

2011-05-13T11:48:00.000-07:00

Finally I'm feeling really like I'm getting back on form.
This week I really kicked it back into tough.
Steph and Alexa are away to the states for a visit, so Im on holiday and being full time dad for 2 weeks. For the first few days though Zane was still in school so I took advantage of this and got some solid training in.
On Wednesday I started out with a 16 mile run that took 2.5 hours..
On thursday I knocked out my first half century bike ride of the year. 50 miles in 3 hours 10 minutes. Not gonna win any records for speed... but decent enough training and all zone 2.
Finally.. today, Friday... I finished off this 3 days of tough training with a self supported olympic distance triathlon...
First of all I got back in the pool for the first time in about 7 months. It was tough and I was slow but I managed the 1500m in 34:37... Not bad.
Then I drove home, and headed out on the bike. Which was an Awesome ride. Zone 2 all the way, felt great. Bit of a balls up at the end.. blew out both wheels.. Then blew out one of my two spare tubes when changing it.. had to ride last mile home on a flat back wheel.. time for changes isnt included :D Still managed the 25 miles in 1:31:17 (not including tyre changing time). Would have been better if it wasn't for the last mile on a flat.
Finally, I headed out on the run. The run itself was tough going.. but after these three days and as the first brick I've done in ages, this was to be expected. Still did it in 58:48 with an AP of 9:29.. so not bad overall! A decent 3 hours worth of training, which brings the week to a total of nearly 9 hours for the week in just 3 days.
Feels good. :D

Sort your Zones out...

2011-05-06T07:14:00.000-07:00

Ive done quite a lot since my last blog post.. Training has been up and down. This blog post is a bit of a training tip though, rather than an update on my training.. and the focus is training zones.

Most people train with a heart rate monitor. If you don't, you should, go buy one.. I'll wait....

Got it?

OK.. good.

So.. Its one thing to have a heart rate monitor (HRM) but its another thing to actually use it correctly. In order to do so, you should actually train according to your heart rate. The key to doing this correctly is to discover your own heart rate zones. Now lots of websites and probably even your own HRM software will probably offer to do this for you based on your age. It may even be really fancy and ask you to determine your resting heart rate. This is very basic and there is a way better way to do things. The way to find your ideal training zones is to base your training on what your heart rate is when training. In order to do this you can do a lactate threshold test. I first heard about these things from Joe Friels book "The Triathletes training bible" and thankfully Joe as a blog post that explains both how to do a LT test and how to set your zones based on it. LT tests are tough. It basically involves you doing 30 mins running or cycling (you will need to do both.. at different times) to find out what your average heart rate is at lactate threshold.

I did a run LT test the other night for the first time in over a year. I'm glad I did as I discovered that my standard zone 2 heart rate was a bit better than i thought and my pace for zone 2 runs is a little better than I was aiming for.

Training according to heart rate makes sense. Its a way of gauging your pace and effort based on what your fitness levels allow and what you re capable of and what your body can do, rather than what you want to do or think you can do. Running based on heart rate and doing a lot of zone 2 training can reduce injuries and ultimately make you fitter and faster... So.... clear off and do a wee LT test. :D

Just to finish, and cuz I like pics in my blog posts.. here is a little pic of me, covered in mud at a recent adventure race/ mudrun i did recently...
DIRTY

Woah.. its march already???

2011-03-02T14:04:00.000-08:00

Training has picked up a bit over the last month..
Actually, having just checked back when I last blogged.. things have really picked up a lot.
Ive made it back out on the road on the bike.. twice now. On both occasions I went out on a Sunday morning and did a 30 miler. Both were tough.. wonderful Belfast conditions were in full force. The first week was windy as a wind tunnel, and it was hard going. The second time it looked like it was going to be a nice day.. so I went out in just shorts and a short sleeved cycle top and some arm warmers.. big mistake. It rained so heavily that for a while i couldn't see.. then it cleared up for a while, then there were hailstones. When i got home I was physically shaking with cold for about 20 mines. But it felt good to get out.
On both occasions my wrist ached like hell, and was sore for a few day after.. but I'll just have to get used to that. What the hell, its another reason to argue that I need a full carbon bike, right?
I managed to get in 200 miles of cycling in february with about 40 miles of running. This pretty much doubled my cycling and running mileage from January
Target for March is to try and get in about 300 miles biking and about 50 miles running.

I kicked that of tonight with my first run of the month and my first double digit run in about 6 months. Ive been focussed this last while on running slower, which has been a real necessity as im trying to get my mileage back up and the speed needs to be sacrificed to do so. I realised today while updating my outlook calender that my first race of the year is only two and half weeks away. The larne half marathon will kick off my 2011 season. Im not aiming for a PR.. im just aiming to get round the course and have a nice run. Im hoping to finish sub 2 hours... which is WAY off a PR.. but after the amount of time off and lost fitness that Ive had, it will be a good start to the year. The PRs can come later
:D

Looking up

2011-01-29T02:05:00.000-08:00

Things have started to improve this month. While I'm still far from back on good form, I have undoubtedly started training again. Admittedly this entire month has had less hours training than a previous heavy week.. but its improving. Ive built up at a safe and semi-conservative pace. Ive pushed myself, but not too much, and I'm starting to see results. Ive shed some of the excess weight I picked up along the way and I'm abe to run and cycle (on the turbo) and enjoy it again. The first few runs this month were horrible. Truly unenjoyable and unpleasant. This week I managed a 5 mile run and enjoyed it. Then 2 days later did a 6 miler and enjoyed that too. Longest runs for 3 months, and the most enjoyable. Hopefully next week I'll be back to running an hour solid.

I'm also considering trying to go out on the bike on the road again. Possibly this Sunday morning. I'm nervous to do so, but Ive gotta shake off the fear and do it. Actually, in honesty, its not even fear. Its a complete lack of desire tempered with a touch of dread. I'm just hopeful that 2 Min's out on the road and my love of cycling will overpower it all and my problems will be solved. Fingers crossed for that.

Haven't considered swimming yet. Got a new tattoo a week a go so need to let that settle in for a few weeks before I can swim. I cant imagine how weird swimming is going to be. I'm hoping it will be OK though. Again, fingers crossed!

The Turbo

2011-01-27T00:11:00.000-08:00

I'm currently sitting on a train to Dublin, and this seems to be as good a time as any to write a quick blog update.

I was just following a conversation on Twitter there about turbo sessions, and found myself thinking, as I have on many occasions before, am I the only person in the world that actually likes using a turbo trainer?

I often hear people berate the trainer. It seems to be hated almost as much as the dreaded treadmill, or dreadmill as I personally call it.

I like the trainer. I do. Last night, for example. After we got the kids to bed, Steph and a friend of hers had gone out to a Zumba class, but got stuck in traffic, so they came home and decided to play the Dance Central game on the Xbox as a replacement. So guilt free I retired to the front room to hit the trainer. With the kids asleep and Steph busy, I didn't have to worry or feel guilty that I should be doing something else. The only worry was the downstairs neighbour, who has on one occasion, complained about the noise of the trainer. But it was only 8pm... so even that worry was appeased.

I turned on the fan, dimmed the lights, queued up a few tracks on the ipod and jumped on the bike for some intervals and had a good solid hour workout. Which I fully enjoyed.

Why do I enjoy it so much? Well... at 8pm at night in Belfast at this time of year, its dark. Cycling in the dark is OK.. but its not the safest thing in the world. Its also cold, so requires about 4 hours of getting ready to actually go outside. Finally.. and most importantly.. I can do completely focused training sessions. Last nights was intervals to build speed and power. When I cycle out on the road, I'm not really very good at this. I just happily cycle along and enjoy it.

Now at the moment, I'm not cycling on the road anyway. I still don't really have the strength or flexibility in my wrist, and I don't have the confidence either. This is not the issue though, last night was just a prime example of how enjoyable using the turbo can be. I got a really good hours training session in. My legs feel it this morning much more than an hour on the road would achieve.

Weirdly, the total opposite is true for running. I cannot run on a treadmill. Well, obviously technically I can, I just hate it. Id much rather be outside, regardless of the weather. Rain, wind, snow, whatever. I guess the turbo haters just feel the same way

Now, apart from the fact Id rather be outside.. I also have a bit of a rationale for this loving the turbo and hating the dreadmill thing. I think running outside makes you a much better runner. The wind, hills, fluctuations in the terrain etc are all good for the leg strength and stability in a way that running on a treadmill just wont achieve. Conversely.. If you use it right, I think the turbo can provide very significant gains for cycling. There are no downhills on the trainer. Provided you are using the right resistance and gearing, using the trainer should not be like cycling on the flat. Even a steady state spin should be a like a constant gradual incline. My average speed on the trainer is by default several mph slower than it is on the road.

Fair enough you can set a gradient on the treadmill, but its not the same. Maybe its just personal preference. If you love the treadmill, feel free to comment or drop me a mail !

Back on track? Meh.

2011-01-11T14:52:00.000-08:00

Another month has passed since last update.
Ive had to do a lot of thinking over the last few weeks.
Not doing any training for about 3 months now has resulted in me losing lot of fitness. Ive had to evaluate my plans for this year. 2011 was meant to be the year of my first Ironman. Ive had to reconsider this, I was struggling with this a lot and was very grateful to Phil Lavoie with whom I had a great chat over the whole issue. Phil is a phenomenal athlete who has clocked up some incredible times in the IM's that he has done.
My basic issue is that I don't really want my first Ironman to be a horrible experience. I don't want to be desperately trying to beat the cutoff and I don't want my first to be my last. In short, I don't want to go into the race not sure if I can finish.

So my plan this year is now to complete a few half Iron distances and get faster at them. The day I made this decision I signed up for the Galway 70.3 event. The first WTC event in Ireland.

Trying to get back to training has been a lot harder than I anticipated. While my wrist is recovering and is still pretty sore. My range of motion is terrible and i cant support any weight with my right arm. Ive put on a lot of weight and can feel it. being off over Christmas, eating too much and drinking a lot (partially for pain relief!) really didn't help.

I went for a 3 mile run last week and my legs hurt for days afterwards. I got some new shoes at the weekend and went for a 4 mile this week. In short.. it sucked. I hated every minute of it.

This saddened me greatly as I love to run, I really love it. I'm sure the love will come back, hopefully sooner rather than later.

As for cycling.. well, I spoke to the consultant about this last week and he said that if I really wanted too I could try and go out on the bike again but to be very careful due to the restricted range of motion and lack of strength. The truth is though, I dont want to. The accident has thrown me quite a lot psychologically and going back out on the road is kinda scary. I'll get over it, but I'm not even going to try until i get a bit more strength and flexibility in the arm.

I have, however, been back on the trainer and just finished my first hard trainer workout with intervals and some high intensity effort levels... and I feel pretty good.

Ive got some plans in mind for racing this year.. and over the next few weeks I will see how I feel and how the trainig goes and see how achievable they are. Hopefully now that I am back training again, I will be back to blogging a bit more often.

Life is full of challenges

2010-12-09T00:13:00.000-08:00

I think this may be the longest I've gone without blogging... and I'm terrible at it at the best of times.

The last few months have been incredibly busy, but not so much with training. I had my off-season, then just as i was starting to get back into training, I had a spot of bad luck.

A few months back I bought a motorbike and started commuting to work. It was economical and fun. After a few months of this, the bad luck struck. While driving through a town on my way to work, a car pulled put in front of me from a side street.. I had always heard that the biggest risk with motorbikes is other drivers and its very true. The driver just drove out directly in front of me. I was lucky in that i was probably only doing about 10-15mph when I impacted... But I hurt my wrist.

A visit to the hospital revealed that it was broken. The bad luck continued in that it wasn't a clean or simple break... So they dosed me up with morphine and something that removes your memory and did things to my wrist to try and set it right.

A week later some more X-rays meant more bad luck.. The bone wasn't setting right and I needed surgery. I am hugely impressed time and time again by the British National Health System. I was called in for surgery the nest day.

The surgery happened, I got a plate put in my arm and spent the night in hospital.

I'm not dwelling on details, and this is not a desire for pity of any kind... but its probably worth noting that I have a few little phobias about medical procedures... particularly needles. Surgery is something Ive always been terrified of, so it wasn't really a fun experience inside my head. Plus, the pain afterwards was pretty damn intense.

Its now 2 weeks post surgery. The pain is getting better, although I'm still popping painkillers 3-6 times a day. I'm due for a review appointment tomorrow morning, so please send good wishes and positive thoughts my way that everything is healing well!

Anyway.. there is a point to all this, and its not meant to be just a blog post of complaining. I haven't done any exercise in nearly a month now. Over the last few weeks I've been endlessly frustrated by only having one functional arm. The frustration isn't helped by having little sleep... but the thing is, its really hard to function with one arm. Simple things become lengthy and arduous tasks... things like picking up the baby, changing her diaper, buttoning a shirt, typing, putting on Zane's shoes, tying shoelaces etc etc. Some of these things seem damn near impossible with one hand... Seriously.. how do you tie shoelaces with one hand? If it wasnt for my awesome, wonderful wife I don't know what I would have done.

Through all this, through the pain and the frustration, I've found one thing often popping into my head... A guy called Jason Lester, here's a little part of Jason's story from his wiki page

Lester grew up playing baseball and football. When he was twelve years old, he was hit while on his bicycle by a woman driving 70 mph who ran a red light. He was left for dead with 21 broken bones and a collapsed lung. Lester lost the use of his right arm, which became partially paralyzed as a result of the accident. During the next several months he began a lengthy hospital recovery. While he was still in the hospital recovering, his father, and sole guardian, died of a heart attack.

Jason is now an endurance athlete. In 2008 he became the first physically challenged athlete ever to complete the Ultraman World Championships in Hawaii finishing the ultra-distance triathlon where he swam 6.2 miles, biked 261.4 miles and ran 52.4 miles to the finish line.

In 2009 he won the ESPY award for best male with a disability.

Last year, himself and Rich Roll did the "Epic 5". 5 Ironman races in 5 days on the 5 islands of Hawaii

My accident was small by comparison. I wasn't going that fast and only broke one bone. However, on a personal perspective Ive had a horrible few weeks. I cant even imagine what Jason Lester went through. Ive had a few weeks of being frustrated about not being able to dress myself or my kids. Jason has done the Ultraman race with one arm.

This whole experience has really highlighted to me how much of a challenge disabled athletes face. My temporary disability has shown me how hard everyday life can be.. never mind training or competing.

So.... pop over to Jason's website maybe consider donating to the charity he runs and most importantly.... Just take a few minutes to just appreciate what you have in life. If you've got 2 functioning arms, legs, ears, eyes etc then be glad you do. And if you've been slipping on the training because its too dark or too cold? Get off your ass and go do a few miles for me please... I'm missing it.

70.3....... DONE

2010-08-23T02:59:00.000-07:00

I'm going to actually try and make this a concise and short race report.
Yesterday I did my main "A race" for the year.
This was essentially what I had been training for all year.
Beyond that it was the next link in the chain that ultimately leads to doing a full Ironman. Suffice to say this was pretty important!

I had been really concerned over the last few weeks. I was injured. I'd been to see a physio a few times and I hadn't trained AT ALL for the last 3 weeks. You could consider it an extended taper... but my original intention would have been one more BIG week of training with 2 weeks of actual tapering (ie still training but less).
Instead I got 3 weeks of inactivity and, funnily enough, weight gain... Not ideal, but those were the cards I was dealt.

I arrived on race day excited and nervous. Nervous of what i was about to do, and even more nervous that my knee was going to pack in on me. I was early and I wandered around soaking up the atmosphere. It was awesome to bump into Lisa and her family as they had come down to give some support

As the start approached my nerves got worse... but so did the excitement.. eventually they led us out of transition and I walked with the 200 or so other competitors down to the beach.

THE SWIM
My last open water swim was ROUGH the sea had been very choppy and rough.. this time round it was flat and still. Last time round I also went out too hard, this time round I deliberately started as slow as I could.. and the tactic worked. The swim felt easy, I stayed relaxed and even when I got thumped or kicked in the head, it didn't throw me off (too much) and despite taking in some water, I cruised the two laps in what felt like a pretty easy 30 minutes and 10 seconds. For a 2km swim I'm very happy with that, especially considering the last one was only 1500m and took me 43:35. I took my time in transition and felt ready for the bike.

THE BIKE
The bike course was lovely. It was flat and pleasant with lovely scenery. In retrospect I realise now that I went out too hard.. but it felt good. the injured leg gave me a few twinges that caused me to hold back a little, but overall I was more than happy. Along the course the occasional spectators and the cheers from the volunteers was a fantastic boost.
At one point along the course I was going through the village of Donaghadee and totally unexpectedly saw my wife with Alexa and our friend Fiona. This unexpected site and their cheers of encouragement literally brought tears to my eyes :D
Although I did instantly realise that tears were a loss of body fluid that I couldnt afford and knocked that on the head immediately.

According to my garmin the course was a few miles long, so my time of 3:09:32 was perfect and I was pretty much on course for my best possible scenario race day... but with the lingering injury the worry was always the run...

THE RUN
I racked my bike, pulled on my shoes and headed out on the run and IT HURT STRAIGHT AWAY.
Funnily enough, the majority of the pain was in the leg that wasn't previously injured... although Id been feeling some twinges in that knee, probably from overcompensating for the injury. I knew within minutes that there was no way I was running the whole course. In fact I was very worried that I was going to have to just walk the whole thing.

It took me a while to work out what to do, and the off-road nature of the majority of the course made it hard to get into a routine.. but I settled eventually into a run/walk strategy of 4 mins run, 1 min walk.
For the first half of the run it basically worked something like this
Minute 1: Oh I feel ok, cool, whoooo, yeah
Minute 2: Oh, shit, no.. this hurts
Minute 3: oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit
Minute 4: ARGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG
Minute 5: Walk... hang on.. walking shouldn't still be hurting should it?
REPEAT.

As I progressed through the second half... It got harder. For the last few miles, I was having to throw in little extra walk breaks now and again.
But the knowledge that I was going to finish kept me going. I had totally lost track of my time, I was convinced that I must have stopped my stopwatch and re-started it at some point and i was convinced that I was about 15-20 minutes slower than it was saying. There was no way I was going to be close to 6 hours... as long as I was under 6:30 I was going to be happy.

As I came down the hill towards the last stretch, my awesome and amazing and supportive wife was there cheering. I head the announcer saying something that led me to believe I could still make it in under 6 hours... BUT, I didn't care. In the last race, at the end, Zane was there and came out to run beside me, but I was so focused that I didn't really see him and kept running. He ran beside me, but I was disappointed in myself for not realising he was there and running with him. I was NOT going to do that again and I didn't give a shit what the time on the clock was.
I stopped dead
"Wheres Zane?"
"He is over there on the beach!"
I shouted to him and he came over.
I took his hand and asked him if he wanted to run with me and he said yes.... So we ran the last stretch, hand in hand over the finish line. There wasn't a huge crowd but the cheers were amazing from those that were there, and the fact that I was running with Zane seemed to make people cheer even more :D
I crossed the finish line in 6 hours and 10 seconds and crossing that line, holding my wonderful son's hand was an incredible feeling.

SUMMARY
So, despite an injury, my last few weeks training being messed up and it being my first half ironman, I hit my target of 6 hours. Looking at my splits based on my training, experience and the level I am at, I think I was as fast as I could have been in the swim and fast as I could have been on the bike. The run was not even close to what I could have done if I was in peak running condition. But a 2:19 half marathon that is mostly off-road is still not bad, especially considering that the entire 13.1 miles actually felt like the last 6 miles of a marathon!

During the event, and particularly on the run, I gained a newfound repsect for those that do the full Ironman distance. While running it did run through my head that there was no way I could ever do that. I can though. And i will.

A few photos from the start courtesy of Lisa...

Two weeks out...

2010-08-09T06:08:00.000-07:00

I'm now two weeks out from my main race of this year... the half ironman in Groomsport.

And I am NOT training

Yup, nothing at all.

I haven't done any exercise in 5 days now.
This is due to injury and not laziness.
Ive been seeing a physio over this tendon problem. Ive had a few treatments and have had to have complete rest.

Psychologically, this was tough to start with. To make the decision that after a years training, i stop 2 weeks out from my race is difficult.

Physically its even worse.
I worked out the other day that on a big training week I can burn off up to 11,000 calories.
That's over 4 days worth of food.
My body, despite not training, doesn't realise that it doesn't need the food. So I'm hungry, trying not to eat as much and gaining weight nonetheless.
Not great.
I'm rather on edge. I'm kinda cranky, and I'm sure I'm a total pain in the ass to be around at the moment as my body is really not dealing very well with the transition from lots of training to no training.

Still, the most important thing is to make sure this injury gets better so that I can show up to the start line in two weeks and do this event.
I no longer care about the time.
I was never THAT concerned.. but its nice to have targets.. things to aim for.
At the start of the season, my aim for the year was to complete a half ironman.
As the year progressed and my training went well, I started to have little internal time targets. At one point I was starting to aim pretty high.
Now I'm back to just wanting to show up uninjured and to complete it.

Despite all this, I'm totally upbeat and happy. These things happen.
My body has shown me that it has limitations... and that I pushed it too hard.
All I can do is learn the lesson and get better in time for the race.

(Not a) RACE DAY (for me)

2010-08-01T11:39:00.000-07:00

Today was my first experience of not racing in a race I had registered for.
The City of Lisburn sprint triathlon was my first Tri last year. Its where I got the bug and I had been really looking forward to doing it.
Sadly over the last few weeks I've been struggling with a hamstring tendon injury. I thought it was gone, but it seems its not. I went fro a swim yesterday to make sure I still knew how... its been a few weeks... and while i CAN swim.. the swim seems to have aggravated the hamstring injury.
I spent the rest of the day sore, cranky and irritable.
Mid afternoon I made the call.. I wasn't going to race today.
If it had been my A-race for the year, I would have done it anyway (probably stupid, but I would have). Its not though, it was a priority race, but my A-race for the year is my half ironman. Which is a mere 3 weeks away. If I had raced today, I KNOW i would have ended up hurting myself and not racing the half ironman. Now THAT would have sucked. Not only is it my A-race, its also an important step towards my overall longer term goal... Full Ironman. Last year I did the marathon. This year half Iron, next year, Ironman.
I cant afford to screw this up. But it was still hard to decide not to race a race that I knew would be fun. I also knew I would have made a very significant improvement over last year and was looking forward to seeing how much. Still, what can you do?

Howver, there waws one silver lining. My friend Lisa who I have been coaching this year.. for her The Lisburn tri was her A-race for the year. So I got to go and watch and cheer her on. Which was great. I was supposed to be in the wave after her so wouldn't have seen her race at all after the swim. As it was today I got to watch her swim with her dad, then met her dad, her husband and her kids to watch her on the bike course and again on the run course.

She executed her race perfectly. Her perfect race target was to get a sub 1:30 time... she managed it in 1:27. An amazing performance. It was fantastic to watch someone achieve their goals, especially when you've played some small part in helping them along towards those goals.

I always feel a bit of a fool saying I am coaching anyone.. I'm totally inexperienced myself. But Ive learned a lot through my own training, through my own mistakes, and through reading HUGE amounts of literature on training. Today I felt less of a fool and very glad that I had been able to help someone support someone in achieving what they set out to achieve. Lisa's race report will be on her own blog... http://windymillar.posterous.com/

It really help make up for not racing.

Now.. I have 3 weeks to get this niggling injury sorted, lose the extra pounds Ive put on this last month and execute my own A-race for the year.
:D

Oh so very delayed! Causeway Coast Triathlon Race Report

2010-07-19T15:12:00.000-07:00

This is one seriously overdue blog. About 5 weeks back I did my first Olympic Triathlon. I was ready to write the blog straight away.. but life's been busy. Lots been happening, most importantly of which is the birth of my daughter Alexa Grace.

And here I am with both of my awesome kids...

SO, that's my excuse... Now on with the blog and race report.

My first Olympic triathlon was the Causeway coast triathlon on the 13th of June. It was both a hugely enjoyable experience and a very humbling one. The swim was my first open water swim, as my other tri's have been sprints with pool swims. It was TOUGH. And it wasn't just me that thought it was tough. The conditions were tough and swimming in the sea was like swimming in a washing machine. It was two laps of 750m.. but with the waves and currents, I definitely did more than this with lots of being dragged around. Here is a quote from the race organisers report on the race which highlights the difficulty...

"The average time for a swim of this length in benign conditions for elite swimmers is about 20 minutes so it was somewhat of a surprise when the first swimmer took 33 minutes to eventually emerge after 2 laps"

Yup, it was hard. The first lap was a struggle and when I came out after the first lap i was shaken and kinda scared to go back in again. This was me coming out of the water...

Part of me was even vaguely tempted to give up... Then I saw my wife, my mother in law and Zane cheering and that gave me the kick i needed. This was me waving as I ran back in for my second lap...

The second lap, I slowed down a bit. I found out later that I had gone out way to hard on the first lap. I did the first lap in 19:55 and the second in a much more realistic 23:30. Steph said afterwards that she was worried about me after the first lap because I was coming out FAR to close to the folks at the front :D

My total swim time was 43:35. The fastest guy out of the water did it in 33 Min's. The guy who WON the whole race did it in 40:26... So I was only 3 Min's behind the winner out of the water.
When I came out though, I was SHAKY. One of the race officials grabbed me and pulled me to the side to ask if I was OK. To be honest, I wasn't. I felt like I gone a few rounds with Mike Tyson. But as I explained to the official, Id be OK once I had a nice wee sit down on the bike. At this he laughed and sent me on my way. In this pic you can see me just after this has happened. The guys who was concerned for me is on the left.. I love the fact that the other guy is cheering on my stupid determination.

I got my wetsuit off, grabbed the bike and got going. It took a while to get my heart rate down and get settled but once I did I loved it. The bike course was beautiful and I was able to keep a fairly decent speed despite it being pretty hilly. The 40k took me 1:12:26. If the distance was right and it was indeed a full 40k, then my average speed was 20.6mph... and I am MORE than happy with this.

The run was uphill for the first 3 miles, then a bit of downhill and the last few km was on the beach... not an easy finish. Steph managed to get a quick photo of me just coming out of T2

Definitely looking better than I did coming out of the water and rocking my johnhirsch.org CREW tri-kit in all its glory.

I'm pretty sure the run was a little short of the full 10k as I finished it in 43:52.. which would be a 10k PR for me, but who am i to argue, I'll take it.

This is me just over the line.

The finish time shown in the photo was my correct finish time. 2:43:38. Totally happy with this. I did have a target going into the race to do it sub 2:45... and I did, despite the evil and pretty slow swim. I did way better than I expected in the bike and run and placed 40th overall and 9th in my age group. I was, and still am, totally happy with this result.

This was my first A-race of the year, my first Olympic triathlon and was an amazing experience. Roll on more races :D

Race season continues....

2010-06-04T03:21:00.000-07:00

Since last posting I’ve had another race. On Sunday past I got up at a horribly early hour (5:30am) to drive to Derry to take part in the Liam Ball/ Northwest Sprint Triathlon. My “taper” for this race consisted of doing the most amount of cycling Ive ever done in one week, plus a bit of running and a wee swim. Basically.. this was a normal training week so no taper allowed! I started the week with some bike commuting. My daily commute is 30 miles, and this week I did 2 full days of bike commuting, thus clocking up 120 miles of cycling by Wednesday. I took Thursday as a rest day, had a 1 hour run on Friday, then on Saturday got in the pool for a quick check that I still knew how to swim as I hadn't done so in 2 weeks due to getting a tattoo. Thus I arrived on race day, far from refreshed and rested.. but exited nonetheless.

I had decided to follow some advice from my buddy and favourite pro-triathlete John Hirsch and “race like a Buddhist monk”. I wanted to get faster in transition so no messing around with unnecessary crap. So I cut my transition setup down to the bare minimum

Tri-suit
Goggles
T1: helmet, sunglasses, bikeshoes
T2: socks, shoes

No messing around.

I was glad I had opted for this strategy, as to start off with.. the race had a hell of a transition. The pool was upstairs (yes.. UPSTAIRS) in the leisure centre, so T1 involved a run the length of the leisure centre, down the stairs, through the sports hall, and halfway across some gravel pitches. T:2 was pretty long too.. so I was already expecting to struggle to PR on this course due to this.

I got into my lane for the swim and started out second, after a few lengths I passed the guy in front of me and led the swim and was first out of the water in my lane. I think I was maybe 2nd or 3rd out of the water in my wave. I'm not really that insanely fast or anything, If I had been in the next wave, I probably would have been way down the ranking.

The bike leg was a challenge. Strong headwinds on the way out and a course that was a mile longer than the standard sprint distance. I think the total length was 13.4 miles. This was fine by me, and it was a nice bike course. However, that extra mile when you aren’t expecting it is kinda tough… not in total.. but when you're expecting the turn around point to happen any second and it doesn’t!

T:2 was fun… I couldn’t find my shoes.. which slowed me down for a few seconds, and was equally frustrating and hilarious. The run course was, I think, a fair bit short of 5k as I did it way faster than I actually am capable of running at the moment.. but what the hell, I will take it.. a 20:11 5k sounds good!

In the last 100m, the guy who I had passed in the pool and who had been behind me for the whole bike leg, put a sprint on and passed me.. damn… I ended up finishing 4th in my wave, which I'm totally happy with, and 13th in my age group… which I am both HAPPY with and AMAZED by as its exactly the same placing as last time.

Overall, in terms of time I was a little slower than the last race, but with an extra mile in the bike leg and a lot longer transition, I consider it mentally a PR. RESULT.

Next race is another two weeks away when I do my first Olympic length tri… and my first open water swim……

Kickin off the season...

2010-05-16T10:43:00.000-07:00

This week was a busy one. I had a cold, travelled for 40 hours to the west coast of the states and back, had jetlag from hell and kicked off my triathlon season.

Not the easiest of weeks!

While over in the states I manged to get a few training sessions in. I went for an amazing 1 hour trail run in San Diego out in the Torrey pines State park in La Jolla. Spectacular trails that included a 1300 ft descent and climb. Not easy, at one point i was running (kinda) up and 18% grade. A hell of a lot of fun though.

The next day I met up with a Triathlon buddy, Morgan and we went for a nice easy 8.5 mile run down by the coast. It was his first long run since completing his first half -ironman so I was picking his brain extensively for tips. Meeting up with a friend while away from home is great and we had a cool afternoon training and hanging out.

SO, fast-forward to the weekend. I got home, suffered the worst jetlag Ive had in a LONG time and then come Saturday morning its time for the first tri of the season.

The tri was in Roe Valley, near limavady here in Norn Iron. Nice spot. I was very excited about the race. The bike course was actually pretty hilly and while this was in no way a priority race for me, i was very keen to see how my fitness was and how the winters training had come together. Also this was the first time Steph had been able to see me race a tri so I was extra excited about that.

On the morning of the race I wasn't certain whether to bother bringing my Garmin or not. For the simple reason that I wasn't going to be speeding up or slowing down based on anything it could tell me. In the end my decision was made for me as it turned out I had left it in work! So, stopwatch it was!

My friend Lisa, who I have been coaching, was in the first wave so I got to watch her and she did really well. A strong swim in a good time. Great to see.

Then I got myself ready and I hit the water in wave 3. Amazingly enough, one guy who was in my wave actually knew me... and apparently reads this blog! I was kinda nervous at this stage and this totally threw me so I didn't even catch his name.. so dude, if you're reading, drop me a note! :D

That's me sitting down at the poolside putting on my swimcap :D

The swim was OK. I probably could have been in wave 4, the slightly faster wave, as I had put in last years times. It looked like I was second fastest so I set out second. The swim was pretty tough going. I had probably drunk too much coffee beforehand and that combined with nerves had my heart rate way too high and this made breathing difficult so my swim was a bit scrappy. I was happy enough with it though and actually ended up being out of my lane first.

T1 seemed pretty fast then it was out on the bike. I pushed hard on the bike, the course was pretty hilly overall. Definitely not a fast easy ride! Luckily no one passed me on the bike and I passed a few people. Towards the end I think there were only 4 people ahead of me from my heat and we all came in pretty close together together with me as the last of that group to get in.

The run was flat enough and went well, I passed 1 of the 4 who had been ahead of me right at the start and was chasing down a second from about the halfway mark.. I just managed to get ahead at the end and crossed the line once second before him.. So I totally thank him for giving me the motivation to sprint across the line :D

I actually hadn't hit the start button on my stopwatch when I was in the pool so i didn't get my overall time till the official results were posted, although I was happy with my time. Today when I saw the result I was very happy. Here are the results with improvements over my time in Lisburn last year

Swim: 14:20 (2:58 improvement)
T1: 1:16 (00:20 improvement)
Bike: 38:23 (2:27 improvement on a MUCH tougher course)
T2: 1:20 (50 seconds slower)
Run: 21:21 (1:44 improvement)

A 6:36 improvement. YAY.
Very happy with this not just with the overall time but I also PRed at each of the individual sections. That's the fastest 5k I've done, fastest 750m swim and the fastest 20k bike. Plus, I know there is still significant room for improvement in this season.

In terms of overall placing I came 62/ 156 overall and 13th in my agegroup.
For a non-priority race at the start of the season for someone who has only done 2 sprint tri's before.. I'm DAMN happy with that.

Oh, and I am not setting my sights on a sub 20 min 5k. I'm gonna do it this season. I also now have a good measure of my fitness on a short course and something to aim for for the next few races.

Lisa also kicked some ass in hers and confirms that she has now been fully bitten by the triathlon bug. Whooohooo... :D

So, today as I still had a 3 hour ride to do. Amazingly enough, not only did I get out and do it, I actually managed my furthest distance for a 3 hour ride too hitting 53.4 miles in 3 hours flat. An improvement over my previous best by a few miles. This is also good as now my target of a sub 3 hour ride in the half Ironman distance seems achievable. So tonight I'm feeling pretty tired, but very happy indeed.

Glad its a rest week this week though :D

Good week!

2010-04-18T13:09:00.001-07:00

Now that was a good training week.
Longest run: 2 hours
Longest swim: 2 hours
Longest ride: 2 hours

10 hour week in the bag. Did my first 5k swim on Friday. Which I completed in under 2 hours. Then the next day I competed in my first duathlon.
It was the midulster duathlon in Magherafelt. 2 mile run, 12 mile bike, 2 mile run.
Really enjoyed it. The field was pretty strong, i recognised a fiar few faces and those that I recognised I knew to be seasoned veterans. No on there looked like they were inexperienced. There was a LOT of nice and very expensive bikes. Plenty of people there with back wheels that cost more than my whole bike.

I went out, treating this as a hard training session and fitness test. I hadn't tapered, and indeed had done the 5k swim the day before and my longest run in months on just Wednesday night.

I was very happy with the race overall. The first 2 miles I finished in 13:49 (6:47 AP). The 12 mile took 36:58 (19.5mph avg) and the second run which was actually 2.25 miles due to a lap of the track at the end took 15:26 (6:52 AP).
Add in transitions and I completed in 1:07:54. My target was 1:10 as a perfect performance so I'm very happy with this overall. My favourite part of the day was that no one passed me on the bike. I was at the tail of the leading pack going on the bike and while I played cat and mouse with one guy for much of the course, I ended up finishing ahead of him and no one else came close to passing.

My buddy Lisa who I am currently helping out with a bit of coaching also competed. It was her first multisport event and she performed really well, despite feeling that is was torture and almost giving up on the second run.. but she didn't give up and she finished.. Much respect!

Today, despite the fatigue, I still got out and did my long ride, which I cut back to a 2 hour ride which was mostly on the flat. Tonight my legs are, without doubt, TIRED :D

Oh, and finally.. I can firmly recommend this as a warmup for a race....

The best laid plans...

2010-04-10T00:53:00.001-07:00

This week was pretty rough. Monday I flew from Dublin to New York then
on from new York to Miami. 2 flights totalling more than 10 hours.
Once I arrived I met my work colleague, we had some dinner and I went
out for a short run .It was about 3am bodyclock time, and indeed it
was after 10pm local time but I was intent to get a 10 hour training
week done according to schedule and also going for a run after arrival
helps with the jetlag.
I got an OK nights sleep and headed out running again early in the
morning. From that point on it went downhill.
I saw nothing of Miami other than the stretch of South beach I ran
on. After the run I had to go do the work I was there for and give a
seminar in the University. After this we had to head to the airport
for another two flights.. .first to Atlanta then on to Columbia, South
Carolina. The second flight was delayed and then when we got on the
flight, they had apparently put too much fuel on board and had to
remove it.
Yeah
Seriously.
Anyway.. long story short… we didn't arrive till much later than
expected and I didn't get to sleep till after 1am. Which was, of
course, 6am bodyclock time. Usually my trips to the states, I deal
with the time differences OK by going to bed as early as possible and
getting up early to train. Staying up till 1am the second night there
is NOT advisable.
Woke up the next morning and felt like total shit. Hit the pool and
got in an hours swim that just didn't feel good and was a struggle.
Then another day of work… unfortunately though, on the way to the
university in Columbia I started feeling sick. For the few days
before I had left Zane had a stomach bug and had been suffering from
vomiting and diarrhoea.
Oh no
I thought
Seriously.. no.. no way.
The next few days were due to be pretty much non-stop. We had checked
out of the hotel that morning and were flying that evening to Atlanta.
I can tell you know, feeling ill and knowing that you have work to do,
knowing you have to give a talk to a room full of people, knowing that
you have no bed you can go and lie in and knowing that you wont have
an opportunity to lie down and be alone for about 12 hours… well
that's not a nice feeling.
I didn't succumb to the same depth of nastiness that poor Zane did.
Thankfully there was no bowel or stomach emptying for me.. but I felt
rotten.
I struggled through the day, got to the airport and another flight and
we went to Atlanta. That night I was so relieved to get to the hotel.
I went straight to my room, grabbed some food and was asleep by about
9. I was hoping that I would wake bright and early feeling refreshed
and better.
Didn't work.
I woke early, felt mediocre and headed to the gym. I only had 30 mins
so I jumped on the stationary bike for 30 mins and was sweating within
about 2 mins.
DEFINITELY not right.
I certainly wasn't better.
That night we had to go to a dinner then the next day was an early
start. Today had been LONG and I was the last speaker of the day. Now,
here I am on the flight home. I still feel like crap and its been a
very tough week.
My plans of doing lots of training just went totally out the window
due to travel and illness.. I had hoped to get in at least 7 hours of
training. I managed around 3.
I'm lucky that in the several years of travelling as much as I do,
this is the first time I've fallen Ill while away. Also it wasn't that
bad, but It gave me a taste of how unpleasant it could have been. Now
I'm just really glad to be on my way home.

--
Sent from my mobile device

Long ride and recovery

2010-04-05T01:41:00.001-07:00

Before I start her I would like to take a brief second here to mention
something non-training related.
Its amazing how much technology has developed over a few years. I was
having dinner with my boss and some colleagues the other day. My boss
was talking about how when he was in university, he and his friends
used to write letters to each other.
My joking response was something like "wow, you really are old"
Funny thing is that he isn't that old. I think he is just under 5
years older than me. When I was in first year in college people were
just starting to get email addresses. I've always been a tecjnology
"early adopter". I bought my first computer in first year and it was a
custom built desktop. Really powerful, 33hz processor. 4 meg of ram,
and I think a 250mb hard drive

My current computer is a 1000 fold increase in all of the above.

The first website I ever had was written in raw html and uploaded via ftp.

I'm currently writing this blog post from the passenger seat of a car
on my phone while driving to get a flight to dublin.

The pace of progress is crazy.

Anyway, back to training. I had mentioned in my last post about
cycling across Ireland. Well, it turned out that we weren't actually
staying where I thought. Rather than Donegal town we were heading to
Newtowncunningham. This is 75 miles from home rather than 100. I did
it. It rained the whole way, but it was an enjoyable ride. I left at
7am and made it in less than 5 hours. It was a great feeling to have
cycled that far and got that good a training session in the bag and to
be at my destination with the family by lunchtime!

I followed this up with my first proper "recovery week"
I'm now working on a 3 week mesocycle. I'm aware that my readership
varies from very experienced ironman triathletes to total beginners so
I will explain, but briefly.

Periodization is important in training
generally but particularly in triathlon. In a periodized training plan
your time is split up into microcycles (usually a week) mesocycles
(usually 3 or 4 weeks) and macrocycles (usually a year/ season).

The mesocycle consists of both training stress microcycles and rest
and recovery microcycles.

My mesocycle is 3 weeks. In simple terms, 2 training weeks and a
recovery week. In this particular cycle, due to the ride to donegal, I threw in an extra training week so I did two 10 hour training weeks
and an 8 hour week before this recovery week. I planned a 5 hour week
but ended up doing about 4. Overall it was interesting. I felt like
training more and probably pushed a little too hard in the time I was
training due to increased energy levels. This is obviously not the
thing to do! Yesterday on the bike I pushed harder than I should have
and my legs are a bit sore today.

The expression "go easy on your easy days" obviously counts double on
recovery weeks.

Now I'm off to the states for a week of lots of travelling. 3 states
in 5 days. Lots of travel. But I'm back to a training week so my aim
is to get in 10 hours of training this week.

Wish me luck!

--
Sent from my mobile device

Should I?

2010-03-19T03:28:00.000-07:00

An opportunity has arisen that may allow me to cycle from one side of Ireland to the other. Looks like we might be getting away for a few days to Donegal over easter. It also turns out that Ireland is frickin tiny and that I can easily cycle coast to coast.
Only problem is that Im meant to be on a rest week next week.. not cycling 100 miles
Should I do it?
Comments would be REALLY appreciated.

View Larger Map

Its been a while...

2010-03-16T02:03:00.000-07:00

Actually it hasnt really been that long.. but for some reason that line from a song by Staind just jumped into my head as I opened blogger.
There's a band I havent heard in a long time.
Todays blog post is brought to you by "stream of consciousness"

No overriding theme for this post, just a general update.
My last post was the end of February. Its now mid march, so I can update on the last few weeks which have continued with the February theme...
Training is going well.
In the first two weeks of this month, Ive manged to get in 4 swims, 7 bike rides and 3 runs.
This isnt really ideally balanced, but its the base period and I'm doing the sensible thing and training my weakness.
Im not the worlds best runner, but I already have the capacity to run pretty long and run pretty fast. So for the moment Im just focussing on maintaining that by keeping the aerobic base with long runs and a bit of speedwork.
Im not really focussing on swimming per se, but I am trying to get consistent with 2 swims per week. Ideally I would be swimming 3 times a week I guess, perhaps later in the season I will do so.
Last week was a bit of a breakthrough week. On sunday I managed to complete a 50 mile bike ride in just under 3 hours. For me this is fast. My target for the Half Ironman distance is to complete the bike leg in around 3 hours. Obviously Im still a good bit off that pace, but I now think it is achievable. The race is still 5 months away and 5 months ago I think my longest bike ride had been 35 miles.
Generally speaking, on longer rides, Ive struggled to get my average speed much over 15mph. On this ride, however, there were a few variable.
Firstly.. I discovered my bike was set up wrong. Not going to bother with details but basically the seat was way too low. Idiotic rookie mistake. Its now fixed. That helped.
Secondly, nutrition. I havent done enough longer distance riding to really judge need for nutrition and the little experimentation Ive done has been with gels. Last week my wife made me some homemade energy bars. These things are phenomenal. Normally on a long ride I spend the last 30-60 mins obsessing over food and arrive home and eat everything I can get my hands on. For this ride I ate an energy bar before leaving and another one at the halfway mark and it made a huge difference. My average speed for the first hour was 16.9mph. The second hour was 15.2. Normally my last hour slows down significantly due to fatigue and lack of fuel. On this occasion my last hour average speed was 18.6mph. On a few occcasions I was even pushing over 25mph on the flats.
One final consideration was that I went a different route that doesnt have a few miles of climbing at the end. Overall this helped my speed at the end. I think the other factors were probably more significant though.

Final note.. last week was also a breakthrough as it was the first time I actually manged to do over 10 hours of training. Yesterday was a rest day and I NEEDED it. This week is going to be another > 10 hour week.. then a recovery week.

Kickass Month.

2010-02-26T06:24:00.000-08:00

Just a quick blog post...

This month has been pretty damn good for training.

I did my first century on the bike. Which, incidentally, was also more mileage than I had ever done in a week. I checked that.. I had always fallen a bit short.

Ive also started to hit the pool. As I've mentioned before, Ive never really done any swim training... well, I hit the pool in the second week of the month and then joined a gym and have started to establish a bit of a routine. Ive now done more swimming in the last 3 weeks than I did in all of 2009. This isn't exactly a reflection of three weeks of intense swimming.. its a sign that I just didn't swim last year. In the last 3 weeks Ive swum 10700m... Over 10k of swimming. Sweet!

2 weeks back I hit a good target of 2 workouts in each sport for the week. 2 swims, 2 bikes, 2 runs... AND a weights session.
This week I hit the 2 X 2 X 2 again and its only Friday, which means I'm likely to hit my ideal target for the week which is 2 X swim, 3 X bike, 3 X run for ~ a 10 hour training week.

Today is a rest day though, and I'm very glad of it. I don't yearn for rest days that often, but today I need one.

Mental toughness and always learning.

2010-02-22T01:38:00.000-08:00

Ive 2 themes to cover in this blog.. Learning and mental toughness...

There are lots of things I like about training.

I like the fact that it calms me, centers me, keeps me fit and will hopefully let me live longer to see my kids grow and stay active enough to keep up with them.
I'm not going to list off all the other good things about training, that would be dull.. and would also probably abrogate the necessity for ever writing another blog post.
Lets focus on one thing right now... I like the fact that I have to keep learning.
I spend an ungodly amount of time in the education system. 7 years in primary school, 5 years in high school, 3 years in tech (ehh.. for you Americans this is like a bridge between high school and university), then 8 years in university. That's 23 years of education.
One thing you get out of this is a love of learning. Not really a conscious love. Its not like you wake up thinking "HELL YEAH MAN I WANNA GO AND LEARN SOME SHIT".
No, its a bit more subtle. A "PhD" is a Doctor of Philosophy. Philosophy from the Greek "philosophia" which is the love of wisdom. This stems from "philia" which means love (of the dispassionate and virtuous kind) and "sophia" which means wisdom.
So its a dispassionate, virtuous love for wisdom and knowledge.
This sounds fancy and pretentious... but there is an element of truth. Although it may not be so much of a love and more of a compulsion. A compulsive desire to understand things. Sometimes I get frustrated when my toddler asks "why" about everything... but I try not too because I do it myself in my head all the time.
How does this apply to training???? Where am I going with this??? Do I know? Possibly, stick with it and see....

Basically, I tend to analyse what I do. when I take on something, I need to know a lot about it. So when I started running, it wasn't enough to go out, buy some shoes and run. I needed to read about running, research it, understand it. I also needed to stupidly ignore much of the "wisdom" I read and make mistakes. I probably needed to get injured, cuz sometimes its easier, sadly, to learn from your own mistakes than from the teachings of others.

The truth is though, that I like to learn. I like to read triathletes world, and runners world, and blogs and books about training. I listen to podcasts to absorb as much info as possible. Triathlon offers a lot to learn. On the surface this is obvious... its 3 sports rather than one. It goes beyond that though. There is also nutrition, transition, multisport (brick) workouts and the mindset that goes with triathlon.

So, in short, one of the things I love about triathlon, is that its like studying again.. but studying something immediately applicable that I love.

That last paragraph could possibly replace all the initial preabmle... but Im not deleting it now.

OK.. Theme 2.
Mental Toughness.

Training requires toughness and conditioning of the body. But it also requires toughness and conditioning of the mind. I'm pretty sure these two things are of equal importance.

One of the reasons that most endurance sports seem to be dominated by older folks has got to be partially due to the mental aspect. As we go through life we accumulate experience and mental toughness. We all go through hard times, life does kick the shit out of you at times, and as the expression goes... what doesnt kill us only makes us stronger. I think Nietzsche originally said this... more philosophy for you.

There is an alternative theory that whatever doesnt kill us leaves us battered, weakened and vulnerable... but lets ignore that and go with Nietzsche's theory for now.

Lets vaguely connect this to training.
Yesterday morning I woke up at 6am.
Yeah, 6am on a sunday, another example of how training changes us.
I woke up at 6am, all ready for my long bike ride. I had prepped the night before. I had sorted out the flat on my bike, packed my bag and layed out all my gear so it would be easier to just haul ass and hit the road.
I walked, zombielike, down the stairs, looked out the window and there was 3 INCHES OF FRICKIN SNOW.
Cue me standing at the window, bleary, half asleep looking backwards and forwards between kitchen (place of coffee), window (place of snow), stairs (direction of bed and place of sleep).
It was a tough call.
Eventually I decided to phase the movement. I hit the kitchen, put on the kettle and opened up the laptop and googled "cycling in the snow"
Long story short... I decided to go for it. I was actually too psyched up. I hadnt had a long bike ride in a few weeks, I had planned a 9 hour training week and had already dropped an hour on friday night and there was no way I was don g 3 hours on the trainer.
So off I went.
It was tough going. It started off very difficult. Turns out you cant clip in to pedals when your cleats are jammed with snow. Also, I reckon its probably pretty funny watching a guy sitting on a bike, leaning on a lampost and picking at his shoes with an alan key.
Also, going down a really steep hill in deep snow on slicks is SCARY.
Once I got out on the main roads though it got easier and i got a 3 hour, 45 mile ride in the bag and felt great afterwards.

So what did I LEARN????
AHA!!!! See? The themes come together.. you'd think I clevely planned this, rather than rambling till it made sense
I learned a few things... and I think if we pay attention we can learn something, if not from every training session, but at least from every training cycle.
Key lessons from yesterday.

1. Dont give up cuz it looks like its going to be hard. Or, in shorter form. DONT BE A WUSS.
2. Dont do speedwork the day before a long ride. Thats an obvious one and again, something I had to learn from my own stupidity rather than just paying attention to what Id been told before. I had done a 7 mile run the night before. The 3 miles in the middle were 400m repeats at 6:30 with 400m recoveries. I also did this after being on my feet all day down at the market in Belfast. Despite this making my ride much harder... it also highligted key lesson number three...
3. Mental toughness makes a huge difference. I did 45 miles yesterday on sore and tired legs in the snow. Did it seem unduly hard?
Not really.
Compared with cycling across that frickin mountain in California at the tail end of a century ride it was piss easy.
Ive done lots of way more tough workouts. a "tough workout" is totally relative.
For you it may be a 3 mile run.
For me, a year ago, (quick check of training log), an 8 mile run at a 10 minute mile pace was tough going.
6 months before that, running for 30 minutes non-stop wasnt even possible.

So, learning and mental toughness. Really important and intrinsically linked.
The body learns how to work harder. The mind learns how to train better. Similarly the body learns to handle the pressure you pile on it, and the mind learns to listen to the body to judge the effort level in order to properly judge the appropriate load to put on the body. And of course, the mind learns to be tougher. To realise when the bodys complaints can be ignored and when they need to be listened too.

Hectic few weeks 2: First century ride

2010-02-11T05:09:00.000-08:00

While in SF I managed to do my first century ride. The evidence is above in that dreadful photo.
I arrived on Monday and got to bed pretty early. Then, I woke after about 4 and half hours sleep at 2:30 on Tuesday morning. i struggle to call 2:30am "Tuesday morning", but i guess it technically is. There was no way that I was getting back to sleep so I just got up. I spent a good few hours getting some work done then at 8am I headed out.
I ran the three miles from the hotel to the bike rental place. I picked up my Giant Defy 2 and went on my way.

It was a hell of an adventure. I hadn't really planned a route so having a map and google maps on my phone helped. Didn't do a lot for my overall average speed though to have to stop regularly to figure out where to go.

I started out by heading across the Golden Gate bridge to Sausalito, as I had done last time. Stopped there for a cup of coffee and to watch the ocean for a while, then started out properly to really do the distance.
I cycled up through Corte Madera. The last time I had done this Corte Madera was my turnaround point. The total distance that day was 33.91 miles, and was my longest run to date... a mere 8 months ago. At that stage I didn't even own a road bike yet. Today's aim was a little more ambitious.

I headed on up past Corte Madera, through Fairfax and onward north. I hit the coast again at Anelmo.. and at that point was at the 40 mile mark. In order to do the full century, this meant continuing north for a further 10 miles, then turning round.
That 10 miles north was hard.
Once i turned round and started heading back it was OK again. I had planned on stopping for lunch at some point after the halfway point... but after the halfway point heading back down the coast, there was nowhere to stop for lunch! I also ran out of water after a while.
At about the 70 mile mark I actually began to feel kinda dodgy. Id been out of water for a while and hadn't eaten enough. Up to this point I had eaten two cliff bars and that was it. I started feeling like I was on the verge of "bonking". So, I stopped, had a little break and ate the last thing I had left in my camelback... which was a powerbar. It fought off the impending "bonk" but I gotta tell ya... those things suck when you eat them without water. they are drrrryyyyyyy.
A few miles down the road I finally came across a shop and picked up a bottle of water and a bottle of gatorade... The gatorade was downed straight away and I started feeling OK again.
The last 25 miles involved crossing a small mountain range.
It was HARD GOING. There were climbs that had to be over a 10% elevation and lots of long climbs that were around 3 miles long.
I was crawling up these at about 5mph in the easiest gear I had and my heart rate was STILL pretty high.
The many downhill sweeps were 25-30mph, with not pedalling and the brakes on.
It really was tough.
BUT
It was a breakthrough training session.
I managed a century. I managed LOTS of hills and I managed it under far from perfect conditions. I was jetlagged, was functioning on less than 5 hours sleep and despite it being done during the day in real time.. but by my body clock, it was well after midnight by the time I had finished and I had actually done the guts of a full days work before starting.
If that's not building mental endurance I don't know what is.
Below is the route and the elevation profile.
I also took some video footage which I may post as a follow up.

Minor addition... The ride included over 5,000 feet of clmibing. I dont really have a point of reference for how much this is, but I just checked and Britains highest mountain is Ben Nevis, and its 4,409 feet. So I figure OMG THAT WAS A LOT.

Hectic few weeks 1: Belfast4Haiti 5K

2010-02-10T04:41:00.000-08:00

I actually started out doing one LONG blog post.. but it was too long even for me so Im cutting it into two and will, in my usual style, be posting 2 blog posts in two days after nothing for a few weeks.

What a hectic couple of weeks!
This was mostly written the day after the Belfast 4 Haiti 5k on a flight en route to San Francisco for work.

Yesterday was a completely amazing day. It was an incredible success.
We had around 250 pre-registered for the event and right now I'm not 100% sure how many registered on the day.
I had printed 200 registeration forms
We ran out of these
We had 550 race numbers
we ran out of these too.
Not bad going for a couple of complete of people doing it in their spare time with no previous experience and pretty busy day jobs to do as well.

My colleauges Lisa and Lorraine did a phenomenal job and the list of volunteers who came to help out on the day were amazing.
Everyone invovled worked for free and with amazing enthusiasm.
We even had some local heroes come along... The picture above is me standing with Dame Mary Peters... A Northern Ireland athlete who won Olympic gold in the pentathalon in 1972. You gotta love my obnoxious orange/ yellow stylin combo.. and the fact that i seem to be scratching my nose...
I managed to do the run myself in a pretty decent time of 22:15.
We had a great day and in total the run raised over £7,000.
The total raised by the combination of the run and the two evening events is now over £40,000
Im unbelievably proud and happy to have been involved and to have been able to help in whatever small way I did.
Thanks to everyone who helped, took part and offered support.
For those of you who still want to donate, please feel free to do so, my donation page will remain open for another while.

Finally.. a bunch of nice photos... You can click on them for full size versions.

The first two pics below are me posing with the first lady across the line, Catriona McCorkell and a shot of the midpack, which gives a good perspective of the numbers if you look in the background. Thanks to Eddie for the photos

The next three come from Shereen The first is me being interviewed (which was weird) by the local news folks, the second are the two lads who came first (on the left) and second (on the right), the third shows people lining up and in the foreground, just behind those two random blokes are my co-organisers Lisa (left, in the Belfast4haiti t-shirt) and Lorraine (in the furry looking jacket).

Me and Cat, who kicked ass.

A bit of perspective of the pack

Me being interviewed

The superfast winning males.

The Pack.. and my co-organisers.

Race Day!

2010-01-30T21:53:00.000-08:00

Ive had a hectic few weeks helping organise this Belfast 4 Haiti 5k benefit run.
Despite being one of the race directors... Im still aiming to actually run the race myself!
So, for all of those that cant attend or run themselves... please, give some support. Click the donate button below.

Running for GOOD

2010-01-26T06:01:00.001-08:00

At 16:53 on the 12th of January, an earthquake of catastrophic magnitude struck Haiti.
The red cross estimate that about 3 million people have been affected by this.
The Haitian authorities have confirmed, as of the 24th of January, that over 150,000 people have been buried.
The death toll may reach 300,000
More than 400,000 people are homeless.
To top this off, Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere.

Its been great to see the efforts worldwide to raise funds to support the rescue and rebuild efforts in Haiti.
It restores my faith in the inherent goodness of humanity to see such things.

Here in Belfast a team of people have pulled together to do what they can to raise some cash.
It started with a few local musicians who had the idea of putting on a Benefit gig.
The positive response they received was phenomenal so they set about putting togethet the logistics and formed the "Belfast4Haiti" group.

My friend, Lisa Millar, heard about this on twitter and suggested that perhaps in addition to the benefit gig, perhaps we could also have some sort of fund raising sporting event

Like a fun run... and so the Belfast 4 Haiti 5k was born.
I joined the organisational team, as did Lorraine Anthony a PR specialist.
3 people who pretty much just know each other via twitter.

At the start when Lisa was talking to a race director from another race, she was told that trying to organise a race in 2 weeks was next to impossible

This person didnt count on the dedication of a good team, the amazing support we've been given and the countless people who have given freely of their time to MAKE THIS EVENT HAPPEN.

Not only do we have a race.. we've got a family fun day out. We've got tea, coffee, buns, cakes, facepainting and balloon modelling and post race footrubs and massages.
We've even got a damn carnival band!!!!!

Cant organise a race in 2 weeks huh?

SO.. please, if you are from Northern Ireland.... Register for the race, get yourself to Belfast for Sunday mornign and run or walk with us.

If youre unsure, or undecided... watch this video...

Thanks,

The Belfast4Haiti 5k team
Follow us on twitter
Check the facebook page

The importance of a plan...

2010-01-21T06:04:00.000-08:00

Ive posted before on the importance of goals and realism. I'm pretty sure Ive also pointed out the importance ofplanning your training. Its not exactly a secret. Planning your training is vital if you want to achieve specificgoals and reach a certain point.

There is a reason I mention this. I will come back to it.

So I did my "birthday triathlon" on Sunday. Started out with a nice 35 mile cycle at a respectable (for me) speed. Then straight off the bike and out again for a 3.5 mile run. Started out with the usual jelly legs but at a 7:45 minute mile pace so no problem there. Slowed down after a while but it was still respectable.

Then headed off to my in-laws for a much needed lunch then hit the pool for my 35 lengths. Which i completed... slowly. I'm not a strong or fast swimmer.. and I can see why the swim comes first in a triathlon. Put it at the end and you do your swim pretty much just using your arms.
Still.. good upper body workout.

I arrived home and mentioned that Id completed my efforts on facebook and twitter. One of my decidedly unsporty friends commented "not going to do 35 pushups then?"
So yeah, I dropped and did 35 pushups.
Grrr.

So why did I mention planning at the start?
Well, about 10 miles into my bike ride... my legs were tired and sore.
Seriously... 10 miles in.
It was at this point I thought to myself... On Friday I had done a hard "hill" workout on the trainer.
On Saturday morning i went out and did 4 miles at a 7:43 average pace. I know that's not fast for you Boston qualifiers and pro-ironmen out there.. but its pretty damn fast for me folks.
Come Sunday morning and my longer workout and my legs were TIRED AND SORE.

I'm still working through the process of planning my season. Ive got three A races, a half marathon, a half ironman and a marathon, so its kinda complex to plan for this. I'm sure a coach would have no problem, but to work it out from scratch takes a bit of work and I have like ZERO spare time so Im working in a rather impromptu manner with my workouts at the moment. So, the moral of the story is... PLAN YOUR WORKOUTS. Remember that rest is critical and dont push yourself too hard.

Luckily I didn't do anything stupid like injure myself. I felt something not right in a few muscles, so I took Monday of (as planned) and have had two easy low intensity bike workouts this week to let my body recover. So I'm not all stupid.

Finally... I've become involved with a group called "belfast4haiti" and I'm helping organise a 5k fun run to raise funds for the victims of the haitian earthquake. I will be writing a full blog post on this over the next few days. For more info, drop me a mail or follow me on twitter or facebook if you don't already do so.

Birthday Triathlon

2010-01-15T05:57:00.000-08:00

Its my birthday next week.
YAY
Im 35....
ummm...
Not so yay.
Im going to be officially closer to 40 than to 30.
This does not fill me with Joy. But Im not going to get all depressed about it.
I love birthdays. Its an excuse for a party. At the moment though Im off booze. So the party consists of going to Nandos then the cinema with a bunch of mates.
We're doing that on Saturday, then on Sunday morning I am going to do a BIRTHDAY TRIATHLON

This will consist of 35 lengths in a pool, 35 mile bike ride and a 3.5 mile run.
These are rather disproportionate distances for a triathlon... but its the only way I can work it out that's achievable!

I may also be forced to do it in a non-triathlon order.. ie, rather than the traditional Swim, Bike, Run order I may have to Bike, Swim, Run. As my local pool doesn't open till 10am on a Sunday.
Actually, my LOCAL pool is currently shut due to the fact that it is leaking.
Yes, I kid you not. The pool at the valley leisure centre was closed for a month for some work to be done (don't know what) and it was due to reopen on the 11th of Jan, but has not done so because its leaking and they don't know why.
So my next nearest pool doesn't open till 10am, and I'm hoping to start at about 7. I can get the bike and maybe the run done first. Although that greatly increases my risk of drowning due to exhaustion, but what the hell. It should be fun. I believe my in-laws are then cooking me brunch and my parents are cooking me dinner.. which is a result cuz I'm gonna be STARVING.

This will be a very unusual change from a normal Sunday of a birthday weekend which would normally be spent languishing in bed nursing a horrendous hangover and pondering my dubious life choices. Wish me luck!

I leave you with a picture of a a can-opener and a guy on a bike chasing another dude

Weight Loss

2010-01-06T06:09:00.000-08:00

I’m actually writing this in response to being asked some questions about this by friends.
I’m not an expert on this, I’m not a professional.
However, as a sciencey type, I’m quite good at research. Im also good at pattern recognition and logical thinking (at times). As a result I tend to be vaguely useful at pulling together lots of data and information from a variety of sources and trying to derive core principles.
I’ve also got a bit of common sense (unusual for a scientist) so I can tend to pull useful information out of the sea of crap.
All the information I’m relaying here can be found in books, the internet, and your own common sense… so apologies if it seems I am stating the obvious. If this helps you, I’m happy.

Right.. First and most important point. Weight loss is EASY
In theory.
All you have to do is burn more calories than you consume.
Seriously it’s that easy.
All diets and exercise plans are based around this simple premise.
Your body needs a certain number of calories per day to keep it alive and to make it do whatever you have to do.
Your caloric requirement very much depends on your lifestyle.
If you are a professional athlete, you need a tremendously large amount of calories,
If you work in an office, get out of breath climbing the stairs and spend every evening watching 7 hours of TV.. Your calorie requirements are not so much.

With diets alone you restrict what you eat. You also eat different types of food.
This is important. You can just go on an insane diet of eating nothing. You can starve yourself, but this will mess you up. Your body learns to adapt and you will start shutting down every function you can. Your body is amazing at survival so if you don’t feed it will start to shut itself down piece by piece till you die.
Thus I strongly don’t recommend anorexia, bulimia or starvation diets as a good weight loss method.

With exercise alone you try to burn more calories than you consume. Again though, the body is pretty good at survival so if you don’t eat enough and try to make your body burn insane amounts of calories you’re going to get sick or injured.

So the simplest and most successful approach is a good diet with the right amount of calories and a decent exercise program. Restrict your caloric intake. Try and ensure that you’re eating a balanced diet that has all the main food groups represented and has a sensible GI load. Then, do some exercise.

All statements of the obvious
Right?

So why isn’t it REALLY easy?
Why does anyone have weight issues?

Well I think there are a variety of reasons first up… diet.

Diet:
Eating the right diet actually isn’t easy. The biggest problem is that most people don’t KNOW what a good balanced diet is. All diet fads used to be about cutting out fat. It was fat that made us fat. This is obvious right?
Actually… no. We need fats. Just like we need protein and carbs.
Then Dr. Robert Atkins came along and said “screw fat… stop eating carbs”
I should probably state for legal reasons that Atkins very probably never said these words.
Still you all know how it is… he realised that by eating less carbs we can lose weight. So he came up with an insane diet plan that cuts out carbs.
It works, but it messes you up, is hard and I’d avoid it like the plague.
So, one needs to work out a balanced diet that has the right amounts of carbs, fats, proteins etc.

Its not easy.. and it takes a bit of work. But the internet is full of great resources for this.. for example, check out the daily plate on the Livestrong website. Its pretty cool.
If you don’t wanna do it yourself, you can get help on this from someone. Yup… just like with exercise you can get a coach. My buddy Christine in NYC is great at this.. give her a shout
You can of course also follow set diet plans which do work. You might want to check out the South Beach Diet. Im going to link you to the wikki entry rather than the company’s website. I’m in no way affiliated with these folks, but I have bought their book, know a few people whove followed it and both myself and my wife dropped a few pounds following it and learned a lot from it. The guy who came up with this diet is a cardiologist and it’s a sensible, scientifically sound and healthy diet.

What I will stress though that while working out what you should and shouldn’t eat is not easy.. its also not that hard. Seriously, its not rocket science. Do a bit of reading, learn a bit about what a balanced diet is, use something like the daily plate for a while and try and understand your own nutrition. Its very important.

Enough on diet… what about exercise?
So with exercise, again, its not easy… but its really not that hard. To be honest, it’s a lot easier for me than the diet bit.
With exercise, what we are doing is burning calories. But before I get into any detail.. Lets do some maths.

The standard recommended calorie intake for an “average” male is about 2500. for a female its about 2000.

So, let say that I, as the average male consume 2500 calories a day, but I have a desk job, I drive to and from work and I do no exercise at all. This estimate may be way too high. My actual daily requirement could be as low as 2100 to stay the same weight.
This means I am taking in 400 calories too much every day. That’s 2800 calories per week. That’s 11,200 per month. If we vector in the fact that there are 3,500 calories in a pond of fat, then guess what? At this rate I’m gaining over 3lb per month.

So, not I can talk about exercise.
Exercise is the key. You don’t need to run a marathon or an Ironman triathlon to burn calories. Take the above example. Me with no exercise taking in 400 calories too much per day. What do I do? Well, I could eat less.. and I could exercise. A 30 minute run at a pretty easy pace for me would probably burn those 400 calories. I could throw in a few sprint intervals and knock that up to 600 calories and be gradually losing weight. I could go for a walk at a brisk pace for an hour a day.. that would probably burn about 300 calories. Maybe one less sandwich at lunch and drop the sugar from my coffee and Id be fine, no weight gain.

This is where it becomes individualised.
For me, doing for a 30 minute run a day, now, would be downright easy. In fact I would probably go nuts from lack of activity. I enjoy running. When I started… I hated it. Honestly. Running for one minute was horrible. I started out doing a 1 minute run 2 minute walk routine for 30 mins and it was just unbelievably hard. Now I happily run for literally hours and can enjoy it.
The most important thing with exercise is to find something you enjoy, but also to recognise that it may take time to enjoy it.
Every year, around the world in January I would imagine that sales of diet books and treadmills go through the roof.
The same diet books and treadmills will probably be gathering dust in the garages of the owners within a few months.

So ask yourself some simple questions... firstly.. is there any exercise you actually already enjoy? You might like walking. That’s totally fine, do some calculations, work out the number of calories youre going to burn by walking and just do it. Then modify your diet accordingly to ensure that youre going to lose a bit of weight.
Do you enjoy cycling? Cool, its an awesome way to burn calories. Just get on your bike and cycle. Again though, look into the number of calories youre burning and make sure that youre in balance.

If you genuinely don’t like any form of exercise that you’ve tried.. is there something you’ve never tried and would like to? Maybe rock climbing? Ever tried that? It’s a great workout. Go to a climbing wall and try it out. Failing that, just start running, cycling or swimming and have the willpower to stick with it until you’ve got over the initial “this is too hard” stage. It really doesn’t take that long. You don’t need to join an expensive gym or buy a top of the range bike either. Just go run on the streets, ride your friends or kids unused mountain bike or go to the local pool.

Final note… Its very easy to start exercising and actually eat more as a result of it. You need to be aware of both your diet and your exercise. You need to be aware of the caloric intake and the calorie output. And really.. its very simple maths. If you need some help with it, give me a shout. The most important thing is that you CAN do it. As I’ve mentioned before, Over the last year and half Ive lost over 40lb. That’s about 140,000 calories worth of fat. Unnerving huh?

Notes:

You can mess around with figuring out your calorie requirements using loads of calorie calculators on the internet. I cant recommend any specifically but by googling here are two I found one and two. If anyone reading knows of better ones or knows these to be bad, please let me know.

You can calculate the calories burned doing different forms of exercise again using various web pages. Again, just from googling here are 2 that look good. One and two.

2009 in review

2010-01-03T00:21:00.000-08:00

Happy new year everyone!

Its the new year. Its actually the last day of my much desired, if not needed, two week holiday from work and the first time ive had a chance to sit down and consider a blog update.
I actually got up earlier than the rest of my household today for the first time in a while to do some training, but having had breakfast, Ive decided today will be a good day to do my lactate threshold test, which is only a 30 minute workout so I will wait till Steph and Zane wake up then go and do that on the trainer upstairs where I wont be disturbed.

2009 was a great year for me. Generally speaking, life was good and from a training and fitness perspective.. well, it was great as it had no predecessor! I set PR's at every distance, but this is easy to do when you are doing them all for the first time. In total I did 2 10k's, 2 half marathons, 2 sprint triathlons and 1 marathon

PR's...
10k: 45:10
Half Marathon: 1:43:16
Marathon: 3:43:41
Sprint Tri: 1:23:13 (Tri splits: Swim: 17:12/ T1: 1:37/ Bike: 40:51/ T2: 00:30/Run: 23:05)

I also cycled a 50 mile ride and then a metric century.. 100km. Not bad going for a guy who at the end of 2008 had done one 10k and barely cycled at all in about 20 years.

Ive also kicked off most of my excess weight. In the last year and a half Ive lost over 40lb. I talked about this in a blog post in June my current weight is now around 175lb. Im pretty much happy with this and reckon that within a few months of core work I may even get to the point of having a six pack :D

This results of course in none of my trousers actually fitting me anymore... as shown below...
Im gonna cut this now and leave my 2010 plans and goals for a separate post.

Traveling and Training

2009-12-11T05:42:00.000-08:00

Wrote this the other day on a train from Manhattan to Newark airport. I do have a round up/ conclusion to the detox thing, will post it soon.

Today has been a bit weird.
Woke up at 5am in New Jersey to about 3-4 inches of snow.

Decided running in in this would not be a lot of fun, so headed down to the hotel fitness room and did 5km on the dreadmill. Which sucked about as much as any treadmill run does, but on the bright side, thats three runs in 24 hours and no real pain, no real foot problems... Must be healing.

Then a busy morning of meetings, 2 meetings with 2 companies in New Jersey and we made it to the Airport super early so I checked in my bag and jumped the train to Manhattan.
Got out at Penn station and walked to times square and ate a hotdog.

Then I walked to rockefellar plaza.

Saw the 30 rock building, couldnt find Liz Lemon, Watched people ice skate, had a coffee and cupcake at the famous Dean and Delucca's.

Walked to central park, ate brown rice sushi and salad at the wholefoods market and here I am back on a train to Newark airport a few mere hours later.
Weird day indeed.

Have had a few days of pretty decent training this trip. A nice 6-7 mile run round central park on Sunday. An hour on a gym bike on Monday. A nice 1 hour, 6-7 mile run in the snow in Boston on Tuesday morning.
Saw the sun rise over the old harbour.

Then another 1.5 hour workout that night in the gym, then finished up with the 5k on the treadmill this morning. Not bad considering transatlantic travel had been involved and about 600 miles of driving as well as 5 meetings, some sightseeing and meeting up with some twitter buddies...

One of which was Ironman Bobby, who interviewed me the last time I was in the states and the day after we met up again, this interview finally went live on his site... check it out!

Detox Update

2009-11-09T01:54:00.000-08:00

I have completed the first week of my healthy/ detox month.
So far its going pretty well. I have now been a full week without meat products, caffeine or booze. The toughest thing has been the caffeine.

I definitely have a hell of a caffeine habit. On an average day I probably drink about 6 or more cups of coffee a day, so going from 6 to 0 has been hard. The first few days I was getting headaches, feeling unfocused, grouchy and generally was not a joy to be around.
Its getting better but its still tough. I still WANT coffee.

My aim with the coffee thing though is not to give up coffee completely, but to top drinking it in the way that I do. I currently drink coffee completely mindlessly. I couldn't tell you for sure how many cups I drink a day for the simple reason that I'm not really 100% aware of how much I drink. I have a cup in the morning, then once I arrive in the office I pretty much drink it all day. The worst thing is, the coffee in the office isn't even good. In fact, its pretty dreadful. My aim is not to stop drinking coffee altogether, but to now only drink coffee when I am focused on drinking a cup of coffee. Like when I go out for a coffee, or I am sitting down with Steph to have a cup of coffee and a chat. Or just when I feel like I want to drink a cup of coffee for enjoyment. I picked up this tip from my buddy Christine the HolisticGuru and it seems like a good approach. Its also following the zen idea of focus.

"when drinking coffee, only drink coffee."

I am probably going to set some kind of limit on it too, like no more than one or two cups a day.

Next up... booze. My aim is simply to drink less. I have had a tendency since I was a teenager to drink too much. I'm toying with the idea of just staying booze free completely. However, I do live in Ireland and its not easy! Its so ingrained in our culture. I have given up drinking on numerous occasions before. Once I just randomly gave up for three months. During that time I continued to go out to clubs etc. This is a real example of what happens when you try to stop drinking in Ireland

Friend: "what are you drinking"
Me: "nothing I'm OK"
Friend: "Ah sure have a drink"
Me: "OK I will have a coke or something"
Friend: "Vodka and coke?"
Me: "No Just a coke"
Friend: *Uncontrollable laughter*
At which point friend goes to bar, buys me a pint anyway and places it in front of me.
I remember one particular night that by the time I left the bar, my table had 5 full pints of beer on it, completely untouched by me.

Now admittedly this was a fair few years ago when we were all a bit more into going out and enjoying ourselves. These days its a bit easier as people settle down, have kids etc.
The additional problem is, however, that I LOVE red wine. So we will see how that one goes.

As for the veganism... Well, I personally don't think that a vegan is really the best diet that human beings can eat. We are not really designed to live on such a diet. However for a one month detox sort of thing, I think its great. We've been eating really well. Ive even cooked once.. and BAKED! Yes, for the second time in my life i baked something. I have vague memories of baking scones when I was about 10. On Saturday me and Zane baked vegan Banana muffins. They were delicious! That night I cooked vegan french bread pizza. this consisted of a baguette base topped with a sauce made from tahini, soy sauce and lime topped with sauteed kale, mushrooms and sun dried tomatoes. It was go good I'm cooking it again tonight.

As for training. Its been going pretty well too. Ive hurt my foot so am taking two weeks off from running, but have been cycling and doing strength training. Last week was actually my highest mileage week for cycling to date with a total of 80 miles over 4 sessions. I know this isn't a lot compared with most cyclists, but its a lot for me as a novice. My previous highest mileage week was 70 miles (although I did admittedly run 35 miles that week too... This week Ive only run 6 miles). Three of this weeks rides were 13 milers... so to bring it up to 80 I did my longest ride to date of 41 miles on Sunday morning. This took me 2.5 hours and was hugely enjoyable.
Ive also been doing push ups, dips and core work. I tend to fail to keep up on doing this so Ive been working to a new challenge of doing this every Monday, Wednesday and Friday and have had my buddy Josh the Speedy Sasquatch doing the same thing. Having mutual support/ encouragement/ competition really helps with this sort of thing. Originally the challenge was to do 100 push ups and 100 reps of core work 3 times a week. We are now both doing 150 push ups, 100 dips, and I'm doing around 200 reps of core work with Josh doing about 4 million or something like that.

On the whole I am feeling great, going to sleep earlier, getting up earlier, training in the morning and sometimes again at night. I still miss coffee.. and I'm permanently hungry. That, however, is nothing new... Its the training, rather than the vegan diet, that does that. I do think its worsened slightly due to the fact that I used to have a constant intake of appetite suppressant (caffeine).
I will update again next week.

"Off Season"

2009-11-03T05:47:00.000-08:00

So, having completed my "A-Race" for the year, I have allowed myself an off-season. A time for decompression.
Basically, lots of boozing and lots less exercise. In the week after my marathon I didn't run at all and cycled twice. (a 13 mile ride and a 26.5 mile ride). The following week, I ran twice for a total of 9.1 miles and cycled once (31.15 miles).

And that's it.
Off season is OVER.

Over those two weeks I ate a huge amount of BAD food, and drank far too much.
On the bright side...I got a new bike.
I picked up a cube streamer under the cycle to work scheme. On Sunday I took it out for the first time and MASSIVELY enjoyed my 31 mile ride. the weather was terrible, cold, windy and heavy rain. when I got home my feet were completely numb and I could not have been more soaked had I jumped in a swimming pool. Yet I enjoyed the ride loads. I'm attributing that to the bike!

Of course, they say when you get a new bike you should name it. So I put out a shout on Twitter for suggestions and Rae Threat, my photographer friend from LA, instantly suggested Pretty Hate Machine. Cliched as this may be... I LIKE IT. I also had John Hirsh, my pro-triathlete twitter buddy, volunteer to name it. John had previously given bikes some awesome names (BLOOD BIKE being my favourite). At the end of the day though, John couldn't beat Pretty Hate Machine... so that is indeed the name of my shiny new bike.

So. Its November and its base training / transition time. For the month of November, I will be undergoing a detox.
No caffeine
No alcohol
No meat
No dairy

I'm a teetotal, caffeine free Vegan for a month.
Today was the first day and I am really struggling without caffeine.
I will do it though.

Ive recently read Joe Friels great blog post on the transition period and he suggests strongly that we should take this period seriously. Don't train... exercise. Don't plan, don't overdo it. This makes sense and (combined with what I fear is a stress fracture in my foot) means for the next 4 weeks or so of the detox, it will be lots of easy bike riding, a bit of running (if i can) and hopefully swimming but nothing structured and planned. Im going to try and post more regularly through this period giving updates on the detox.. who knows though, the lack of caffiene may be too much and i might sleep for the next 4 weeks.

MARATHON!!!

2009-11-02T06:09:00.000-08:00

This must be one of the most delayed race reports ever.
I wasn't sure where to go with this, but knowing my propensity for verbosity.. Ive decided to try and keep this short and sweet.

Two weeks ago I ran my first marathon. It was a truly fantastic experience.

I had planned very carefully how I was going to get through the race. I knew the key was to not go out too hard and just stick to the plan. I planned to keep an 8:30 AP for the first 13 miles. Then I planned to let myself speed up slightly up to the 20 mile mark.. then, I was just going to see how it went for the last 10k.

The first 13 miles was fantastic. We started in the Olympic stadium in Amsterdam and it was amazing to start with so many people. For the first 13 miles I did genuinely have to keep a close eye on my Garmin to stop myself from speeding up too much. As this was my first marathon, I was starting pretty near the back... which was good as it meant I spent the majority of the race overtaking people.. but it was tough in some ways as I had to be my own pacer, and i struggled to slow myself down with my excitement, that of the other runners and the support of the crowd.

Once I hit the halfway mark I allowed myself to speed up.. but just a little bit, to about an 8:15 AP. Once I hit 20 miles, things were starting to get tough. By this time my right knee had already been hurting for a few miles, various other parts of my legs were sore and my left calf was starting to cramp up.

I had chatted to one of my co-workers, who has about 4 marathons under his belt, and he mentioned to me that one really important thing once you get past 20 miles is DON'T WALK. This makes a lot of sense to me, however when i felt that left calf start cramping, i stopped and stretched it for about 10 seconds, then moved on. from this point and for about the next 5k, i was slowed down. I made sure to keep sub 9, but it was tough and i could feel that I was close to the calf muscle seizing up. I could also feel that speeding up at all would be the trigger to cause that to happen! So for that 5k i slowed, but not too much. the last 3 miles I was able to speed up again, to around the pace I ran the first half at. Most importantly, I finished strong.
Strong... and VERY happy.

I have to say, finishing this marathon was one of the proudest achievements of my life. Its probably the hardest and most rewarding thing Ive ever done by myself and purely for myself. Throughout my life to date, I know I have achieved a lot... I'm not going to list off things as I'm not trying to be boastful... but I think this was the biggest thing that I've done just for me, and it felt great.

My finishing time was 3:43:41. A time I'm very proud of an very happy with.
After finishing, I met Steph and we went for a beer. I gotta say, beer tastes good after a marathon!

Another crazy weekend

2009-09-17T08:25:00.001-07:00

After last weekends madness of doing a triathlon and a 10k back to back, surely this weekend was going to be a quite one... Right?

Wrong.

Friday was normal. I had decided to be booze free for 6 weeks prior to the marathon, but on my drive home I had already started to doubt the sense of this and by the time that I arrived home four weeks booze free seemed like enough for sure. So we had family junk food night and a few pleasant glasses of wine.

Saturday I hung out with Zane and we had a great day.
Sunday is when I topped the madness of last weekend.

I started off by doing my first ever 20 mile run. I set out at about 11am without really properly planning it. I hadnt really eaten enough to be running over lunchtime. Plus, it was very hot (for Belfast). The run was tough. Really... tough. I ran from home, into the centre of Belfast, right through the centre of a major shopping area, where my wife was working (she was quite surprised my my hello/kiss/cant talk or stop or legs will sieze up passing), then back home. It was long and difficult but it was good.

In total I actually ran 20.75 miles in a total time of 3 hours, 6 minutes and 12 seconds for an average pace of 8:58. Target pace was about 9:15, so Im happy with that. Funnily enough, my last three miles were, unintentionally the fastest.

Anyone interested can check the route out on Garmin Connect

I got home, had a quick ice bath then shower then headed off to do the thing that topped last weekends madness. I was due to abseil from the top of the Europa hotel Belfast. The Europa holds the dubious honour of being the most bombed hotel in Europe and I was jumping off its roof along with my wife and my sister-in-law.

As with last week, the break time between the two events was minimal, probably about 90 minutes. I can strongly advise anyone who ever considers doing this to not do it in the order I did it.

See, my original plan was to do the abseil first, then run later. But then at 11am on the Sunday morning, I realised.. abseil at 4. Hmm.. by the time we do the briefing, abseil, get home, its going to be dinner time.. and I do not want to do my first ever 20 miler at 8 o clock at night. So off I went out the door to run.

This led to me arriving at the Europe on sore, shaky and somewhat crampy legs. We did the briefing and headed to the roof and as you can see from this pic, I was feeling pretty darn good and totally fearless.

I have to be honest though. The fearlesssness didnt last. Once I got about 10 feet down, the shakiness in my legs, combined with the weird moonwalky feeling of little weight on my legs, combined with the fact that I was hanging from the roof of a hotel by a rope combined with LOOKING DOWN suddenly struck me down with fear.
I was, for a few moments, terrified. The girl at the top who was there as my safety person and general psychological support for the moment shouted down to ask me if I was OK. I think I squeaked out a "Yeah, Great!" but who knows. The photo below was taken around about the time of my slight mental metltdown. On the leftis my wonderful wife coming down on the left beside me...

I recovered from that moment, and downgraded my overall mental status from terrified to REALLY SCARED. Which was a massive improvement.

Just to put it into perspective. Here is a longer shot of the hotel. Im the little green spec.

And finally, one more shot of me as I got further down. At this point the fear was pretty much gone and I was just speeding down as fast as I could. Partially to get the hell onto the ground and partially because at this point it was verging on fun.

Overall, it was a scary, but exhilarating experience. I did the whole thing for a local charity called Enable NI. If you feel inclined, please visit my just giving page and donate some money. Its all for a very good cause.

Seriously.... Click here -> http://www.justgiving.com/austintanney/

How will I top this next week? To be honest.. I wont!

Double the fun.

2009-09-07T08:10:00.000-07:00

Sunday the 6th of September goes down in my personal history as the first time I did two races. It may also be the last time, but I can’t guarantee that.

I started the day with the Newtownabbey Triathlon. If the Amsterdam marathon is my “A race” for the season and the Lisburn triathlon was my “B race” (due to it being my first tri) then this was probably my C or D race. Not due to not caring about it… but due to the fact that I haven’t trained for it specifically and was not expecting to do particularly well.

So, about the training… or lack thereof. Well, with my A race being a marathon, I've been running focussed. I’ve been doing speedwork.. But that’s been speedwork based on improving marathon pace. Not focussed on getting a good 5k pace. So I wasn’t expecting to be that fast on the run. For the bike, I’ve been doing some cycling, and I’ve got a road bike, but I haven’t been training on the bike as such. I’ve just done some cycling. As for the swim. Well, my last swim was in the last triathlon.. in July.

So I set out to enjoy the race and wasn’t too worried about times. I had a feeling the bike course was going to be hilly, so on Friday night I went out to ride round it and check it out… but I got lost and ended up cycling about 20 miles around the countryside. I had stayed enough on the course to realise that it WAS hilly and there was no way I was going to improve on my bike time, even though I was on a road bike. The last tri had a really flat bike course by comparison.

I arrived to my local leisure centre, picked up my pack and got marked with my number. I found out that I was in wave 3 of 5. It runs, basically, from slowest to fastest. In the last tri I was in wave 2 of 5. I guess this means I’ve moved up one level. While waiting to get into the pool I enjoyed chatting to a few of the other competitors. I bumped into one guy who I had shared a swim lane with in the Lisburn Tri and a few that I had met while marshalling at the Lough Neagh tri.

The swim was tough going. Luckily my lane only had 4 people (some of the lanes in wave 1 had 7 people) and I opted to go out second of the 4. My lack of swim training really paid off. I struggled from the start. I let the guy behind me pass me once, but then he slowed and I passed him again. I stuck with my second position, in the lane overall.. but it was not done with style or good technique. I think I did the breast stoke for about 10 of the 30 lengths and couldn’t find a pace or rhythm at all. I’m very surprised to see from the results today that I was actually 1 second faster than last time. It felt like I was a few minutes slower.

The bike course was tough, but fun. I’m proud to say I wasn’t passed by anyone on the bike, and I passed lots of others. One lady (who had been in my swim lane, and weirdly, had also been in my swim lane in the Lisburn triathlon) was a really strong cyclist and we had out own little race/ game of cat and mouse. She passed me a few times but I got back ahead each time and finished about a minute before her. At one point my chain popped off the big ring at the front, but I managed to guide it back on without panicking, unclipping or even slowing down much. The course was indeed very hilly. Nothing too steep, just lots of long slow inclines. The course was also a little longer than the standard 20km (I think it’s was closer to 22) so I was happy with my overall time. The bike racks were split up into waves and when I racked my bike it was the first one on the rack. I can’t guarantee that there weren’t people in my wave who racked in other racks, but I’m still happy that I performed pretty well within my wave.

The run was two laps of the valley park. Which meant that it was also hilly. I’m proud to say once more that no one passed me on the run. They must have compensated for the extra few KM on the bike by shortening the run a little as I did the run in 20:30. There is no way I could have done a full 5K in that time as I was probably averaging just under a 7 minute mile.

Overall times

Swim: 17:11
T1: 1:51
Bike: 42:01
T2: 1:49
Run: 20:24
Total time: 1:23:14
Position: 56/196.

Wow. I just checked the results from my first tri… 1:23:13. ONE SECOND slower this time on a much tougher course. Last time I just about made it into the top 50%. This time made it into the top 30%. Sweet. Could definitely improve the swim. Transitions were slow too, could save 2 minutes there easily.

I finished happy and proud and completely enjoyed the race. The course was tough and I was happy with my performance considering the lack of triathlon specific training. I’m sorry it is the last tri of the season. Next season I will definitely be doing more.

My brother in law, and some twitter buddies, were doing the Laganside 10k. It started at 2pm and I finished the triathlon at close to 12:30. Having picked up my bike and loaded it into my car, I sped off down the road to pick up my son from my parents place and headed on down the road to meet my sister and Brother in law at the 10k course. We got parked and got to registration at about twenty to two. Just in time for last minute registration. I had planned on just having an easy run around the course without registering, and maybe pacing someone. Obviously though, having a number on your chest makes you run just that little bit faster. So I decided to run it after all. It was tough going. I had gone out hard in the triathlon and I kept the pace going for the 10k. It did cross my mind, at around the 2k mark that just maybe I could PR this. However, once I hit the 5k mark at about 23 minutes, I realised I had nothing left. I could keep my legs going at this pace but no matter what I did they were not going to speed up.

I completed the race in 46:37. This is about a minute slower than my 10k PR. A minute slower and it was my second race of the day. Couldn’t be happier! My sister managed to get a few picture of me running. The first was on the first of two laps. I was happy, smiling and waving at my son who was grinning and waving back.
The second is me crossing the finish line. Yes.. At that stage it was hurting and you can see it in my face.

Next time some one asks me for advice on how they should taper for a 10k, the answer will be “don’t do a triathlon 2 hours beforehand”.

I enjoyed it all though. It’s a great sense of achievement to finish any race. Finishing two in one day is just frickin’ awesome.

Strength and Determination

2009-08-31T08:34:00.000-07:00

Its been a while since my last blog update, so here is a quick update on the last month.

Since my last post Ive finally got myself a new bike. Its a Vitus Alios Triple, and very nice it is too. Been out for a few training rides on it and have really enjoyed it.

Ive never ridden clipless pedals before and generally have found them to be great. I have, of course, had the inevitable experience of falling over. I was on a desserted street, on my own, trying to adjust the saddle bag, and to be honest, Im not really sure how it happened... but I just fell over. It was embarrassing, even though there was no one around to see it!

I decided to help out at the Lough Neagh triathlon and cycled to the event (about 30 miles) and home again that afternoon. This was the most cycling I had done in one day, and it felt really good. It was also my first experience of marshalling a race which was a lot of fun at the start, and got pretty boring after a while. Good day overall though and nice to meet some local triathletes who were all very nice people.

Funnily enough, on the way home from the race, I started feeling a bit of a wobble in the front wheel. Last week, When I set out last week to do a long ride from Cookstown to Belfast, the wobbling got progressively worse to the point where the whole bike was shaking and I had to abondon the ride and be rescued.
Today my wife brought the wheel back to Chain Reaction, where I bought the bike, and they are going to fix it. apparently the spokes were loose. Im kinda annoyed about this but I guess these things happen.

Ive actually just finished two weeks vacation. I had originally planned to do extra workouts over this time... but in the end I did less than normal... due to focussing on family time and partying! yesterday though, I did make it out for my long run and did my first 18 miler.

I did it in 2 hours 45 minutes, which was decent enough and I really was trying to go slow. I enjoyed most of it. Where I ran was far from flat and so I got a good workout overall. The weather was terrible. One of the highlights though... at one point, at the bottom of a mile long uphill climb, with the wind blowing in my face and the raid pouring down, I came towards and older gentleman who smiled and told me I was "the picture of strength and determination". That put a huge smile on my face and helped me speed up for the last few miles.

Well thats about it. I have my second triathlon this weekend. It will be my first on a road bike.. but the course is much hillier so Im not sure if my bike time will be any better. Ive done no swim training at all, so thats not likely to improve either. Lucky its not my "A-race" right?

Will update again after the tri, and Just to finish off, here is a pic of my new bike (stolen from the chain reaction website).

Wrapped in cotton wool

2009-07-29T14:35:00.000-07:00

When we are kids, we know no fear. We climb trees, jump over things on our bikes
and just generally do things that are insanely hazardous.
My son is only two, and I can only imagine the heart failures he will cause me as he gets older and more rebellious.
But.
The older we get, the more we move away from this fearlessness.

Obviously, this is in some ways necessary.
Risk taking is fun, but as we age and as our responsibilities grow,
we cant afford to take as many risks.
People depend on us.
We’ve got families and jobs.
However, so often people go to the opposite extreme.

They wrap themselves in cotton wool.
They get set in their routines.
Scared of change.
Afraid to do anything new.
So often, their lives become sheltered and closed.
Their perpectives shift, their minds narrow
And they become accustomed to the soft warm comfort of the easy and the familiar.

I find it frustrating when I subconsciously do this myself.
I see it in others.
And I will be quick to criticise.
But of course, I do it too.

Our society encourages this wrapping in cotton wool.
Health and safety laws and regulations discourage risk.
I spoke to a guy who was into fell running and I asked him what the appeal was.
At this point I had just discovered a love for running.
But this crazy mountain running stuff sounded a bit nuts to me.
His reason was that for many it was a stike back against the “nanny state” we live in.
His words, not mine.
Nanny state.
I like that.

I haven’t started running up mountains
Yet.
But I think this aversion to the nanny state and to wrapping oneself in cotton wool
Is one of the many reasons I have embraced training.
I actually have taken pleasure in donning a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and going running in snow.
Last night I went out and did speed work on a really windy night, with heavy rain.
It felt GOOD.

I love the fact that when I travel on business,
I no longer just see airport -> hotel -> meeting room -> hotel -> airport
I get to go out and see something of the places I visit.
This year so far,
I’ve run across the golden gate bridge.
I’ve run through a forest in Stockholm
I’ve run through Boston city centre and down by the harbour
I’ve cycled along the California coastline from San Fran to Corte Madera via Sausalito.
I’ve run in the worst snow in a decade in London.
And the beautiful heat of San Diego by Mission Beach.
Ive soaked up the natural beauty of greenlake park in Seattle
And the grim surroundings of a massive industrial estate in south-east England.
I’ve got mildly lost running through the streets of Frankfurt, Germany,
And All of this interspersed with my normal training in the less than scenic Newtownabbey, Northern Ireland.
Where despite the unexciting surroundings Ive been happiest by far,
because all those runs and bike rides end up with me going back home to my family.

Ive done all of this with a busy schedule by simply getting up a bit earlier, or going to bed a bit later and by just having the balls to get up and get out.

By not succumbing to the temptation
of the sofa
of the glass of wine
of the TV.
And by recognising the wrapping myself in cotton wool does nothing good.

The sofa, TV and wine are all much better AFTER a training session.

First Tri

2009-07-28T06:13:00.000-07:00

I’ve chatted with a few people about triathlon in relation to what makes a person a triathlete. It seems that the consensus is that once you’ve done a triathlon, you become a triathlete. So I am proud to say that I am now a triathlete.

On Sunday I did my first triathlon. It was a sprint distance triathlon in Lisburn, a small town in Northern Ireland.
I had been looking forward to the event for quite a while. I hadn’t been training for the triathlon. This year my “A-race” is the Amsterdam marathon in October. So really I’ve been very much running focussed and have been doing some cycling (once or twice a week at best) more as cross training than anything else.
Swimming... well, let’s just say my main goal on the day for the swim was not to drown.

Coming up to the day, I had been hoping to have bought myself a road bike. However, circumstances had conspired against me on this and that hadn’t quite happened. My current bike is, as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, a heap of junk. It’s made by Reebok. It says on the frame that it’s made from steel… but I’m pretty sure some of the components are made from dark matter. There was no way I was racing on this thing. So luckily a good friend of mine is off sailing across the Ocean from Canada to Ireland at the moment, so I borrowed his half decent mountain bike. I went out for one training ride on it and it’s a lot lighter and easier to ride than mine so that was a bonus.

The morning of the race I got up at 6am to find that there was rain of biblical proportions and high winds. I had some breakfast and tried to work out whether I was going to need a bike, or an Ark.

The race briefing was at 8:30 am so I arrived in good time and collected my race pack and got myself inked with my number. I chatted to a few people here and there and everyone was very friendly. Most of those that I spoke to were first timers like me, which was a real relief.

As I set up in transition, I noticed a lot of NICE bikes, but was again relieved to see that there were other mountain bikes (I actually saw two others).

I was in the second swim wave, so I hung out and watched the first wave. There were four waves altogether and obviously it was working from slowest to fastest to get everyone off the road as early as possible. The first wave seemed to be really slow, and I noticed that most of the people were doing the breast stroke. Again, this made me feel a little better about my weak swimming. Once I got in the pool myself, once more I found everyone to be really friendly, and I positioned myself to go off fourth of the 6 in my wave. We all had a friendly agreement that if you wanted to pass you tapped the person in front on the foot and we would switch at the wall.

The swim set off and while it was tough going, I was happy enough considering my lack of training. I moved up from 4th to second and was second out of the pool in my lane. The guy ahead of me was about a length ahead of me and the rest of the pack were about a length behind me.

I ran out to T1 and made a last minute decision to wear socks. I had been planning on going sockless to save transition time, but had put some socks in my fancy transition bag just in case (my fancy transition bag was a trash bag). I decided to wear the socks as my heart rate was pretty high after the swim and I figured a few seconds break would be a good call.

I jumped on the bike and off I went. The ride felt good and the two lap course was nice. No steep hills and I managed to keep an average speed of around 18mph. Way better than any of my training rides and a speed I was very happy with considering I was on a mountain bike with standard platform pedals without any cages. I did pass two people on mountain bikes and am proud to say I passed a good four or five people on road bikes, a few of which even had tri/ profile bars.

Finally I came to the run. My T2 time was good as all had to do was park my bike and put a cap on. The run started well and my legs felt good but my heart rate was unusually high. I did the first mile at a decent pace but then had to slow for the second mile to get my heart rate down. For the third mile I managed to speed up again and finished well.

Overall I LOVED it. It was a fantastic experience and I genuinely enjoyed all of it. Going into the race I had 6 goals

1. Swim goal: Don’t drown
2. Bike goal: Don’t get hit by a car
3. Run goal: run it as strong as you can
4. Finish
5. Finish smiling
6. Finish smiling in under an hour and a half

As you can see, I wasn’t aiming tremendously high! I’m happy to say that I hit all of my goals. My final times and splits were as follows.

Swim: 17:12
T1: 1:37
Bike: 40:51
T2: 00:30
Run: 23:05

Final time: 1:23:13

I’m definitely happy with it. The guy who won the race did it in about 55 minutes. I came in 80th out of about 160… so again, I’m happy with that. Now I have some targets to beat! I know that with training I can shave a few minutes off the swim. On a decent bike and with training I should easily knock five or six minutes off the bike. Ideally I would like my run time to get under 20 minutes. That’s probably the most ambitious improvement though.

While doing the race I was already looking forward to the next one, which is September the 7th in my local area. I’m just about to mail off my application form!

The importance of goals and the importance of realism.

2009-06-23T15:10:00.000-07:00

I mentioned before that I was going to start running a few pieces for beginners. Well, a few people liked the idea so here is the first of (hopefully) many of these.

One thing Ive discovered with running is that you have to have a goal. You need something to aim towards.
At first I thought this was perhaps just me. Well, obviously not JUST me. I realise that many people are “goal oriented” etc. I however am not really one of those goal focussed kind of people generally speaking. With running/ training though, I am. There are a number of reasons for this. First and foremost, I need something to kick my ass and get me off the couch when Im tired/ its cold/ its raining/ its snowing/ its midnight/ I don’t want to or all of the above reasons try to hold me back. I need a reason to do it. Something that says I have to do it, something that can stand above the snow, the exhaustion, the fact that Ive been on a 12 hour flight and my body clock thinks its 2am. I need something to drive me.
The more I look at it the more I think this applies to everyone. We all need training goals.
At the start it may be for you as it was for me.. The desire to be able to run 3 minutes without stopping.

My next goal was to run a 10k.
My next was to run a 10k without injuring myself.
After that a lot of my goals were about not injuring myself.
But I’ve kept resetting my goals.

Once you achieve you goal. You need the next one. In fact, for me, I need the next number of goals planned out well in advance.

I think this is advantageous for a number of reasons. The most important three being MOMENTUM, FOCUS and PERSPECTIVE.

Momentum is really important. There is nothing worse than having a goal, achieving it then thinking.. “now what?”.

The second key is focus. Knowing what your next goal is keeps your focussed. This is obviously directly connected to momentum.. right? So, for me my goal was a 10k. But while training for a 10k, I already knew that I wanted to do a half marathon. I hadn’t picked one at this stage, and injuries held it all back for a while… but I knew I wanted to do it, and it allowed me to focus on sorting out my injury problems.

Finally, and most importantly to me, is perspective. It’s important to have perspective. It’s also important to aim high. I’m not going to talk endlessly about this, I’m just going to explain how this works for me.

When I was training for my first 10k, I knew I was going to be doing a half marathon. This made the 10k seem not that bad. It was only 6.2 miles. I was aiming to do 13.1. IT reduced the size of the initial goal. It put it into perspective.

I’ve now done two 10ks and two half marathons this season. When I started training for the half marathon, this was also easily put into perspective.
I’m doing a marathon.
I’m doing it THIS YEAR.
That’s 26.2 miles. Thus, 13.1 doesn’t seem that bad.

Again, even the marathon.. I haven’t even started my marathon training plan yet… but… my GOAL is to do an Ironman triathlon next year. So all of a sudden the marathon doesn’t seem so insurmountable. It doesn’t seem like such a huge thing. Its just one in a series of goals. Each goal is a small step… but it’s also a giant leap forward for someone who couldn’t run the length of himself a year ago.

Finally, as I mentioned in the title. The importance of realism. I have lots of goals now. This season, another 10k or two. Two sprint triathlons, one Olympic length triathlon and a marathon.
I want to get my half marathon time under 1 hour 40. I want to get my 10k time under 40 mins.
The point where realism comes into it is to remember that if you’re setting yourself high goals, don’t set yourself up for a fall.
If I cant do the Olympic length triathlon this year, that’s fine. I will do it next year.
If I don’t think I will be able to do an Ironman in 2010? No bother, I will do it in 2011.
It’s important to be thankful for what you’ve got. To always look back as well as forward.
If I hadn’t got a PR in my half marathon last week would I have been pissed off?
Hell no! I couldn’t run a year ago and I completed my second half marathon.
So… For the more experienced folks who may have stuck with this for this long… If you’re about to kick yourself for not qualifying for Boston this year… before you do, how about allowing yourself to be amazed that you ran a marathon in 3 hours 30 mins? (or whatever your time was).

Aim high, but don’t beat yourself up for failure. Celebrate your successes, don’t even think of anything as a failure. Look at the part of it that was a success and celebrate that.

Hope this has been useful. If there are any specific topics you would like to hear me ramble endlessly on about, please feel free to leave a comment.

Back in San Francisco / Endurance

2009-06-11T18:33:00.000-07:00

This week I am back in San Francisco.
Transatlantic travel can be totally exhausting. Regular trips to the West coast are really hard to take.
Interestingly though, I think as I train more (particularly endurance training) it is getting easier.

Endurance: the power to withstand hardship or stress; "the marathon tests a runner's endurance"

Basically, I'm finding that as I build my running and cycling endurance, its having a knock on effect of just building overall physical and mental endurance.

I flew over on Monday, which was a long day. I was up to travel to the Airport in Dublin at 5am. 2 hours journey to the Airport, 2 hours waiting around and an 11 hour flight later I arrived in SFO International airport. By this stage Ive been awake for 16 hours, but its only 1 in the afternoon.
I headed to my hotel, grabbed a cup of coffee and decided to go out for a run. Amazingly enough I managed to run just over 10k. It was about 3:30 in the afternoon by the time I headed out... which by my body clock was 11:30pm.

The biggest problem with the run was the fact that my hotel was at the top of the worlds steepest hill.

You can just about see the bottom. Running down this was virtually impossible so i sort of half jogged half walked.
For this first run, I had a destination in mind. I actually had to pop to Sports Basement to pick up a Tri Suit for my first Tri next month. I picked myself up a pair of Sugoi shorts and Zoot top. Man those things are tight. I'm by no means vain.. but I can be quite self conscious. Wearing these in public is going to be weird!
Anyway, shopping done I ran back to the hotel. I managed to run all the way up the hill right until the last block.. where the incline had to be close to 90 degrees.

I had to give up and walk. There was just no way I was running up that!

The next morning I woke up superearly, like 5am or something, and headed out for a run again. I planned on doing a run across the bridge again, but was undecided whether that would be Tuesday or Thursday morning... I decided to just run and see where I ended up. Once I saw the bridge through the mist, my mind was made up and off I went.. I couldn't resist the call...

I do love the Golden Gate bridge, and as Ive said before, its a pretty awesome feeling to run across one of the wonders of the modern world.

My camera phone really doesn't do it justice at all, but I do like to take a few shots while out running.

I ran across the bridge and on the way back, weirdly, had to stop as there were guys doing something maintenance related. At that time of the morning, there weren't a lot of people around, but there was me, a few more runners and about 10 hardcore looking cyclists all waiting by the time they let us through.

After that, my run was undisturbed and I had a nice easy 14 mile round trip that took me about 2 hours 13 minutes. Once more, I walked the last block of the hill.

While on this run, I had been watching the cyclists and thinking how much fun it would be to ride across the bridge as well. I popped into a bike rental place on my way back and picked up a leaflet. Turns out they rent some nice road bikes. The next evening, when I was finished work, I popped down and picked one up. It was a Giant Defy 2.. and man was it awesome.

Back home I ride a mountain bike that isn't even made by a bike company.
Seriously.
Its made by Reebok.
Yeah, the shoe company.
Its, to put it nicely, a heap of crap.
It weighs about 4 tonnes, and cost less than £100 new.

So, when I got on this £800 racing bike... Imagine the difference. I could easily lift this thing and carry it under my arm. Riding it was so easy compared to what I was used to. I could get it up to 25mph on the flat without really feeling like I was straining. My bike at home hits 25 mph going down the steepest hill i can find with me pedaling all out.

So off I went on a spin. I headed across the bridge and went up the hill and I saw this lovely view.

See that long, windy, very hilly road? Yes, I went down there. Many was that exhilarating. Scary too.. a bit... but really good fun. Amazingly enough, climbing it again on the way home wasn't even that bad. What a difference a decent bike makes!

I followed this really pretty road out to Sausalito
Once I hit Sausalito, there was a really nice cycle path.. so I just kept going.

Eventually, somewhere, I came off the bike path, cycled up a hill and decided that this sign was telling me it was time to turn round...

The view from this point was quite breathtaking... again, the crappy cam phone picture doesn't do it justice, but at least you get an idea.

On the way back, once I came across the bridge, I turned a different direction from the way I came and took a spin up into the hills, then down through golden gate park and back (eventually after getting totally lost a few times) to the hotel. I ended up riding 33.91 miles. The longest bike ride of my life!

The next morning, I rose early once more and headed out for more of the same. This time I went a bit further on via another route and ended up in a place called Corte Madera a pretty little town. I stopped off here and popped into Pete's Coffee to grab a caramel latte. When I came back out someone had left a little present for me in my bike helmet...

A cute little toy monkey.
Kinda weird.
But nice.
I put him in my bag and he will be joining me on my journey home.
I can only guess that the kid who owned him saw the helmet hanging there and thought that looked like a comfy bed for the monkey. Bet they didn't expect that it would result in their little toy monkey flying halfway around the world!

After my coffee, I got back on the road and headed back. With sadness I handed the bike back and wandered down to fisherman's wharf for some quality recovery food... Clam chowder in a sourdough bread bowl. Tasty

Total distance for the day was 36.32 miles. At one point though, I had paused the Garmin at a traffic light and forgot to hit start again and may have lost out on a mile or two, regardless it was still another longest ride ever.

In total over a period of 24 hours I manged to ride 70.23 miles and had 8,644 feet of climbing... And I enjoyed every bit of it.

Before and After / Family running

2009-06-06T04:26:00.000-07:00

I'm merging two topics together here. Y'know, because its my blog and I can damn well do as I please.

First up.. been planning on doing this for a while.

I ha vent been running / working out long. I started in summer 2008. There were a variety of reasons... probably foremost of which was my spreading waistline. I used to be a SKINNY guy. And man do I mean skinny.. underweight, malnourished looking. Often sick looking. So, it was rather a surprise to discover one day that I was a fat guy.

I wasn't Gilbert Grape's mother fat. But for me... a skinny guy.. I was big. My BMI said OBESE. In about 2.5 years, my trouser size had gone from a 30 to a 36.
That's a hell of an increase.
Now, a year and a bit later, Ive got rid of most of the excess weight. I'm still not exactly where I want to be. There is still a bit of excess body fat I want to get rid of, and I still have a lot of toning up to do... but on the whole I think its time for a before and after photo.

First up, a nice shot of me and my proud stomach with my lovely wife taken in June of Last year. Shortly after I began running and long before it had a chance to do me any good. You can click the image to see it in all its glory.

What a damn fine specimen of manhood. Check out that double chin. Check out those moobs. Admire the prominent gut. A lot of wine, GOOD food and hard work went into sculpting this Adonis like physique.

OK. Skip forward one year. I have not done any crazy diets. I still eat a lot of junk food. I still eat a PERIOD. BUT, Ive worked out a lot more. I run, bike and occasionally swim. To be honest, the running was all I did for the first 6 months or so. Ive really only started the biking this year. Since starting the cycling and swimming Ive found the weight loss easier. Although that's because I now train at least 6 days a week.

On Wednesday night I did the Craigavon 10k. I dragged my long suffering wife and long suffering son along for the ride. Well.. not just for the ride. I signed them up for the 1km family run. Which was a lot of fun. So, my photos to show the weight loss were taken on that night... First up... me and the lil guy finishing the 1km race, and yes... he beat me.

Now.. don't get me wrong. I'm not a vain guy. I am no model. But I'm proud of the fact that i manged to go from overweight couch potato, to something that resembles a fit human being.
Ive enjoyed the journey and at some point, very early in the process, I became obsessed with running. I'm also sorta obsessed with the idea of triathlon, but until i do one, I cant say much on that.

So, I ran the 10k. My first 10k was a disaster.. I was injured and dragged myself round the course. My second 10k, my target was to do it in under an hour.
I did it in 48 Min's and 30 secs (ish)
Which amazed me. I was really happy with this time.
My only aim with this 10k was to beat the last time... but I am in base training at the moment, have done no 10k prep and virtually no speed work.. So I was REALLY happy when I did the 10k in 45 min 49 seconds. Shaved nearly 3 minutes off the last one. Totally over the moon with this time.
The best thing was, the next day I felt fine. No stiffness, no pain, no injury. After the last 10k I was unable to run for a good few days and ended up having to see a physio and podiatrist. This time round, in the right shoes with orthotics.. faster and no pain.
Excellent.
In fact the next night i went out for a 13 mile cycle.

Anyway, here is me mid 10k. It was a very hot night so I was throwing cups of water over myself while running... so basically.. the wetness on the shirt isn't all sweat.
I really enjoyed this run. I'm off to San Francisco again next week so will do another run across the Golden Gate bridge. Will undoubtedly blog from there.

Ive also been thinking of using this blog to put together some advice for beginning runners and first time wannabe triathletes. If anyone would like to see bog posts on this subject, please leave a comment.

Just to finish off, here is the before and after... side by side.

Genetically... Awesome?

2009-05-29T23:43:00.000-07:00

I haven't had time to write my blog on running in Sweden, will try and do that sometime soon.. however... I just got a mail through from 23 and Me to say my genetic profile is ready!
It was supposed to take 6-8 weeks... Now, as I work in this business, I am aware of the technology that 23 and Me use and how long running a sample takes. To be honest I'm either impressed by LabCorp's turnaround times or surprised they aren't busier.
Anyway.
Its 7:45 on a Saturday morning. My wife is out at work and my lil 2 year old son is sitting beside me eating his breakfast and insisting that I should give him chocolate. I guess this is a good time to check out what sorta genes Ive passed on to the little guy.
I'm going to write some notes on this as I go along.

First of all... Where do I come from????
This was the one bit I was figuring i could guess with about 99% accuracy.
First glance..
Yes, I'm European.

I'm highlighted by the green icon at the top of the Europe part of the scattergraph.
I can zoom in and find I'm from Northern Europe and then one more click and.. YES, I am Irish.

So.. yeah, no surprises there. Apparently my maternal haplogroup is H4a, most commonly seen in Irish, Polish and Arabs and apparently is the same maternal haplogroup as Warren Buffet. My paternal haplogroup is R1B1c. This is most common in western europe particularly among Irish, British, French and Basque people. I am SO frickin Irish. Seriously, if I were more Irish I would be a leprechaun or a pint of Guinness. I could be proud of this, or embarrassed at being inbred. At least my maternal and paternal haplotypes are not identical. :)

So, on to the meatier stuff, the clinical reports. Again, this is the area I work in, so this is of particular interest to me. I fully appreciate that there can be many errors here but its still of interest.

Interesting stuff. I don't flush when I drink alcohol, which I knew. I can taste bitterness, which again I know. My Earwax type is wet... which I definitely knew. My eye colour is "likely blue", well that's close enough, my eyes are blue/ green and vary so technically speaking on any given day it is indeed likely they will be blue. Lactose wise I am likely tolerant. I had often wondered about this. If I eat breakfast cereal early in the morning I feel like crap. Sometimes dairy does make me feel bad, other times it doesn't bother me at all. At least I know whatever the problem is its not likely to be genetic. I'm not resistant to malaria, so I guess I will be as pissed off as ever at mosquito's and interestingly my muscle performance indicates I'm a likely sprinter. Interesting, if i probe this a little I find the following info..

I have "Two working copies of alpha-actinin-3 in fast-twitch muscle fiber. Many world-class sprinters and some endurance athletes have this genotype."

Of course they also add the "genes vs environment" caveat

"...muscle fiber only contributes a small part to your overall athletic performance. Other physical characteristics, such as lung capacity, and behaviors, such as regular exercise, also make important contributions to your prowess in sports. "

Which of course, I know. Its interesting info tho. At least I am not genetically inhibited.
Lastly on this section... Im not resistant to norovirus or HIV. Bummer.

Well, the lil guy is getting impatient so thats enough for now. The research reports are interesting so I may cover these in a separate post.

Running Seattle.....

2009-05-18T10:26:00.001-07:00

My attempts to run everywhere in the world are continuing successfully!
This week I was in Seattle. Hell of a journey getting there. Left Belfast on Monday morning and flew to Newark first, had about 4 hours of waiting around then another 6 hour flight on to Seattle. I arrived late on Monday night having travelled for about 20 hours in total. The picture above was the view from my hotel room that night. Quite nice to have a view of the most recognisable feature of Seattle. After that amount of travelling it was particularly useful to remind me what city I was actually in.

The next morning I woke early and headed out for a long run. The guys at Brooks Running (my favourite shoes!) had recommended that I head to Greenlake for the loop. I looked on Google maps and Greenlake was about 4 miles from my hotel and seemed to be around a 3 mile loop, so I figured on around a 12-14 mile run altogether and I set out.

I always like to listen to music or podcasts when I run... but being in Seattle, there was no way I was listening to podcasts. My soundtrack to the day was to be Soundgarden, Nirvana and Pearl Jam.

It was a beautiful morning and a really nice area to run in. At one point I had to stop at a bridge (the Fremont Bridge I think) as it was opening to let boats through. I think I can safely say this was a first... I don't think I have ever had my running interrupted by a passing boat.

I made it to Greenlake and it was beautiful. Great scenery and great for running too. There was always a bit of the path that was gravel, packed earth or grass, so I got to give my legs a little break from pounding the concrete or tarmac for a while and they thanked me for it.

As I ran along, I stopped at one point to take a quick photo of my shoes in their spiritual home.

The scenery was spectacular. Really nice environment for running and very popular. The best thing was that round the lake, there was a nice path, but there was also always a part where you could run on gravel, packed earth and grass, giving the legs a much needed break from pounding the concrete!

I have to say I was even tempted to jump in the water for a swim. The hotel I was staying in had no pool so I faced a week of no swimming and was tempted to try a bit of open water swimming. If it wasn't for the garmin, ipod, shoes etc I probably would have.

This guy had the right idea though...

When I got towards the end of the loop, i found a nice bit off to the side where I could run up into the woods and run on the trail through there. Nice and hilly and lots of fun.

I had actually planned out my route carefully and knew there was a branch of Road Runner Sports near the lake, so I did another half lap of the lake and headed there to pick up some gels. I had planned on doing so. Had figured out where the shop was, even knew in advance what I was buying.

The only thing I didn't really account for was having to carry the damn things.

So, for the 5.5 miles remaining in my run, I was carrying a plastic bag with two big bulky boxes of Gu gels. Just for the record.. I would recommend against this.
During the week I also had the opportunity to do a little bit of sight seeing. Invariably this involved a visit to Pike Place market and to the first ever Starbucks. Which was really cool. Much as I dislike Starbucks global domination, I do love their coffee and drink it a lot. So It was nice to, for once, drink some Starbucks and know I was having coffee in a local coffee shop.

Amazingly enough, the branding in the original Starbucks (and a few others that I saw that I assume were also early branches) actually have a different branding. They use brown instead of green in the logo and the mugs and other merchandise were quite distinct too. Its quite impressive to see that such a massive company actually maintains a distinct brand for specific shops.

Coffee tasted exactly the same, of course!

One last point of interest. At the meeting I was at, there was a raffle for a kit to be genotyped by the direct to consumer genomics company 23 and Me. As I work in this field myself, I am fascinated by this. I'm not sure if the world is really ready for direct to consumer genetic testing. Futher, I'm not sure that what is offered presently has a real medical benefit or value. However, as a matter of interest and for purely informational purposes I think its great. Ive maintained since I first heard of 23 and Me that I would love to do it but would never pay for it. Luckily I won the raffle and so Ive spat in the tube and FedEx'ed it off to them. In 6-8 weeks I shall find out the results. I will undoubtedly write a blog post on this!

One final note. Am pretty that despite having two transatlantic flights in the week, to the west coast no less, I still managed to do my highest mileage week ever. Just over 40 miles! I also managed to get in 23 miles on the bike (11.6 at home on a real bike, 12 miles in the gym in Seattle).

Just to finish off.. a map of the long run...

Endurance!

2009-05-12T02:29:00.001-07:00

This is a totally random blog posting, from my phone while sitting at
an airport. Waiting to board a flight to New York, then onward to
Seattle. Long day ahead.

For some reason this memory popped into my head and I thought it worth
documenting.

A few months back on a trip to San Francisco, I went to a health food
/ supplement store. I had run out of the stuff I take to prevent knee
pain. A lot of people use glucosamine/ chondritin, I actually use a
supplement called cissus. It was recommended by a friend with bad knee
problems and when my knees were hurting I tried it and it seemed to
help.

Anyway, there I was searching the shelves of the store when one of the
employees came over to me with the usual "can I help you sir?"

Usually my male pride, y'know that genetic imperative that refuses to
ask for directions, makes me reply "no thanks I'm fine"

This time, though, I had a dinner appointment, so I replied that yes,
she could help. As soon as I said yes, she started to lead me across
the shop and said something like "I assume its endurance supplements
you are looking for"

For real?

I thought I was hearing things. About a year before I would have been
more inclined to expect to be asked if I was looking for diet pills.

A few years before that, as a party animal, drinker, smoker and all
round unhealthy (but still pretty damn fun) guy, my grey palor would
have been more likely to cause her to say this

"Look, to be honest sir, this herbal stuff can only do so much. Most
of it is a total crock. You need a doctor."

But here I was being asked if I was looking for endurance supplements.

Cool.

--
Sent from my mobile device

When you run in places you visit, you encounter things you'd never see otherwise

2009-05-01T13:45:00.000-07:00

The title is a quote from Tom Brokaw... and it is very true.

Was in Boston this week. Boston is a big place for the Irish to visit. Many of the people I work with have lived there. Of course, Harvard being there is a significant reason for this, but generally speaking the Irish love Boston.

Personally, I never really got why. I had been a few times and thought it was OK.

This time, I got the opportunity to understand a little more of why people love Boston. I arrived on Sunday night and went for a 5 mile run down by the harbor. Which was very nice.

As I was running down by the harbour, I just happened to run by the volvo ocean race which was pretty cool. Didnt expect that at all!

On Monday morning at 6am, I awoke to this view... and I headed out for a 10 mile run.

I ran through town, round Boston Common, round the duck pond then went to the river Charles and ran alongside the river for a few miles. It was Beautiful. I have to say, I can really see the appeal of the city.

Running alongside the river was beautiful...

I love cherry blossom.

Usually traveling, especially to the states, totally scuppers my training. Amazingly though, this week I managed to stick with it despite the travel. As I mentioned, I actually ran on the night I arrived. I ran again on the Monday and the Tuesday I ran down by the habour again

On the Wednesday morning I manged a 1000m swim. First time Ive tried to swim this distance without breaks. Felt pretty good afterwards. Flew home wednesday night and on thursday night I managed to make it out for a 13 mile cycle followed by 50 pushups and 100 situps.

Today, Friday, I managed to get back to the pool for another non-stop 1000m swim.
So... Today was day 6 in a row of working out. Considering I was on two transatlantic flights on two of those 6 days, thats pretty good going.

So, just for the hell of it, Im gonna try and see how many days I can go or without a rest day.
Running a 7 mile leg of the Belfast marathon on Monday. Looking forward to that. Longer run and a decent bike ride to get in before then. Will update again when I finally cave in and take a rest day.

Have a fair bit of travel over the next while so there should be blog posts from Seattle, Sweden, San Diego and San Francisco again over the next two months. Busy times....

Distance makes things seem smaller...

2009-04-16T12:31:00.000-07:00

As Ive mentioned before, there are a lot of great benefits in being a total rookie.
Its so easier to go longer or faster than you've ever done before.

Cycling is something I'm very new to. Sure I had a bike as kid... but Ive never done a lot of cycling. Deciding to get into triathlons, of course, makes this a bit of a priority.

Over the last while, and particularly since finishing the half marathon, Ive been just focused on base raining.. ie trying to get the miles / time in with the running and the biking (and swimming but that is still lagging furthest behind).

Every time I go out on the bike, I cycle 12 miles. This is how far I need to cycle in the bike leg of a sprint triathlon, so its important to know I can do this. At the moment i am FAR slower than I need to be, but there is plenty of time to worry about that, for now I am just concerned with being able to do the distances.

However, I recently decided that I am going to enter an Olympic length triathlon in August... So I know i need to cycle further. This week I am off on a weeks vacation from work, and despite a bad start to the week (one scheduled rest day followed by a TOTALLY unscheduled rest day), I picked it up a bit last night with a 10k run and today planned a longer bike ride.

I headed out on the road for a 2 hour ride with no real route in mind at all and by doing so, discovered that travelling longer distances by cycling really does give you a different perspective on distance. I know belfast isnt a huge city, but i really did a fairly big loop today, which included going from the highest point in Belfast to the lowest... and back to the highest again.. It was an amazing feeling to know you have travelled so far. The GPS route below (click for large image) is where I cycled, 24.11 miles in total...

MY average speed for the whole ride was 11.6mph. I know this is pretty slow, but there was a lot of climbing. Here is the GPS profile...

You gotta admit, thats pretty impressive for a total rookie!

The hardest part was undoubtedle the 10% climb right up to the top of the mountain, right at the end of the ride. This was TOUGH. but, whatever doesnt kill us etc etc...

This was how it looked and belive me it was a lot harder than it looked

Beautiful view from up there though,

Came home feeling great and spend the afternoon hanging out, playing and eating ice-cream with my son. Now just finishing this off and about to settle down to a nice glass of red wine.

Techno dependancy

2009-04-08T15:04:00.001-07:00

Tonight I headed out to do a 10 miler.
The family were away for the night, so rather than my usual run where I just go out the front door and run, I decided to drive to somewhere a little more picturesque,
and a LOT more flat.
I'm kinda sick of hills. My house is quite high up, and the first mile is downhill. Which means the last mile is uphill.
Anyway, so I drove the few miles down to the shore. Parked the car and just before heading off, took out the phone to snap a quick photo.
As I was putting on my camelback and sending the pic to twitter, a guy on his bike stopped by to ask if I was a runner, and handed me a flyer for a 10k a few miles up the road.

We had a little chat, with him asking me about any races I had done and inviting me to come along and join his running club if I felt like it. Very nice guy.

Anyway, after this brief and pleasant interlude I donned my earphones, hit play on the ipod, pushed start on my Garmin and off I went.

One mile into my run, I glanced down at my wrist to check my pace and lo and behold. The garmin was dead!

I knew the battery was a bit low, but this is the first time the battery died on me during a run.
I felt a bit lost! I was running a route which I had never run before, so had very little way of gauging distance. If it was my normal route, I would have known exactly where to go for my 10 miles.. but on this occasion I really had no idea.

So, I took out my Blackberry and, while still running, tried to use google maps to calculate how far I should be running. Which is, incidentally, not easy to do.

Which brings me to the point of this Blog... Technological dependency.
Going for a normal run, I carry with me an iPod, Garmin and often my blackberry. So.. a music player, a GPS system, a heart monitor, a phone, Internet device, camera and full access to my email.

Seriously.

Its a bit nuts really.
I mean, I can run without any of these things, but I find them useful. I enjoy listening to music or podcasts while I run. I like snapping the occasional photo and I am pretty OCD about my pace and distance.
It is amazing how all pervasive technology has become in our lives.

Training has been going well the last few weeks. I haven't posted since the half marathon, but Ive been feeling good since. I took it pretty easy for a week after the marathon with just a few short runs and after that Ive been base training.

I don't start my marathon training till July, and I will be doing a few triathlons before the marathon, but I haven't decided which ones yet for sure. So, I'm just trying to get into a rhythm of multisport training.

Ive cut my running down from 5 days a week to 4, and have upped the mileage to compensate for this (hence the midweek 10 mile runs). In addition to this I am now swimming and cycling more. Yesterday I actually managed to get in 750m in the pool, a 20km cycle and a 10km run. Most exercise I've ever done in a single day! That is, of course, far form the norm. I just had a few spare hours.

I will post again soon with some more detail on my current training, once I get into a better routine. In the meantime, all the best from the sunny beaches of Belfast ;-)

The first half

2009-03-24T01:32:00.001-07:00

Sitting on a flight to london and finally have time to update on the weekends race.
Last week I had taken it relatively easy. I ran 10 miles monday night, to make up for missing my long run on sunday. Then on tuesday night I did 10k in about 52 minutes... Which is only about 2.5 minutes off my best time.

Wednesday I took a day off, then thursday I ran 3 miles fast. Did the three miles in just 24 minutes... The fastest run I've done. When I analysed my garmin data later I discovered that my heart rate was in zone 5 (above 90% max) for 85% of the run. This gave me a real confidence boost and had me psyched for the run on saturday.

My sleep on friday night was a little unsettled as I was genuinely excited about the race. Saturday morning I woke at 6 and spent a few hours ganging out with my son and eating sensible foods like bread and bananas.

At 8.30 I headed to my friends house and we set out together for omagh.

Once we got there and picked up our numbers, we had plenty of time to hang around, warmup and stretch. The buzz around the registration area was pretty cool. As we lined up at the start line, I was impressed by the variety of participants. There was a 4 mile fun run occurring at the same time so we were lined up between young kids, older folks and very obvious athletes with their club kit, wraparound oakleys and armbands specifically designed for holding gels.

On that note I have to briefly digress and wonder... How many gels do you need for a 13 mile run? Seriously, I saw one girl that had an armband with about 6 in it. Is it really possible to use that many? Yuck! I had one bottle of double strength energy drink and that seemed fine for me.

Anyway, we got started and I set off at a decent enough pace. Bear in mind that this time last year I had never run in my life. When I decided I wanted to start running I was running 1 minute and walking one minute and it killed me. So... When I say a decent pace, I mean just under an 8 minute mile.

The course was pretty cool. Quite varied, and far from flat. I kept the pace up pretty well and by the time I hit the 10k mark I was very close to a pr for a 10k. This was when I started to think seriously about what sort of time I could manage.

I knew I could do it in under 2 hours. My personal target, and the training plan I had been following, was for sub 1 hour 50. I hadn't followed the plan that closely though and had skimped a little on the speedwork so I hadn't been that confident I would manage it. However, as I hit the 10k mark I was (for me) fast and still feeling good. So I tried to pick up the pace a little more to be consistently under 8 minutes per mile.

The toughest part was around the 11 / 12 mile mark where there was a long steady hill that looked like it was 13 miles long, and in reality was probably over half a mile. Once I got over this I really pushed and the last mile was probably my fastest of the race. When I saw the 400m to go sign I genuinely sprinted for the line.

I finished in 1 hour 45 mins and 16 seconds. This totally amazed me and I was genunely over the moon with this time. I had been playing around with a pace calculator and figured that to get this time basically requires an 8 min mile for 13.1 miles and I honestly didn't think I could do this. Somehow, I did. My friend had actually only come in about 2 minutes before me.

So, I've completed my first half marathon, set my PR and set the bar. Now all I have to do is improve it. Based on this I am going to have a target of 3 hours 45 for the dublin marathon in october. Its ambitious, but I've plenty of time to get there.

When I looked at my garmin data later I found that, like the 3 mile run a few days before, I actually ran 85% of the race in heart rate zone 5. I will also post the course map and profile later.

Finally, I had sat down the night before the race to program in a playlist for the run and the music really helped, so just for the hell of it, this is what I listened to as I ran. I had just downloaded the new NINJA (nine inch nails and janes addiction) ep and the new prodigy album and hadn't had a chance to listen to them yet, hence the high density of their tracks...

Bixby canyon bridge - death cab for cutie
Fallin - de la soul and teenage fanclub
Invaders must die - the prodigy (first song that made me speed up)
Chip away - janes addiction
That's what you get - paramore
Dawn of the dead - does it offend you, yeah?
Clap for the killers - streetsweeper
Battle royale - does it offend you, yeah?
Rocket queen - guns n roses
Non-entity - nine inch nails
The oath - streetsweeper
Complication - nine inch nails
Whores - janes addiction
Omen - the prodigy
Smack my bitch up - the prodigy
We're in this together - nine inch nails
Their law - the prodigy
Head like a hole - nine inch nails
Hearts burst into fire - bullet for my valentine (this is where I started running my ass off)
Every day is exactly the same - nine inch nails
We are rockstars - does it offend you, yeah?
Come and die - fatal and therapy?
And as I finished....
Going out of my head - fatboy slim.

Brickin it

2009-03-11T01:25:00.001-07:00

Last night I did my first proper "brick" workout, ie going straight from bike to run.
Actually, yesterday was a serious workout day. I was at the gym at 6.30am for a 45 minute spin class, then 30 mins of weights, then work.
When I got home from work at about 6 it was still bright, zane was staying at his grandparents and steph was at college, so rather than sitting around on my ass I got on the road.
I cycled 12.2 miles (20km) and was annoyingly slow as before. I had planned on finishing the rider at my house, but the loop I cycled meant that I came back by my place about a mile short so I just kept going. I cycled into glengormely and looked out for somewhere to lock up the bike. Shortly after hitting the 20km mark, I saw a fence beside a bus stop. So I pulled over, jumped off the bike, chained it to the fence, threw my helmet in the camelback and started running.
I got a lot of strange looks from the people at the bus stop... And I think this is the moment that I learned that doing this sort of training means not giving a shit what people think of you or how weird you look.
I was prepared for jelly legs, but I was rather surprised to discover how my body dealt with this, which was to run faster than normal. Like, quite a lot faster. I started out at a 7.30 pace and kept thid going for about a mile I think.
I decided that I might as well run a sprint triathlon distance hard, then finish with two easy miles.
I was pretty happy to do the initial 3.1 miles in 24 mins. That's good going for me.
I got myself back to the bike, and gently cycled the 2 miles home.
Totally excellent workout, and to top it all off my wonderful wife picked up some KFC for us on the way home.
Nice.

13.1

2009-03-09T13:08:00.000-07:00

So, yesterday I was meant to run the "between the bridges" race in Belfast. This was a bit of a strange one. To celebrate the completion of a large new section of motorway (highway) they shut it down for a few hours and had a 10k on it.
I thought it sounded like fun. Unfortunately though, I was totally disorganised and had left registration to the last minute. I contacted the organisers last week and found that while there was no race day registration, I could go and register at a local shopping centre for the few days beforehand.
So on Friday evening, I left work a little early and drove down the road to meet my wife so we could sign up. When we got to the registration, however, it seemed we were a few hours too late. Apparently there was a totally unexpected demand for the race and the 4500 places had already been filled.
This was a pity, as with a half marathon coming up, I had decided not to aim for any particular time and was going to take it relatively easy and just run the race, for fun, with Steph.
Oh well, this meant I would have to just do my long run as scheduled.
Come Sunday morning and after a 6am wakeup call from the little guy and a few hours hanging out with him, I started getting ready to go for a nice long easy run.
I was planning a 12 miler, so sat down at the computer and tried to figure out a decent route with map my run. I was quite amazed to see quite how far 12 miles is. I kept planning out routes and then finding that they weren't long enough.
Eventually, i had a good route planned and just as i was getting my gear on, it started snowing.
Fabulous.
I had two new things to try out on this run.. Firstly I bough a Camelback when I was in the states a few weeks ago and hadn't been out on a long run since buying it so was looking forward to trying that out. The second was a new sports drink I had picked up while we were out on Friday. The last few longer runs Ive done I've tried using Lucozade Sport and Powerade. They both helped, but I had wanted to try out something a bit more complex, i.e. with more than just sugar in it. So i picked up this "Iso Energy" stuff. Its got carbs, electrolytes, amino acids and to top it all off.. some caffeine.
So I filled up the Camelback with water, made up a litre of the iso energy drink, downed a couple of hundred mls before starting and hit the road and had an excellent run.

The first bit of the run was the toughest as, I was running the road over the top of the Cavehill here in Belfast. I actually ran to one of the highest points in the city.. Its no mountain, but its far from flat, as you can see from the GPS elevation profile.
Having this at the start of the run was great though as the subsequent prolonged downhill gradient was a breeze. The lowest point was the bottom of the Antrim road, and I took a two minute break to watch the runners who were doing the 10k. Turning around at that point and realising that the remainder of the run was a gradual uphill was a bit more of a challenge. Although I think I decided around this time that I was definitely going to push it beyond the 12 miles and go the full half marathon distance.

On the whole, the run was enjoyable and pretty easy going.. apart from the last 1.5 miles. That was when the pain kicked in both knees and my hips. But I struggled through and finished the 13.1 miles in 2 hours 3 minutes. I think the Iso Energy stuff really helped.. a few times while running I started to feel myself lagging so I took a swig at that and it really helped. Also, the Camelback is a great purchase. No carrying water bottles in my hands and its really comfortable to wear. I can highly recommend it.

When I got home I felt totally fantastic.Its a really good feeling when you do something new like a new PR time or a new longest distance. Of course, still being a running newbie, I get to do this a lot! Indeed, as with today, I usually do both at the same time, which is a lot of fun, but sets the bar for what I have to beat next time.

I learned my lesson from missing out on the between the bridges run and so have now signed up for the half marathon in omagh. Two weeks to go and as planned, I want to do the half marathon in two weeks in less than 2 hours. Having done this run in around 2 hours lets me know that I can definitely do it.

Below is the full GPS profile of the route. As usual, click for full size goodness.

Running one of the wonders of the world.

2009-02-24T16:28:00.001-08:00

This week I am in San Francisco for work purposes.
I decided, while here, that I really wanted to run the Golden Gate Bridge. I mean, how often does one get to run along one of the 7 wonders of the modern world?

I didnt have a decent camera with me, I forgot to bring one, but I did have my trusty phone cam... So here is a little photostory of my memorable run. All images can be viewed in glorious full size with a mere click...

For a start, there was no way I was going to be able to run to the bridge from my hotel. Im staying about 7 miles from the bridge. That each way plus the 3 miles across the bridge and back would be WAY too long.

So, I looked at my options and decided I may as well do something touristy in the process and ride the trolley. I headed from my hotel to Powell and boarded this very car...

I rode the trolley to the end of the line, Bay. From here I started to run. Thanks to google maps on my phone, I figured the best way was to run along Bay for a while to Lombardo then head onto the marina. Once on marina, I got my first good view of the bridge,

This was actually my first time getting a proper look at the Golden Gate bridge. Ive been in SF a few times now, but never had any free time. Once we drove somewhere were I got a bit of a glance at it, but it was very foggy and didnt look very impressive. I got lucky today and it was clear and sunny.

The run along the marina was nice. Lots of other runners, nice sea air, beautiful view. As I got closer to the bridge and actually started running on the path alongside the road, it was strange. Lots of traffic beside me, no other people. Also, lots of puddles. Apparently yesterday there was a huge amount of rain. Score one for luck for me that I missed it. At a few parts where there were pedestrian subway underpasses under roads, I was actually running in ankle deep water.

I think at this point I was running along state route 1 or "california 1"

The run was certainly longer than I had thought. My training schedule for today was actually a rest day. Some chance...

The thing about running towards something as tremendously large as the Golden Gate Bridge is that you see if from very far away and it just doesnt seem to get any closer mile after mile. Eventually, however, I reached the bridge and paused to see this rather spectacular sight...

Didnt pause for long though, at this point I think if I had my legs might have seized up. I pushed on and started running along the bridge. This was the sight that greeted me as I ran onto it.

The run itself was completely exhilarating. It honestly was fantastic. I think part of this was due to a larger than usual endorphin rush, probably caused by the fact that I was running much further than planned just two days after my longest run to date. However, it was mostly just from the sheer thrill of doing it and from the incredible beauty of the views and majesty of the bridge itself. It looks amazing in photos.. yes. Its a wonder of the world.. yes. But none of this really conveys how incredibly impressive this thing is as you run along the length of it. The full length is 1.7 miles, so the run across and back was the easiest 3.4 miles I have ever run. The view from the bridge was spectacular. Sadly the cam phone photo does it NO justice. You can just about see alcatraz in the distance.

When I got to the other side, I turned round to run back and found myself running the full length with a smile on my face and at a fairly decent pace, at one point I glanced at my Garmin and was flying along at about a 7:30 minute per mile pace (thats fast for me.. ok!). I had my iPod on and as listening to "Does it offend you, yeah?" which just seemed to work perfectly.

So here I am, halfway across... loving it...

I came off the bridge and ran back via Crissy Field, along by the ocean which was also beautiful. I had figured out before I even reached the bridge that by the time I finished I would probably be close to 10 miles. I figured that after 12 miles on sunday my knees might protest too much and thought I may have to stop running and walk at some point. Luckily, I stuck at it, my knees did indeed protest the pounding but not enough to stop me. In total, by the time I made it back to the trolley stop I had clocked in a total of 11 miles and had hugely enjoyed it.

When I finished, it had just turned 9:30am. I have to say, starting your day with an 11 mile run that includes running along one of the wonders of the world is FANTASTIC... but... its tough to live up to. The rest of the day seems long and dull by comparison.

Just to finish off, here is a screengrab from google maps of my route....

First 12 mile run

2009-02-22T11:47:00.000-08:00

Today I did my first 12 mile run.
Previously my longest run was 10 miles.
I was over at a friends house last night and told him I was planning the 12 miles today and he suggested we run it together. Now, Ive been running less than a year, and Liam has been running for about 25 years, but I though, what the hell.. why not?
So we met at a nice sport and set out. from the very outset, I knew Liam would have a faster pace than me... and while I am sure I slowed him down a little, I dd my best to keep up.
IF I had gone out to do this run myself, I know I would have probably done 10 minute miles and taken 2 hours for the run. Thanks to being pushed a little, I did it in 1 hour 43 minutes. An average pace of 8:36 per mile. For me this would be good going on a 5 mile run.
So, much as I like to run alone, I guess the lesson here is.. if you're going to go running with a friend, might as well run with a friend who is a better runner.

Ive attached my route, just because to me it looks good. Click the image for a nice full size version of this.

On yer bike...

2009-02-19T06:47:00.001-08:00

Over the last year Ive been focussed exclusively on running. I had decided a while ago, however, that I wanted to do a Triathlon. So, I bought a cheap mountain bike.

I went out a few times with my 2 year old son on the back and did some short distance cycling just for fun. It was pretty much the first time I had been on a bike for many years. Literally since I was a kid I think.

So a month or so ago I knew that I would need to start considering the bike element of the Triathlon and training properly. I started off by going to a spin class to get into the idea of it and start building the basic strength. Im now doing these fairly regularly (2-3 times a weeek when I can) and it seems to be helping.

On sunday past, I ventured out for my first road ride alone. I was heading to a local park with my wife and the little guy. I decided to cycle there and they could follow in the car and meet me there. So I cycled the 6 or so miles to the park and it was a lot of fun. On a downhill section I got the bike up to 30mph. To any cyclists out there that probably sounds like nothing... but to anyone else who, like me, hasnt been on a bike for about 20 years... man its SCARY, and pretty exhilarating too.

We went to the park and had a lot of fun and I headed off to cycle back home. Only problem was that the journey back home was all uphill. Which was tough going. It was about 6 miles home with a steady uphill slope which clinbed 560ft in total. So the total 12 mile journey took me 1 hour and six minutes, with a break of about an hour and a half in the middle.

This is the right distance for a sprint triathlon, but time wise.. phew! Way off! I should be doing it in half that time.

On Tuesday I arived home a few hours early from a business trip. I had started the day with a 5 mile run, but the sun was out, Steph and Zane were not due back for an hour, so I threw my bag in the house, donned my gear and jumped on the bike. I cycled 12.3 miles, this time on a more flat course and managed a slightly more respectable time of 55 mins.

Still WAY off a good time for a triathlon though, but of course my training is just starting.

Today, Thursday, I went to my early morning spin class and discovered it was cancelled. So I jumped on the stationary bike in the gym, set it to 20km distance and started cycling. It seems that in a period of about 36 hours Ive made what can only be described as miraculous improvements as I completed the 20k in 36 minutes 33 seconds. Now that i more like a triathlon time.

What it really shows is that I am never trusting a stationary bike to give me any indication of my ability. Much like running, training indoors on a machine is fine to build up the basics... but nothing prepares you for hills and wind like being out in the open. Ive got to a point where I just cant run on a treamill at all, and while there is obviously a huge advantage to spin classes, I think that I am going to have to clock in a lot more miles on the road for my biking to get to an acceptable standard.

The begining

2009-02-16T15:03:00.000-08:00

This is the start of a new blog for me.
A few weeks ago I came up with an idea.
I decided that I am going to do an Ironman triathlon.
Pretty ambitious, considering my furtherst race so far is a 10k.
On this blog I am going to track my journey towards this goal. Hopefully it will be a bit of motivation for others. If not, hopefully it will at least be entertaining.