Been there, done that, got the tattoo

This is not my leg

I've always liked the idea of having a tattoo but I've never really known of what. Now I can't get the idea out of my head of having a tattoo to celebrate the Brazil Ironman supposing, that is, that I finish it. Unfortunately the Ironman logo is pretty awful but the tattoo would have to include that for it to have meaning.

Why the hell do I want to get a tattoo? It's not to brag, honest (remember the slogan for the Ironman: "Swim 2.4 miles! Bike 112 miles! Run 26.2 miles! Brag for the rest of your life); I want to make this permanent. Been there, done that, got the tattoo and, no, I'm not going to do it again. I can't imagine doing a tattoo for a Marathon, for example, because then as soon as you run one faster, you're going to regret that tattoo. But an Ironman is an Ironman, there is a definite before and after: you are one or you are not. This is something I'm going to be proud of when I'm 99 (if I make it that far) even if it is a bit ugly and unfashionable in the year 2,071.

I've taken the first step towards actually getting inked and that is to start a competition on the 'net for the design that I will use. Digging around on the internet I found hundreds of tattoos, many of which have been compiled by this guy (who, coincidentally is also preparing for Ironman Brazil, but next year):

http://mauriciosegura.blogspot.com/2009/01/im-tattoos.html
http://mauriciosegura.blogspot.com/2009/08/im-tattoos-ironman-tattoo-designs-ii.html

http://mauriciosegura.blogspot.com/2011/02/im-tattoos-ironman-tattoo-designs-iii.html

If you want to have a crack at designing my tattoo then click here and you could win $100, not to mention have the honour of being the creator of something I'll wear for the rest of my life... ;-)

Lactate test

Definitely one of the less unpleasant tests I have had to do. The first part of test involved cycling at ever increasing intensities (Watts) while my pulse and CO2 / O2 interchange were measured (as in previous VO2 Max tests) as well as my blood lactate concentration.

I'm smiling under the mask, honest!

Here's where the unpleasantness comes in: the only way to measure your blood lactate concentration is by measuring the lactate concentration in your blood - doh! In other words, every 3 minutes Diego would prick my ear and extract a drop of blood for analysis. Oh, and by the way, each analysis costs 3 euros (not Diego's fault, but just the cost of the patches).

Blood, sweat but thankfully no tears

After safely clearing my second threshold on the bike - the anaerobic threshold above which the energy metabolism is primarily from glycogen - it was time to go out on the track and repeat the same test running. I got quite a lot of funny looks from the people playing football on the pitch I was running round. On my back in the backpack was the little machine that measures my CO2 / O2 interchange and sends the signal by radio (what technology!) to where Diego was waiting with his needle to take yet more blood samples. I had to run around the track at a predetermined and ever increasing pace which is trickier than it sounds. To help, Diego had set a stopwatch to beep every certain number of seconds and my job was to make sure I was passing a marker at exactly this moment. We had a few technical difficulties with tubes falling out and stopwatches running out of batteries but it looks as though we managed to get some good data for analysis. The good thing is that the conditions were very similar to what I imagine Brazil will throw at me.

If you are curious as to what the point of this bizarre test is, have a look at a post I wrote some time ago in which I tried to explain the significance of the aerobic and anaerobic thresholds, as well as the MLSS (Maximum Lactate Steady State) threshold. Hopefully I'll get the results in the next few days and they will give me an indication as to what kind of pace / heart rate I can aim for both on the bike and for the Marathon leg of the Ironman.

Before starting the test, I bumped into Carlos - who is also doing Ironman Brazil. He had just done his test and was happy that the pain he'd been experiencing in his leg while running over the last few weeks had finally subsided. So - TOUCH WOOD - it looks as though both of us are ready to DO THIS THING!

Unsung Heroes: Kilian Jornet

I'd say that Spain has more than it's fair share of elite sportsmen and women, probably partly due to its great climate. Rafa Nadal, Fernando Alonso, Severiano Ballesteros (RIP), the Spanish football team, Alberto Contador, Marc Gasol even Javier Gómez, the World Champion of Olympic distance Triathlon are all household names. Not so for Kilian Jornet, so he qualifies for my unsung section.

Kilian Jornet runs Marathons. In the mountains. He is an extraordinary athlete with a VO2 Max of around 88ml/kg/min which puts him at the upper end of all the values ever registered. He's already won the Skyrunners World Series 3 times not to mention being World Champion of Ski Mountaineering twice. Skyrunning, as its name suggests, involves running races in the mountains of 30-42km with at least 2,000 meters of climb (and descent - I'm not sure what is worse), a minimum altitude of 2,000m and, in some cases, including a Vertical Kilometer (R). I imagine you have to be extremely fit, lean and dextrous (and a little bit crazy, let's face it) to be able to compete in, let alone win one of these things.

What makes Kilian a "hero" in my book, is his dedication to what he does best without compromising his principles. He could no doubt get more attention and recognition (and more sponsorship for that matter) if he came down to Earth from his Mountains and competed on level ground but he sticks to his thing all the same. He is also very young indeed - only 23 years old - so who knows what he has ahead of him. I'd like to see him getting more coverage at least in the national press - he really is one of the best athletes this country has and he is right under our noses (or really above them I should say).

Week 17 / 20

This week was an easy week in terms of load but a difficult one mentally, although it was nice to be congratulated by so many people at work over my result from Lisbon. What made it difficult psychologically was that my aerobic runs (at a heart rate of 150 bpm) were much slower than the week before and I started to "comerme el coco" as they say in Spanish, thinking that all those sugary gels I used for carboloading last week might have somehow "detrained" my fat burning capacity. The more rational and probable explanation is that I am simply tired and that my body is busy making adaptations to the stresses I put it through last weekend. This sort of worry is fairly typical when you are in the equivalent of the tapering period for any event - for example, when you've sent the invitations out for the wedding, hired the photographer, hairdresser, etc., and really there is nothing left you can do except worry. That's where Jonathan comes in, to put my mind at rest...

Another thing that made the workouts tougher than they really needed to be was the fact that, on Saturday, I had to do my 3 hour (only 3 hours - wahey!) ride in the pouring rain on my mountain bike and that, as my wife is away in Africa, the 1 and a half hour run on Sunday had to be on the treadmill while I watched a really crappy film ("Battle: Los Angeles" if you must know) and the kids watched another not so crappy one. Apart from the obvious tedium of running on the treadmill, I find the stifling heat that builds up almost unbearable, with not even the breeze coming from the fan making much of a difference. After a while, the belt gets so slippery from the stream of sweat that its just as well that I don't heel strike otherwise I'd probably fall off the thing.

By the way, I managed to sort out my Garmin which has been giving me dodgy heart rate readings over the last few weeks and especially in the Lisbon Half Ironman. It turned out to be the obvious: the battery needed changing. That's three euros well spent that I could have thought about spending before!

These days I spend more time than most on the hard shoulder of the motorway, usually pedaling but sometimes fixing punctures. It was only when my car broke down with the kids inside that I realized the difference four wheels makes over two: absolutely no-one stops. Unfortunately, the kids had run my iPhone out of batteries playing so many games so I just needed someone to let me use their phone. What is even more disturbing is that I ran to the nearest homely house (a big out of town garden store) and explained to a middle aged couple I found in the car park my predicament, emphasizing the fact that my kids were on their own by the side of the motorway. Now, I'd understand (but not necessarily believe) a "I haven't got a phone" or even simply a "No, sorry" but this guy actually sort of waved me aside, walking away without looking at me, as if I were a fly trying to settle on his food or a mosquito trying to suck his blood. Now I understand how it must feel to have to beg for money. You can imagine what I said to him - I was so angry and upset it all came out in English and he probably didn't understand a word of it but he will have got the message. I hope he drove past my car on his way home and saw the kids playing by the side of the road with debris from past car crashes and got an earful from his wife for being such a... Still, to be fair, he was probably scared I was going to rob his phone or rape his wife or both, such is the level of fear and mistrust these days; and it doesn't help that I sound like a foreigner (well, I am one). Instead, that would just make him an ignorant twat and means it's all the more likely that he will get his phone stolen one day. Had I been on the bike someone would definitely have stopped - in fact, I even thought about accosting a cyclist, knowing that they would be much more likely to help, but then I also know how much more effort it is to stop and start on a bike compared to a couple of movements of the feet and a slight rotation of the steering wheel required to bring a car to a halt. I finally managed to convince the people in the shop to let me use the phone and, by the time I had run back to the car, the pick up truck was only a couple of minutes behind. (As it happens, I saw a friend in the shop but I was already on the phone - he looked a bit concerned to see me sweating away in a bright yellow fluorescent jacket.) At least now I have a good reason to give to kids so that they don't play so many games on my phone. In the end, the kids were happy that they got off doing their homework.

That peak at the end is the Ironman itself - as you can see, roughly the same load as the total peak weekly training

Anyway, this week starts off with a lactate test - more on this later - and builds up into the last of the heavy training before the event. Not the best timing, what with my wife away, but where there's a will there's always a way...

What next?

You'd be right in thinking: Hang on, did I miss something? He hasn't actually done the Ironman yet so how can he be talking about what comes next?

Well, I am all too aware of the anticlimax and, after having spent a year thinking about almost nothing else, it is going to be a big one. So I need to have something to fix my mind on before I cross that line. My goals have a tendency to determine me, rather than the other way round so I'd better chose something less ambitious than the Ironman before some other crazy idea gets in my head.

I'd like to do a winter Marathon again this year - I'm thinking of doing the one on the 6th December in Málaga, close to where my parents live. It'd be nice to be able to have them cheering me on, as they used to all those years ago in my rowing days. I'd like to capitalize on all this aerobic training I've been doing and see if I can break that magical 3 hour barrier.

I'm also thinking of trying Stand-Up Paddling (SUP). When we were in Asturias recently, I saw someone doing it. It looks a bit like a modern version of punting (I was born in Cambridge and studied in Oxford, so I've done more than the average amount of punting in my life). It grew up out of Hawaii, apparently, so that explains why so many Ironman triathletes seem to be taking it up (Eneko Llanos, Craig Alexander, ...). It also looks like a damn good workout for your core muscles. I don't really believe in fate, but when several things all seem to be pointing in the same direction, I start to pay attention. So when I discovered that the Asturian center for SUP surfing is based on the beach nearest where we stay in a hut that I have run past numerous times, I thought that it's time for me to try it out. Next time we go to Asturias, I'll sign up for a course.

Ironman is the new Marathon

I tried to find some statistics on the 'net of how many Ironman Finishers there have been per year and to compare this against the trend of Marathon Finishers. It's a totally subjective and unscientific thing to say, of course, but it is my impression that more and more people are turning to the Ironman as the "ultimate challenge". There are always harder things you can do: there is even a 20 times Ironman distance event where you do all the swimming in one go (in a swimming pool - imagine having to do 3,040 lengths!), all the cycling and then all the running - you have a certain number of days to complete the whole thing. But the Ironman has captured the public imagination - especially in America - in much the same way as the Marathon has.

The reason is History. Why is it that the most coveted running distance is the seemingly arbitrary 42,195 meters? There are many articles on the internet that explain how we ended up with that distance but my point is, were it not for Pheidippides and all the other quirks of history that lead us to 42,195 (or 26 miles and 385 yards), the Marathon would not have the same prestige or nostalgia. Imagine if in the 70s, someone had decided to round the distance to 40km? It wouldn't be the same. Nowadays, most people know what it means to run a Marathon, have heard about the "wall" and may even know that breaking 3 hours is a very good result.

Much the same happens with the Ironman. The Ironman came into being as the result of a debate Naval Officer John Collins had with some colleagues over "Who was the fittest - the best swimmer, the best cyclist or the best runner?". To settle the question, they decided to take the three toughest tests the island had to offer and came up with a grueling Triathlon: 3.8km swimming, 180km on the bike, followed by the Marathon. Thus the Hawaii Ironman (now Ironman World Championship) was born in 1978. The name came from John Collins, who proclaimed that the first person to cross the line would be called the Iron man. On the last page of the race rules was the slogan "Swim 2.4 miles! Bike 112 miles! Run 26.2 miles! Brag for the rest of your life" which is now a registered trademark! By the way, the 17 hours cut off time is the time that John Collins himself took to complete the even in 1978.

So the Ironman meets the requirements of having history but it was probably the epic battles between Dave Scott and Mark Allen that really raised it's popularity, again, especially in America.

In 1989, Mark Allen finally reversed Dave Scott's 6 Ironman World Championship wins, by swimming, cycling and running neck and neck with him until, finally, the one with more gas left in the tank won. Mark Allen went on to win the event a further 5 times, equaling Dave Scott's record.

Funnily enough, arguably the other person to have had the biggest impact on raising the Ironman's profile was Mark Allen's wife, Julie Moss. In 1982, she was within a couple of miles of crossing the finish line as the first woman when she collapsed, probably from dehydration. She ended up crawling (literally) to the finish line and was pipped by Kathleen McCartney at the post. Millions of people saw her epic struggle on television.

Currently there are 25 official Ironman events around the world and 11 of these in America. Lately, though, the Ironman craze has been growing in Europe and the latest event to be added to the calendar is in Wales. There are also many so-called "Iron Distance Triathlons" which are simply not part of the WTC (World Triathlon Corporation) franchise. They very sensibly keep a very tight control over the Ironman brand and the quality of the events they run.

Vivobarefoot Ultra shoes

I think I have found my next pair of running shoes. The only problem is that they haven't come out yet - but they are due to be released this month.

Apparently they are noticeably lighter than the Evos and the Neos (which I have and like very much). The first obvious thing to notice about them is that they have holes in, rather like Crocs. The idea is that you wear them with an optional mesh sock which comes supplied. They look just the ticket for Triathlon. Any water (or sweat, for that matter) should drain out and the holes should keep your feet cool. From a review I've read, the soles are a bit more bouncy and less stiff than the soles of the Neos and could be less durable and absorb more of the impact (which, if you've been reading my blog, you will know is a bad thing). Still, they could potentially be the best shoes for competition; for training I like to run in tougher shoes with a crisper, more snappy sole.

As soon as I can get my hands on a pair, I'll let you know how they are.