Ironman Update (March)

Over the last few weeks, I’ve had a number of interesting incidents with relation to my Ironman training. As with prior weeks, almost everything revolves around the all-consuming monster that is Ironman cycling training, which takes up about 70 of my training because it will be about 70% of what I do on the day – 112 miles is not going to be a short period of time by any means. Thankfully, there’s a pretty linear relationship between hours in the saddle and hours cut off your bike time - plus you can be semi-productive with a phone.

Given the importance of cycling in my training, I finally got my first pair of cycling shoes and pedals – an historical event on par with Napoleon’s victory at Austerlitz. I put together the pedals with all the urgency the role declared – I broke them instantly. Getting new ones, I practiced a few times on the turbo and was sure I had the whole ‘Clip-in, Clip-out’ deal sorted. I subsequently went just outside my house and put my foot in the clip for the first time on the bike without support. Three seconds later, I hit the ground with a severe gash between my fingers and a lot of gratitude that I was already wearing a helmet. I tried three more times to get the thing on, each time falling over with a thump on the tarmac. I walked back inside feeling like I’d gone a few rounds in a boxing ring rather than tried to balance a bike. With that great success having come about, I was (not) ready for the next stage: riding the darned thing.

One morning, I got the bike out and practiced the clip-on, clip-off routine one hundred times on each foot – no exaggeration, I counted. I proceeded to hold onto the car’s door handle as I positioned myself on the bike and launched off in what was at once embarrassingly amateurish but on the other hand a holy revelation, as I finally found balance with speed and hit the road on my bike shoes. It was also the first time I used my aero-bars. With two firsts for the price of one, I cycled up, down and around the estate to get used to everything. I must have looked so professional – mostly because they hadn’t seen me clobber myself by falling off the bike repeatedly. The greatest miracle was still to come, as I was able to stop and detach myself from the bike without nearly killing myself – or even falling over! Move over Miracle on Ice! We’ve got a new kid on the block!

Then came the next issue: given that I was now using aero-bars, I had to adjust the seat to make the bike work in the new position, otherwise I was going to be scrunched with my knees under stress the whole time. Believe me, if you’re going to cycle for anywhere from six to ten hours, that is not something you want. After finally working out how the darned seat worked (“What do you mean I can’t twist a knob and effortlessly change it?”) I got my dad’s toolkit and set to work, improvising with tools I’m 90% sure weren’t the right ones for the job, but I still got it done. It was honestly the first flexing of my nonexistent handyman skills since Lego. I could now move my seat up and down – truly, the doors were opening up for me.

But I wanted to make extra sure everything else was in the clear. For that reason, I travelled down to Decathlon, given that they’re apparently everywhere these days (I even saw one when I was in Israel). After having to battle to get my bike down two flights of stairs, I brought the thing to the guy who specialized in biking. Well, he didn’t specialize in road-biking, which is sort of important to my case, but I just wanted the principles. I got on the bike and got a judgement of my positioning. Great! Raise the seat up just a little bit more? No problem! No problem, that was, until he stopped and tested out the headset. The headset is the thing that connects the handles and bars to the front wheel. It turned out that the headset was badly bust up and needed replacing. To give you an idea of the worst case scenario, imagine going down a hill at thirty miles an hour, and having the entire front of the bike come off in your hands – yeah. I put it away with them for repair, where it still is at the time of writing. That said, better to repair now than have one heck of a race-day blooper.

With cycling being such a problem-child, any problems with my good little boys (swimming and running) seem easy by comparison. Given that two of the three sports will only take up one third of the actual day, however, you can see why I put them on the backburner. Swimming? Just swim the 2.4 miles in the pool every Sunday. Running? Just run for an hour and a half on Thursday and thirty minutes on Wednesdays after the bike. Simple.

I also had the fun of doing a charity bike event in work on the spin-bike. We had ten minutes to go as far as we could (the computer calculating how far we were going based on our cadence and resistance). I placed third in the company after nearly killing myself – I lost feeling in my arms because so much blood was going to my legs. I also developed a severe dry-cough and could barely function for the rest of the day. All the same, my team lead was there for the moral support – that was very nice. Lastly, the winner was my work-seat neighbor, cycling guru and friend. There are few people I’d feel better losing to than him – and heck, I wasn’t too far off.Iron