Ironman Austria is almost here!

Ironman Austria is almost here!
So Ironman Austria is in a bit over a week. I can't wait!! My race number is 810 which sounds like a speedy number to me! You can track the race at http://www.ironmanlive.com/ If everything goes to plan I will come in just under 10:30. That's a 1.05 swim, 5 min transition 1, 5.45 bike, 3 min T2 and a 3.30 marathon. I think I am either going to get one or the other on the bike and run. If I push for the 5.45, it could slow me down on the run but I don't want to hit the run thinking I could have gone harder on the bike. We will see what happens on the day. The great thing is that the run is completely flat. Whilst I love running the hills and have a real strength doing that, a flat run will enable me to push my run speed up to go for a sub 3.30. I ran a 3.21 on a flat course at the Valencia marathon on very little training (i.e. training on a treadmill in India!) and I am in much better shape now, plus I will be high as a kite on Powerbar caffeinated energy gels!

Austria isn't my main race so anything with 10 hours XX mins will make me happy as that will be a new personal best, beating my 11.04 at Ironman UK last August.

Things with Terry are great. He has been coaching me for 6 weeks now and I am really happy with the sessions and how I am performing. He is working me hard but that fine, I have big targets this year and next so need to put in the hard yards. It is one of the things I enjoy about Ironman is that there is no way you can fake it, you can't show up on the start line without having done the training without serious consequences. I started my visualisation exercises this week where I step through each part of my race thinking about how I am going to feel, what I am going to be focusing on, what I am going to be eating and the negative thought blockers, the things I think about when I start to dip mentally. Those things for me are always thinking about being told I will never run again and how that made me feel, lying in hospital not knowing what waswrong with me, not being able to climb a flight of stairs unassisted. It's those things that make me push harder knowing that I got through those much bigger challenges than this 1 race and that this is a piece of cake in comparison. It's all relative. Of course there is also the sooner you finish the sooner you can have a beer thought too :)

The next week for me is tapering and getting ready to head to Austria, as you can imagine with an Ironman you need so much stuff! Antoinette is flying out with me and Kat and Geoff are meeting us there as they are on the European Tour pre heading back to Australia. It is always such a great thought knowing you have support out there.

The Cast Iron Club was something that I decided to join up to back in March. It was $6 to join with the idea being that you complete the equivalent of 30 Ironman distances in training over the year. The target is 114km's of swimming, 5400km cycling and 1266km's of running.

I track the miles I do each week so it wasn't going to be difficult to log this in every month. It is actually staggering how much time I spend training when the numbers are right there in front of you. Somehow I manage to fit in a full time job, a boyfriend, friends, weekends away, holidays as well as finding time to eat and sleep.

This year, up to today I have spent a total of 223 hours training. That's 55 hours of swimming, 80 hours of riding, 70 hours of running and 17 hours of weights. That's covering 3180km's across the 3 sports, broken down to 101km's swimming, 2209km's of cycling and 870km's of running. Also this year I have spent approximately 8 weeks travelling where I have not had access to my bike, sometimes no swimming pool and occasionally not able to run so training hasn't been at it's optimum which means the weeks I have been in London that the volume of training is much higher than average. I also have Friday's off from training so that is split across 6 days a week.

I'm well ahead of target for the swim and run but need to get those legs pedalling to bring my bike total up. That won't be too hard post Austria where I am not really going away until Ironman Arizona in November except to Nice with The Flying Dutchman where the whole point of us going is to do some quality cycling training. I start going out there once a month starting next month. Great for the legs and the tan!

I have started calling The Flying Dutchman BBE (Best Boyfriend Ever) because he was so sweet and bought me a really thoughtful gift which I LOVE! He got me a pre Ironman Austria gift of a new chain, cassette, tyres and also a pair of wheel bags. It was really thoughtful of him. He said he wanted to make sure my bike was in tip top condition to make sure I have a great race. Unfortunately he isn't going to be in Austria, he has an amazing 10 days cycling in the Pyrenees with 11 others. He has also been training really hard and has been spending a lot of time in Nice recently. We have badly co-ordinated schedules in that the weekends I am away, he is in London. It isn't going to be until August that we will be in the same place at the same time on the weekend and it is a weekend I am racing the London Triathlon. It will be the first time he will see me race and I really don't like Olympic distance. I hate the pain of it!! Pushing that hard for 2 hours 20 is not my idea of fun. The odd Olympic distance race is the only time I ask myself what the hell I am doing out there and am I really having fun :)

I was in Brussels a few weeks ago for Antoinette's birthday which was great fun. Unfortunately I missed a lot of stuff on Saturday (shopping!) as I had to do a run and a swim. It took me an hour to run to the pool and it was lovely to see some different parts of the city, it is really lovely. Brussels isn't exactly the ideal location when I am not drinking alcohol and watching what I eat. I had a blow out the Saturday night and had a gorgeous steak with this amazing cream based mushroom sauce, a small glass of wine and profiteroles in chocolate sauce. I got back off the Eurostar Sunday evening and threw myself around Regents park for an hour on my bike with The Flying Dutchman who certainly lived up to his name. He had already cycled 160km that day and came and did an interval session and was pushing me along! The man is a machine.

The weight loss has not being going well. I am sitting at 60kg and just cannot budge any more weight. My body is used to this level of training and I am eating less. I wanted to be down at 58kg for Austria but it isn't going to happen. I am much more toned but not 2kg of muscle, there is definitely some fat that could go! My body fat was 22% in April and I weighed 62kg. I must be down to around 20% body fat now I think. It is below average for a woman (average is 24-32%), but not for an elite athlete, some of those girls are down around 15% but the trade off is no boobs or curves :)

So, I will try and do another entry pre Austria! Bring it on!!
Cxx