I really, really wish I’d gotten more focused on race-day nutrition earlier in my long-course career.  It’s been a long road of trial and error for me, as it is for most people, and I’m still working at it.  What most people don’t realize is that nutrition is by far the biggest factor to your race day success.  I’m a slow learner and didn’t really understand this fully until about my 4th Ironman.  Hopefully I can save you some of that trouble. Ironman racing is a different ballgame than other distances because of two things.  First,...

Executive Summary: Welcome to the suffer. Pre Race I was really excited to get back to Penticton this year.  We carpooled up with Owen and Polita which not only saved a bunch of gas but made the trip a lot more fun.  The weather was sketchy the first two days as some storms blew through, but got nicer as the weekend approached.  My last few workouts were good and, just like last year, I was amazed at how great the swimming is in Lake Okanogan.  The water is warm and very clear, and the way the beach is set...

I really need to find a good resource to explain why recovery from an Ironman is so dramatic and takes as long as it does.  I'm still struggling to wrap my head around how it can be that different from long training days where you're doing 2/3 of the volume (with much less running, of course). Here's what I'm talking about. It's been over three weeks from the event.  Since then: The first 7 days after the race were pretty much completely off from training.  Towards the end of this week a wave of delayed fatigue tends to hit...

"Ladies and gentlemen, you are about to witness one of the greatest spectacles in all of sport!" These are the muddled words I hear over the loudspeaker while standing on the beach with 2100 other athletes minutes before the start of Ironman Coeur d'Alene (IMCDA) 2008.  And I kind of seize on that word "spectacle", because spectacles are great for the person watching.  They're not always so great for the people in said spectacle.  Oh well, let's get on with this thing. Just like at Ironman Canada last year, there was no real warning for the athletes.  At some point the...

What a difference a week makes.  When the long-range forecasts started reaching this weekend, things looked bad.  Cloudy and showers.  I wasn't so concerned with the weather on race day.  I train in crappy weather most of the time anyway, but I did want it to be nice for hanging out and relaxing during race week.  Given this area hasn't had more than two consecutive days of nice weather since early May, I didn't have my hopes up.  Fortunately, the forecasts were wrong.  Today it's sunny and mid-70s.  Shazam. So here's how Ironman week usually goes.  You show...

Confession.  I consider quitting Ironman at least two or three times a week, sometimes more.  Almost all of that consideration occurs between 5:45 and 6:00 in the morning.  I've embraced the fact that I have very little capacity for positive self-talk in those first 10 minutes or so of the morning.  We all have our personal prioritization around basic needs: sleeping, eating, resting, getting our groove on, etc.  And if there's one thing for certain, it's that as I get older, sleep gets higher and higher on that list. Early in the morning, particularly with my habit of staying...

  There's a quote that I just love.  I think I've used it here before, it's from Gordo's blog and worth calling out again: ...we all overestimate what we can achieve in the short-term and underestimate what we can achieve in the long-term. As I think back on many aspects of my life - education, work, relationships, athletics - this resonates deeply.  And it's a lesson that's easy to forget in day-to-day activities with the natural desire for things to happen quickly. I suspect all of us can think back of so many examples of this.  Given effective habits and a good dose of discipline,...

When someone finds out that I'm one of those crazy Ironman people, they often react by listing off all the reasons why such an endeavor would be "impossible" for them.   I think for most people, it's a mixture of being faced with something that seems completely out of the bounds of normal, and a way to try to be complimentary.  It certainly doesn't bother me, but it's an interesting thing how frequent the reaction is. Of course, the main assertion is "I could never do the swim", and I was definitely someone who originally had the same anxiety.  But people...

One of the things that my coach wanted me to get done this season was some metabolic testing to determine exactly where I was at, in terms of metabolic efficiency.  Endurance sports performance is very much about one's ability to use fat -- versus carbohydrates -- as an energy source.  There is some debate about how best to train this, but the idea is basically that the more efficiently your body can use fat as a fuel, the faster you'll go for longer.  Note this has only a very little to do with diet and weight management, it's about how...

Wow, 2008 already.  New Year turned out pretty well, we did a short ski trip up to Sun Peaks with some friends.  We had a great time.  Funny, it was weird driving past the signs for the turn off to Penticton; I've got such great memories from IMC and am looking forward to getting back there next year.  It was easy to imagine we could turn off and it would be sunny, calm, and green there just like it was in August. My coach Scott sent out an email to all of his 2008 athletes setting some context and asking...