Ready for Ironman UK?

I have booked two Ironman distance races so close: Challenge Roth and Ironman UK. They are less than two months apart. Only stupidest thing I have done is running Two Oceans Marathon a month after I have completed my first Ironman - Ironman South Africa. And did I suffer: I was in pain immediately after the start and it just kept going and going.

Ironman UK is a killer race but I am not intimidated at all. My coach is much more worried than I am. He keeps trying to scare me all the time: this is a very hard race, you have to be careful, do not run fast in the start, take it easy on the bike… I hear him but I am actually so looking forward to this hilly race. I enjoy this kind of racing which is a complete challenge: 2200m elevation on the bike and 700m elevation on the run.

I love cycling hills and even more I love running hills.

I have to say that also I have been enjoying the change in my training. My cycling and running for Challenge Roth was mostly on the flat, out and back style, like a machine, like a metronome. Now for Ironman UK I get to climb a local mountain 10 times and each time I cycle down like crazy, so I would later run the hardest hills in the local park. It is fun training!

However, I had an lot of “bad luck” preparing for this race. During my most important two weeks Belgrade was the hottest city in Europe and also a new heat record was set - officially we had 43 or 44 C, however if you were out on the road it was closer to 50. And we had this heat wave happen so suddenly and it also left suddenly so I could not adjust at all. That whole week I was just trying to maintain my fitness instead of building it up. Even with little training I hardly survived several sessions.

Than immediately after that heat wave, during a two hour run, I got this horrible pain in my left knee. A tendon got inflamed. It is not a serious injury, it happens sometimes. It could be anything: from my bike setup, some steps I have made, change of temperature, food, whatever… I also gained one kilo after Challenge Roth and on top of that retained a lot of water due to climate changes so with this extra weight I must have overloaded my tendon on the downhill.

This was a good lesson both on running downhills which I will avoid from now on (some elite athletes organize a car to drive them down the hill so they can avoid downhills) and on controlling my weight in the season (very unprofessional of me!).

So one week was gone due to a heat wave and second week was gone due to an “injury”. Instead of 30 hours of training I have been doing like 10 hours a week. I started getting soft and heavy immediately.

Now I had one good week with some nice training. Did a 6 hour cycle and the next day I did a 2 hour run with average of 4:30min/km. My coach also made me cycle a lot of these 6 km circles with 12 degrees hill. Now I am able to do 4 hour rides with, for me, high wattage of 170 or more. Before this was my Ironman racing pace but now it is closer to my easier than Ironman pace. An obvious improvement.

Also I have been training with Powertap on my back wheel, all my tools and full water bottles. This adds like 2 kilos on my bike. I like to have my bike as heavy as possible when I train. Then, on race day, I feel like I am flying.

Overall I am ready to enjoy the race. I do not find this race as important as Challenge Roth. By doing a sub 10 hours I feel I have completed my goal for this season and my next race of such importance is Ironman Austria 2008 (I will also do Ironman South Africa 2008 - of course!). Ironman UK is tourism and experience. I hope I will be able to do sub 11 hours and I hope I will learn a lot and have some fun. The more races I do the better - the stronger I will be.

If anyone will be in Sherborne you can get in touch with me via email or phone +381 63 268906. It would be cool to meet someone (I am travelling alone).

This entry was posted on Friday, August 10th, 2007 at 12:20 pm and is filed under Ironman, Ironman UK, Nikola Tosic, heat, injury, training, triathlon, weight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.