Ironman Mark

I have been thinking about stuff recently and have decided that I would like some shorter goals.  Christmas seems a good time to achieve them by.  So, the targets will be:

Swim: Sub-6 mins for 400m

This should be achievable as I could do it a couple of years ago.  My PB was 5:55 in September 2007.

Bike: CTS field test result of 288W

To be honest, I can’t quite remember what this is off the top of my head but I know I did 262W / 257W on 6 March 2011 on the Wattbike.  288W is a 10% improvement.  This might be a little soft.  If it is, I will adjust.

Run: Sub-19:00 for Basingstoke park run

My PB is 19:11 for the 5k run.  I set this in March 2010.

Push-ups: To do 100 in a single go

My best is in the low 30s.  This will be the toughest challenge by far

Weight: To be sub-70kg

That means 4.4kg has to go.  That’s 0.25kg per week.  Very do-able if I set my mind to it.

Dog walking: Take Sparkie for a walk in the evening at least 4 times per week

It beats surfing the interweb – but a day only counts if I get home from work before 8pm

In absence of clearly defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily acts of trivia.

I find this so true at the moment.  Randomly surfing the internet for hours at a time in the evenings with no real purpose.

For a long while I have had a goal.  Do IM Lanzarote again.  But it quickly began to grate on me and became an annoyance, a chore, rather than fun.   The first time I aimed for Lanzarote it was fun.  A goal.  A challenge.  So I want something like that again.  But what.

I’ve thought about a lot of things: A long swim, a long run, another ironman, some other endurance event.  But none of them appeals for long.

I want a dream.  I want something to aspire me, to get me out of bed in the morning, to give me a passion, a vibrancy…  I have a will to do something extra-ordinary that will challenge me more than I can imagine.  But everything I look at just seems grey and ordinary.  Occasionally I will see a sparkle (a 14k swim, a 50 mile run or whatever) but the clouds go across and the ordinariness returns.

I have a dream.  And that dream was to go sub-11 hours at Lanzarote next year.

What would it take to achieve that?

If you exclude the 30 minutes for my wheel problem, I did 11:38:03.  So how do I knock off 39 minutes?

My times were:

Swim: 0:59:38

T1: 0:05:27

Bike: 6:28:56

T2: 0:07:54

Run: 3:56:10

Total: 11:38:03

For now, I will leave my T1 and T2 times alone.  T1 was not particularly slow compared with others.  T2 was 3 minutes slow because I went to the loo.  I know it is all about the aggregation of marginal gains, but lets leave those for the moment.

Swim

I did well on the swim.  Realistically, I may be able to knock a minute or two off it but not much.  So how do I get those two minutes?  Well, I am going to have a quick health check on my swimming on Tuesday morning.  That should hopefully see if there are any easy wins.  Then it is down to hard work!  My guess is that I will keep aiming to swim three times per week.  I enjoy swimming and find it easy to make time to swim in the morning.

Bike

Realistically, I have to go 6:05 or so on the bike.  That’s a 24 minute saving.  Or 6% faster.  Or (probably) around a 12% increase in average power.  Average power was 174W, normalised power was 192W.  That means AP needs to go up to 195W and NP would be 215W.  I never knew my FTP last year but I guess it was around 250W on my tri bike.  That gets an FTP of 280W on my tri bike.  It won’t be easy but that’s do-able.

Run

So if my bike needs to be 6% quicker, so does my run.  3:56 needs to become 3:41.

If you believe the VDOT tables I talked about earlier, that means I need to be able to run a half-marathon in 1:24.  That sounds quite daunting.  It’s even more daunting when you think of it as the equivalent of an 18:22 5k.  My best so far is 19:11.  More practice is needed.

If I could get rid of the pin-and-needles on the run, that would really help.

Weight

Instead of increasing power, decreasing weight would get me there.  Knocking 5.5kg of my Lanza weight last year would (if you believe the VDOT calcs) help get me there on the run.  That’s certainly the easiest of the targets to imagine achieving.  Interesting.  But I think I eat to “emotionally” to make it an easy target.  Another way of saying that is I like chocolate, chocolate and chocolate too much.

The real question for me now is how real do I want to make my dream.   Real in terms of day-to-day exercise.  Real in terms of day-to-day eating.  Any even more, real in day-to-day actions.