And on to the next big plan. 2019 is effectively done for me – bar an upcoming half marathon and middle distance tri, both of which might have been pencilled in for max efforts but are now instead in the ‘jolly day out’ category.
With that in mind, there’s no time like the present for getting an early start on next year and making up for lost time. At the risk of repeating my previous ramblings, I trained for Ironman Hamburg at the end of July, injured my knee around a month before and then slid off my bike about an hour into the race itself, leaving me in need of an extended recovery period.
All in all, I spent around three months either not training, sticking to easy efforts or sitting on the sofa eating chocolate.
My first thoughts for 2020 were to right the wrongs from this year – book another Ironman, train with more focus and discipline, earn my MDot tattoo.
However, I started thinking about what I actually do all this for – enjoyment. What is it I actually enjoy about the training, the eating, the getting up early? I thought I’d enjoy training for Ironman because I love long hours on my bike. More specifically, I enjoy long rides, climbing hills or mountains and the satisfaction that comes with it. I enjoy hard running efforts – long tempo intervals or hills reps where you just find the resolve to last another minute or complete an extra rep.
Training for Hamburg was the opposite of those things – it was a fast, flat course, which would mean plenty of time in the aero position, cranking out a super-steady amount of power, followed by a careful management of energy on the run. While that’s fine and the achievement of making it through all the training hours and the race itself would have been immense, I found myself enjoying the workload less and less – making it feel more like something I needed to do than wanted to do.
It got to the point where any time I was riding my road bike up a hill, it felt like I was undoing the work I should be doing, building the wrong type of fitness. If I was on my road bike, I felt like I should have been on my TT rig, but the prospect of riding in the aero position for hours at a time was completely unappealing.
Throughout the year, it felt like everything needed to be in support of Ironman, so anything that wasn’t part of that picture was a waste of time – London Marathon, Outlaw Half – I was totally unmotivated for it all, which surely defeats the purpose.
So I started to think about the training I enjoy – perhaps a little less volume, but a bit more variety. A bit more freedom to add intensity and build that ‘comfortably hard’, endurance fitness, as opposed to an endless base.
Middle-distance, 70.3 triathlons are most likely to be where my preference lies. In 2018 I raced a 70.3 in the Cotswolds in August and then another near Rutland Water in September. I loved both races and was really happy with my performances. The training was tough, but varied and the races themselves were long but far from being the kind of events that trample over other aspects of life.
I started looking at possible races with a view of completing three in a year – ideally one in May/June, then another in August and a final run out in September. That was actually harder to accomplish than I expected and all the races I was considering were either held on the same day as each other or extremely close, meaning that I was likely to end up doing some that I either had limited interest in or that I’d already done.
One event that I was aware of and long held an ambition for was the Slateman in north Wales, held mainly in and around a former slate mine at the foot of Mount Snowdon, hence the name. I’ve cycled up the race’s main climb – Pen-y-Pass – before and loved it; the zig-zagging road leading through the valley, followed by a sweeping, open descent was epic and is highly recommended.
What I hadn’t realised was that Slateman, which has recently moved in the calendar to a date in June, is the first in a series of three races, with Snowman (as in Snowdonia) in August and Sandman (with a sea swim and beach run finish), in September.
Initially I considered Slateman as my first race of the year before going on to do a couple of other events elsewhere later in the year. And then I came across the Adventure Championship, which puts all three races into a series. My first thought was that it would be crazy, too difficult for me and that I should do something else.
But then I thought: why not? I threw it around in my head for a few days, discussed it with Sarah and bounced the idea past my coach – no-one said anything that put me off, so I eventually stumped up the cash and booked my place in all three races.
Yeah, all the events are tough – especially the cycling – but it’s September and the first race is in June, so I have plenty of time to re-build my fitness and develop the specific conditioning needed. Granted, my home of Milton Keynes is pretty flat, so finding hills that will provide the right stimulus won’t be easy, but it gives me an opportunity to feel good about doing the training I enjoy in the places I want to go.
The biggest unknown for me is the running; historically, I’ve done pretty well in the run section of middle distance races, clocking up times not a million miles away from my standard half marathon pace. All three races in the Adventure Series feature challenging, varied trail runs across mixed terrain and this is something I have zero experience of. This doesn’t daunt me, and, if anything is actually quite exciting as it means I get to try a new set of challenges and test myself in a completely different way.
In particular, the Snowman run is the most interesting: it’s a predominantly flat course until around the 15km mark, when competitors head up the mountain to an ultimate height of around 800m, before turning on their heels and heading back down again.
It’s a million miles away from multiple laps in a city centre, high-fiving spectators and hearing ‘you are an Ironman’, but that’s the point – it’ll be different. I didn’t enjoy training for a fast and flat Ironman so why not go in completely the opposite direction and do something at the other end of the spectrum.
I can’t guarantee I’ll love every second, but it’s definitely worth giving it a go and seeing what happens.