My 2011 Season

 It's taken me a while to put together some thoughts on my triathlon season from last year, and well, to reflect a little and come to terms with everything I accomplished. It goes without saying that 2011 was an outstanding success for me. I acheived PRs in every distance of every race I competed in (except swim meets--those best times are from another life). I dropped 24 minutes off my best Olympic distance race, 57 minutes off my best Half Ironman, and 3 hours (well, technically 3:01) off my best Ironman time. I could not be happier with the way things went, and yet, I have been left a little bit baffled on what to do with all of this.

When I started racing long distance triathlon, I had a vision of breaking 13 hours in an Ironman as an amazing accomplishment to one day achieve. Though I never put this down as a formal goal of mine in the first couple years of racing, it was the elusive target that seemed to be reserved for higher end, more talented athletes. Doing my first 2 Ironmans, I had more realistic goals in place--for the first one--I simply wanted to finish under the cutoff times. And for the second, I was returning from 3 rounds of surgery and wanted to knock some time off my last effort, but couldn't really come up with a concrete amount. My times of 16:05 and 15:45 achieved my goals for those races.

It became apparent as I was training and racing this past year that I would be able to have a significant drop at Ironman Arizona--my goal time for the race waffled between 13 hours, 12:30, and at one point, if all the planets lined up correctly, I might have been able to squeeze out a 12 hour effort. All of these times seemed surreal to me, because of how much faster they were than anything I'd done in the past. In the back of my mind, there was one thing I knew--taking an hour off your best time is a great accomplishment, taking 2 hours off of it is amazing, and what I did--well, by taking 3 hours off my best time, I achieved what I had previously set as my lifetime goal for racing Ironman. My time of 12:44 leaves me undoubtedly happy with the outcome, but in a bit of limbo as far as what to do next.

So, what do you do when you acheive your lifetime goal? I think you make the decision of whether you're finished, or if it's time to set a new lifetime goal--and I'm not finished. So, I need to decide what to aim for next. People who don't really know the sport of triathlon ask me if I want to go to Kona, and my response is usually something like "Sure--and I'd like to win the lottery and an Olympic gold medal while I'm at it." There's a difference between fantasy-world dreams and concrete goals, and qualifying for Kona is an elusive target that's reserved for higher end, more talented athletes than myself. So what do I want to do? I want to finish an Ironman before the sun goes down. I want to go a sub 5 hour Half Ironman. And I want to better my running capabilities to break 4 hours in a marathon. These may or may not be achievable in 2012--we'll have to see how the training and racing goes this year.

Should parking time limits drive our workout choices?

I sometimes find myself doing things that are a little difficult because of the way society has set things up.  Yesterday, I had a treadmill run and weights to do for workouts, and decided to just do those one right after the other at the gym.   Reasonable, right? 

Well, that's actually where it gets a little difficult--my treadmill run was an hour long, and then weights would take anywhere between 40 minutes and an hour, for a rough estimate of 2 hours of time working out.  Every gym I'm able to go to has a time limit of 20-30 minutes on a treadmill, but I've gotten used to figuring out how to avoid that.   Usually, just going at an off-peak time takes care of it--otherwise, moving from one treadmill to the next throws people off.   I happen to know from experience that if you want to run 16 miles on a treadmill, the staff will start to give you the stink-eye at about the hour and thirty mark regardless of what you've done to avoid their scrutiny.  I also happen to know that if you want to run 16 miles on a treadmill, you should seriously consider having your head examined.

The next part is that many gyms in the LA area have a parking situation that requires you to be in and out of the parking garage within 2 hours.  This left me with zero time for stretching before the run and zero time for showering after doing weights.   I'm not a fan of injuring myself during a run, and my coworkers are not fans of me showing up to work after 2 hours of sweating without taking a shower....so, between the run and the weights, I ran out to my car, drove out of the parking structure and then drove back in and parked in exactly the same spot I was at before.

This all makes me wonder--if I didn't have a coach telling me what workouts to do, would I have gone to the trouble I did?  Probably not.   I think I would have allowed the 2 hour limit on parking to drive my workout decisions.   So, I'm just glad my coach is in charge of that, and not a city bureaucrat who decided that 2 hours was sufficient for everyone.