''You're doing a what?''

After reflecting on the admittedly silly amount of time and effort I have recently been pouring into training, I asked myself: Why spend hours pounding away on the pedals and the pavement, Steve? What's the point? A valid question, to be sure. An even more valid question might be something along the lines "why the f*** would you sign up for a 226km triathlon?" This is a question which pops up frequently enough when I'm hurting out there on a run. That's because Jeremy - my best mate - inspired me to pull the trigger on registering for Ironman Melbourne. Premature to be signing up for that in my 3rd year in the sport? We'll see on race day, I suppose.

I think part - if not a lot - of the answer for doing all of this madness can be found in my wanting to motivate myself on a daily basis whilst I pushed through many university classes which admittedly did not interest me all too much, and working a job which is not entirely rewarding. These reasons satisfy the motivation for plunging into it more than 'normal' in the last six months. The rest of the answer, however, is perhaps harder to articulate. Whilst I am still searching to regain what creativeness I once might have had as a wordsmith years ago, I think I shall share with you some words from a rather inspiring athlete, Jordan Rapp, taken from his victory speech at Ironman Canada last year:

"[Triathlon/Ironman] is the sort of momentous [...] experience that allows us, ever so briefly, to get close enough to the stars to reach out and touch the heavens. Of course, some of that may just be the delirium of a 226 kilometer journey of swimming, biking, and running in a single day. 

As much as we might curse the wind, and the heat, and the seemingly endless miles when we are out there on the day, those very things are what bind us to this race and also to each other. Nobody gets together over a beer and recounts war stories like, “hey, remember that time we ran a 5k in totally perfect conditions?” Adversity is one of those things that truly implants a memory in our brain. According to Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths, the meaning of life itself is to suffer. I’m not sure I buy into that, even if it has resulted in some great Blues music over the years.

Personally, I prefer view of Viktor Frankl, the great Austrain psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, that the meaning of life is to find meaning in our lives. I think the “to the stars” part is just as important as the “not easy” part. I don’t think anyone wants to go, through great difficulty, to the grocery store. I don’t think we want our lives, in general to be hard, though I don’t think we necessarily want life to be easy either. What I think drives us to seek out great challenges is that it is a choice that we make for ourselves. We don’t have control over the day, but we have control over our decision to pursue this epic journey. We all, for a variety of reasons, chose to wade into the lake with 3300 other people to undertake something that the typical person would call crazy.

But no one in this room has a burning desire to be, “typical.” That is not why you do an Ironman. You do an Ironman because you want to reach the stars. And you want to do it the hard way. Because that is what makes it special."

Jordan celebrating his IM Texas win last week.

 

If you're so inclined, I think a lot of the reasons I have pulled the trigger on signing up for Ironman Melbourne in March 2013 - and indeed any race - can be explained in the 17-odd minutes of footage below. This video was produced for the awards banquet for Ironman Texas 2013. I think it's worth sharing.

Best,

Steve

p.s. Check out Jordan's speech from IM Texas. He's a classy guy. 

Chopping wood, carrying water (and smelling the roses)

And so, another solid week of training is in the bag! I am simply itching to race. I feel like I have a can of energy and I cannot wait to crack it. Will be great to express the hard work on June 24th. 


The short version:

The slightly-less-short version: 3 key rides including a 4-hour long ride with +1000m of vertical; 3 key runs including two tempo runs and a 24km long run, and; 2 key swims with ~2000m main-sets. 

In other news (a.k.a. more important and certainly more interesting happenings): Audrey is back from an amazing week in Gaspé where she spent time with friends on a grad-trip of sorts! Photos are amazing and I'm sure they don't quite capture the serenity and beauty of the peninsula. She brought us back some lovely fresh Gaspésien seafood, too!  

We've had a wonderful long-weekend here in Ottawa. The weather has been epic (~30 degrees) and the mood relaxed - perfect! There was a multi-day cycling event in Gatineau over the weekend which we went to take a look at this morning. It was fun! I only wish I had of gone to see the TT where Clara Hughes - a multiple Olympic medalist (summer AND winter games) and veritable Canadian sporting icon - backed up her 2011 title (see video below)

Looking forward now to Mum & Dad's arrival in no less than three weeks! Yikes!

Legs 11

In the hurt-box at the Physio Race

Throughout the winter I focused in on swimming and running whilst keeping the cycling hours down to a minimum. I ran, on average 6x week following a "Barry P" style program, concentrating on frequency and consistency. In fact, since mid-December there might only be a dozen or so days where I haven't run. Same with the swimming, where I tried to swim around 5x a week - a goal relatively easy to accomplish with the pool on campus. 


Since mid-April, I've been building up the volume (except in swimming, which has been cut down to 3x a week). In the last four weeks my training has been something like 17-20hrs/week (~8000-10000m of swimming, ~250-350km of cycling, ~60-70km of running). This stupid amount of training won't last forever (don't worry, Audrey). I'll start cutting down the hours in the next two weeks to be super-sharp (hopefully) for Ironman 70.3 Mont-Tremblant. 


I've only done one little race this year, a 10km fun-run here in town, The Physio Race. It went OK. I think I had done one or two tempo runs prior to it (the rest being easy stuff). The goal was to see where my fitness was. The course was decieving in it's difficulty - a slightly undulating out-and-back along the Rideau Canal with a effin' nasty 25-odd km/h headwind on the second half. I finished in 5th with a time of 37:48 which I found encouraging, all things considered. I *should* be able to better that on some of the key Olympic distance races I'll do in the next few months. 


Enjoy a peek into it all.....


Nice ride after work on Friday:

Nasty fartlek the next day:

The take home message: Hopefully after my most consistent and demanding winter of training I can look forward to some good results in 2012! It all begins with an Olympic race in Mont-Tremblant June 9th followed by the 70.3 on the same course two weeks later!


À suivre...

The point....

Hey everyone! I keep meaning on being more on-the-ball with keeping in touch! One day I will, I promise! I had started a blog about a year ago with the full intention of giving you guys a better insight into our world but, alas, it fell by the wayside!

So, here's to hoping that this time around I'll be able to keep the stint alive for a bit longer and perhaps lost the tag of "that shit-at-keeping-in-touch guy". 


I'll try and back-date a few entries going back to when we were last in Aus in order to lay a bit of a context down for you guys.


Enjoy!

"Every mile is two in winter" ~George Herbert

When winter hit, I initially thought "well, this will be the last one you'll have to go through in it's entirety, so try to slow down and smell the roses a little". As the dark, cold, and windy days ticked over, that attitude was hard to maintain.


The snow came in dribbles and flurries in Ottawa in the weeks preceding Christmas. That is to say, there was no wonderful blanket of fluffy white snow covering the ground and the bare branches on which the hungry squirrels were still scampering. Thankfully, we left Ottawa and headed up to Saguenay right after our semester was done, a few days before Christmas. For those of you who don't know, that's Audrey's hometown and where almost the entirety of her family resides. Winter was well and truly established in Saguenay! Lot's of snow!

We spent most of our time eating! Time which wasn't spend doing the latter I spent running, whilst Audrey spent it on the couch, knitting! (I'm still yet to have received the pair of slippers she promised me.. maybe next Christmas?). We had a great time catching up with her family and enjoying the festive season. 


Alas, all good times come to an end. Our winter semester began far too soon, after only something like ten days off. Oh well. Back to school. The winter semester (Jan-Apr) this year felt like the longest four months of my life! Not only was I completely sick off winter, I was truly sick of uni. I 'escaped' by throwing myself into my training, running - metaphorically - as far away as possible from uni work. In good time, though, the semester came to an end. 


April was all-in-all a good month. The weather was decidedly shithouse however when classes ended on the 10th (or so) I had but 6 exams to nail for the rest of the month - that's it, that's all. 


Brilliant. No classes = More time to train (ps. April ended up being a +70hr training month, which is OK)


I did, though, try to work as much as I could, though rarely more than twice a week (14hrs/week). 


Exams came and went, all of which went quite well, I thought (read: pretty well considering I did squat all in terms of a solid preparation). Only 3 more classes to go and the B.A. is in the bag.


Audrey, in the meantime, was the busiest I had ever seen her throughout the last 6-8 weeks of the semester! She was juggling 3 demanding jobs, a research project, and a full course load. I have no idea how she did it! (I suspect caffiene and - what's that expression - blood, sweat, and tears had something to do with it). 

Back at it: Autumn 2011

Summer came and went quickly, in hindsight. A new scholastic year began early September and I went off to do the second required field camp for my degree in Gaspesie, QC. It was pretty cold, wet and windy during our stay but much fun was had nonetheless. The camp gave me a short-lived boost which I needed in order to get me a little more energised about the forthcoming semester. 

Once back in Ottawa a quick-paced semester rolled along. We tried to make the most of cycling as much as I could given the rapidly approaching winter would inhibit any two-wheeled forays for the better part of five months. 

Both Audrey and I kept part-time jobs with the same organisations we worked with during the summer. This was amazing given that our rates pretty well doubled from the previous part-time gigs we had!

Autumn - well the first part where the leaves are pretty and the temperatures mild - is a fantastic time to spend time outdoors. The latter half is the worst period of the year: daylight hours rapidly diminish, the wind kicks up, the vegetation takes on a brown and lifeless hue, the snow - which admittedly brightens things up - takes forever to arrive. The end result is a dangerous increase in caffeine consumption.

Enjoy some mobile phone photography:

The weeks rolled by and the snow arrived. Audrey was kept busy doing her second placement (and a bunch of other stuff) right up until Christmas, when we headed off to where the real white stuff is....

À suivre...