This is a day I said would never happen. After Ironman Lake Placid in 2011 I had decided to call it a day and finally retire from the adrenaline fuelled sport of long distance tri-athlon. The sport had taken up six years of my life and with 3 major races in different parts of the world I felt it was time for something else.
The problem is that I can't find something else. There are many things that I love to do and challenge me in different ways but 18 months on from Lake Placid I realised how much I miss the training and excitement that Ironman brings to my life. Since I packed in I've found it very hard to motivate myself to train properly. Maybe arrogantly I felt I could conquer less challenging events with less or no training. This is very wrong as every event needs to be trained for properly and methodically but I couldn't raise myself to train for the potential races that could be entered and in the end didn't enter many and certainly didn't plan or do any training for the few I entered.
The fourth discipline of triathlon is nutrition. Let me say at the outset of this blog I am not known for disciplined eating and I enjoy a glass of wine or two. So whilst training this is fine, not ideal but my weight can be managed by the hours of training but when I'm not training you can only imagine the impact! I'm embarrassed to confess that I have put on a stone since Lake Placid and I was no lightweight then! In the States I think they have a cart horse racing category for us larger boned chaps, I would have fallen into this category in Lake Placid so am felling very Mr Blobby now!
This time, if I am going to do it, I'm going to do it right. I injured my knee playing football in the middle of last year and that stopped me running for 6 months. I now able to run again, albeit slowly and am enjoying the freedom of getting out again. So this is it, join me on the journey and hopefully we'll finish sub 14 hours in Bangor on 18 August!
