Three more weeks…

Just three weeks to go until Ironman Austria, dear peeps, and everything – toucheth ye olde woode – appears to be going OH KAAAYH. I was initially worried that I’d end up paying for the time in the UK but it actually seems to have done me the world of good – a few big, hilly bike rides followed by a bit of an enforced rest (just two runs in five days).

Now, if you’re doing a more standard 12 week build for an Ironman, I wouldn’t recommend that sort of lull just a month or so out but there are a few reasons why I think it’s worked for me.

Firstly, I don’t feel like this has been a standard build but more the result of a long, hard, gradual increase in fitness and stamina over the past eight months since I joined Tri2Aspire. I’m far calmer, more relaxed and less sore than I was at this point before Wales – some of that, of course, is down to experience and knowing exactly what putting my body through a 3.8k swim, 180k bike and full marathon feels like. But, also, Wales was a traditional build – from decent shape to IM shape in 12 weeks. This time, I feel like my fitness has increased steadily since Wales and, therefore, there’s been no need to force it or peak. For that reason, a bit of a break made little difference.

Also, I’ve always had a fairly unique approach to pressure: run, run like the wind! The Easter before my final exams in university, for example, while all my uni mates were sweating over their studies and revising for 10 hours a day, I went to Portugal to work in a kids’ club for the whole holidays. Undue stress, I feel, is more likely to undermine my abilities than lack of work… that’s the theory at least.

And it’s a theory I may need to fall back on as what I call ‘Final Month Fever’ kicks in. Usually, I’m a fairly social sort but can happily go weeks without going out or having a drink… I just sort of, well, forget. Now, however, with all that hard work under my belt and just a few weeks to go, I’m consumed by the sort of desire and appetite to go and get smashed that is usually reserved only for sailors on shore leave. I guess it’s a kind of cabin fever – I know I’m so close to ‘getting er done’ and being able to enjoy a bit of a blowout (hey, all those weekends of being well-behaved, having early nights or dragging my ass out of bed at 3am have to be balanced up somewhere) that it’s tempting to start early. That week off, with a few beers and less focus on training, has potentially saved me from a week-long epic bender of IM-destroying proportions!

Then there’s the weather. A couple of days ago, Allah hit the thermostat and changed it from ‘Stupidly fooking hot’ to ‘Holy crap, my face is actually on fire, no seriously, my skin is melting’. It is unpleasant. It would be unpleasant if Ironman were at the end of summer and I was having to get the miles in now but it’s somehow worse that this particular journey is nearing its end.

You see, in reality, nothing I do now is really going to make any difference – I’m as ready as I’m going to be. I don’t mean I’m in perfect condition and am going to go out and win it – simply that, if I haven’t put the work in now, nothing I do between now and three weeks’ time is really going to make me significantly fitter. If anything, there’s the risk of injury, illness or overexerting. So, every single ‘hot as a dragon fart’ kilometre that is swum, biked or run in these here conditions is being done ‘just to stay the same’. That’s frustrating. I want it to be here NOW (please imagine footstamping while reading this last sentence)!

But it is what it is – and it’s only that for 17 more days as I fly out to Austria on the night on 27 June.

And, as it approaches, there’s a voice that sits there like one of those devils on the shoulder that appear in bad sitcoms and worse movies… It’s a voice that says just one thing and, I imagine, that voice doesn’t change whether you’re coming up to your first, second (like me) or 50^th Ironman: “Have I done enough?”

It’s hard to tell. As I said, I feel far more in control than I did three weeks out from Wales. The build-up to Wales hurt; I was permanently sore, always tired… but that, in the perverse way that the mind of the triathlete works, was preferable to this calm. I knew I was pushing myself. I knew I was hammering it. I had to be – I was hurting!

It’s at times like these that you need to look outside for your gauges as the internal ones are useless. Since the run-up to IM Wales, I’ve been logging my training on DailyMile – a very simple but easy to use site for recording your sessions, distances, times and intensities. It’s not technologically complex, but neither am I. The past few months I’ve also been keeping a more detailed diary on a spreadsheet. These are both godsends (should that be allahsends here in Middle Earth?). In times of doubt, I can take a look and see that I have been putting the work in and hitting sessions. I realise that volume isn’t everything, but I can also compare the final few months with those that preceded Wales and see that, although I may not be so continually sore or wiped out, I’m actually covering way more kilometres. So, I can conclude, I am just in better shape.

And that was backed up this weekend when the team went to Hatta to hit the hills. It was my third time there and I did the full long ride all the way down to Kalba and back – a 115km long ride that has some 3,000m of elevation in it… and all that in frying pan heat and hell’s ass humidity – and, although I may never be king of the mountains, I definitely crushed it compared to any of my previous Hatta excursions. I even came off the bike feeling fresher than I have before.

So, by these exterior gauges, things are looking OK. Now it’s all about the final few weeks and the taper – two things that can be quite difficult to get right, being a mix between keeping the foot on and also getting the right amount of recovery. I feel I far from nailed this period last time around. Get them right, and I’m confident I’ll put in a performance I can be proud of.