There is a touted 'wisdom' that states that in order to become expert at something one must dedicate 10,000 hours of practice to it. Whether or not that is true, it has me thinking how many hours I will need to dedicate to my 'new' disciplines of cycling and swimming in order to attain a certain level of mediocrity that will enable me to achieve my Ironman dream for this year.
My swimming is my perceived Achilles heel. Back in May 2017, when this Iron-plan was hatched, my freestyle stroke was unbalanced, inefficient and pretty darned ugly. Between then and now I have swum over 70 miles - probably dedicating somewhere around 60 hours to the cause. January 2018 alone saw me putting in over 6 hours and 10 miles of work, and that figure looks set to be higher for each month between now and Ironman Wales in September. Let us say, notionally, that my total time dedicated to the swim is 200 hours... will that be enough for me to have a 'good' swim in Tenby's waves? By good, I do, of course, mean good-for-me, not as in placing somewhere high in the field... my swim times, dear reader, are embarrassing! Whilst many of my contemporaries can swim at a pace somewhere around 1:30 to 1:40 per 100m, my endurance pace is down at about 2:23 per 100m. But that pace should, just about, be good enough to get me out of the water and into T1 well ahead of the 2hrs 20min cut-off time imposed by Ironman Wales. I would hope to improve my pace slightly between now and September, but the main focus will be on staying efficient whilst building endurance so that I am out of the water not only in time, but in good shape for the bike ride and run. Turning to the bike ride, this is where I know I need to put in the most hours of preparation. The bike section of Ironman is where the most time is spent, and therefore the biggest gains can be made. My hill climbing skills are going to need a lot of honing and my endurance improving. The 16 hours I put in during January were nowhere near enough, and this is to be my focus for February. I have an incentive to ensure I stay on course for the month, as the Mad March Hare looms for the start of March. The Hare is a 72 mile ride with one particularly challenging climb so I have set myself the challenge to ride the bike every day throughout the month of February to get the legs conditioned. Some days will only be 15 to 20 mins rides, but some will be 3 to 4 hours or more in the saddle to build that endurance, and some will be over the sort of hills which I would normally avoid like the plague, to ensure that I feel more confident . Will an additional 2500 miles between now and September be enough to get me to mediocre on the bike, do we think? Hmmm.... this brings me to the run. I have few fears regarding the run in view of my ultra-running background. I know it won't be easy coming off the long bike ride but I have confidence that my legs (and head) can still do it. What about hours of training etc? Well, I am pretty sure that over my decades of training, my legs have done considerably more than 10,000 hours of run-training. Has that made me an expert runner? I think not!!! I can certainly run, but I am not sure that I would say that I run well. Bio-mechanically, I have a number of issues that my training has failed to completely iron out and I have pretty much lost the ability to run as fast as I used to 10 years ago. Perhaps I 'peaked' at around the 10,000 hours point and have declined since then? That is possibly closer to the truth... Whatever the outcome, dear reader, you have my assurance that I am going to give this my very best shot, and bore you to death with it for the next 9 months... My last planned ultra-distance run pre-Ironman was completed last Saturday so it is now ALL about the Ironman. The end of February will see me take part in my first aquathlon (swim/run) - how exciting!!! And then it is busy, busy, busy from there! Please feel free to follow my anticipated metamorphosis from Mad-Ultra-Mummy, to Iron-Mummy. All shouts of encouragement welcomed!!!
1 Comment
|
All content of this site copyright of Luan Wall unless otherwise credited.
..........................................
Archives
November 2018
Categories |