Battle Plan

I registered for Ironman Louisville last week. The race is 8/30/09. It's an ironman distance triathlon consisting of a 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike, and a 26.2 mile run, 140.6 total miles. Mentally, I'm ready to do the race tomorrow but physically I couldn't even do the swim right now so thankfully I have over 9 months to train.

Years ago people told me I couldn't finish a 5K, did that. Then it was a 10K, did that. Then I had people laugh at me when I said I was going to do a half marathon, did that 6 times. In my mind it was all baby steps to the ironman race. First time I saw it on tv I knew I wanted to try it someday, it happens next August.

One day at work I mentioned to a friend that we should start doing triathlons instead of just running all the time. That was 5 years ago. Since then I've done 3 sprint distance, 7 olympic distance, and a half ironman. They all laughed at me doing the half ironman too, but I did it.

Do I do all of this to showoff to people that I can do it? No. I do the triathlons because I enjoy them, I compete against myself to finish, and it helps to keep me in decent health. Plus there's the part that's hard to explain. Whenever I complete a race, especially the part right before I'm done when I've almost reached the finish line, I feel really good about myself. It's a pretty simple concept but hard for a lot of people to understand.

Ironman Louisville will give me a chance to test myself mentally and physically more than I ever have before in a single day. The t-shirts, medal, pictures, people yelling my name, etc., will be really cool but all I want is that last 100 yards to remember for the rest of my life. I will cross the line with a big smile on my face.

I'm currently ~25 pounds overweight and a very poor swimmer. So, my "battle plan" for the next 3 months is to lose weight and swim at least 3 times a week...