Start first corporate job, run a few marathons including ‘that one’ in Boston, and oh well, top it off with an Ironman (IM), a full one, of course!
When, I was considering this endeavor, all of my well wishers were…well…worried! They never clearly explained why, exactly, they were worried, but I suppose it was a mixture of emotions. My ‘physical health’ was definitely not one of them!
However, a lot of people have done this by now. Coach Matt Dixon has a very good book on this. I assure you, it is not that difficult. Really!
A lot of training ideas and suggestions/plans for training for Ironman have been written by many accomplished coaches and athletes. Still, I feel, it is important for me to share my two cents – every single person’s situation is different, therefore the more variety we see the more ideas we get. This is critical to figure out what is good for me.
Unlike other sources, I am not going to talk about general training plans, or let you know the obvious (you have to wake up early, not waste time etc – you know those already). I would rather talk about a few easy time saving techniques that I adopted, and some training tricks that I applied.
A few things about myself that would, hopefully, make anybody feel better about themselves: I learned how to float and swim just a few years ago, past my graduate school. I bought my first real bike in August, 2018. I never did a triathlon before 2019 – I did my first triathlon, just to see what a triathlon is, after I signed up for an Ironman. I did not have a support crew to take care of all the things in life, you know things, other than swimming/biking/running/strength training. I did not give up all social ties and live like a monk. I am not a millionaire that I can buy whatever I need to channelize all my effort towards just one goal. I joined my first corporate research job almost at the same time when I started training for Ironman races. I do not know of any of my family members doing any sports ever – in other words, I am not carrying some magic genes. And, I could cross the finish line of my first Ironman, in August 2019, well before sunset.
And, I assure you it is not that much of a difficult endeavor. I mean, Ironman race is difficult! But, chasing the dream to be an Ironman is not.
Also, I can assure you, by the time you will cross that Finish Line at your first Ironman, you will be a very different person – perhaps, in a good way.
1. Take care of the two most essential factors – food and sleep.
Sleep –
I would talk about the sleep first, as it requires less effort. Or rather, if I am putting too much effort to sleep, I might not be able to sleep well. I would not say that I mastered this art of sleeping as much as I wish. However, a few things work for me:
(a) Going to bed at the same time (± 20 min). This includes weekends.
(b) Massaging and stretching before going to bed. As the training load increases, muscles start getting increasingly tired. Therefore relaxing them as much as possible, without taking ibuprofen, becomes important. A foam roller, a muscle roller stick, a fascia blaster, some lacrosse balls or tennis balls do great job for massaging problem areas. Therabands/resistant bands help in some light stretching (this is not the time to do strength trainings though!).
(c) Taking ibuprofen (+ antacid) at the end of heavy workouts, especially long workouts during the weekends. This helps to shut down the inflammation.
(d) Avoiding alcohol during dinner (of course, you have stopped wine tasting during lunch and having mimosas during breakfast if you have been training for endurance sports. If you have not, give it up, and you will win at Kona, Hawaii!!). Alcohol has been reported to affect the sleep quality almost like coffee. Hence, avoiding alcohol truly helps. However, I really love good craft beers and good red wine. Therefore, I must confess that I often end up violating this principle, but I do pay attention to the quantity.
(e) Spending 10 min for meditation, introspection and looking back at the day just before going to bed. This helps me not only to calm my mind, but also to see what I did wrong and plan on corrective measures, in daily activities, training, and work.
(f) Convincing friends and family that I truly have to leave the party at 8:30 PM, 9 the latest. The same applies to them if they are at our place (The other option is living like a monk, which I did not). This is very difficult. I failed almost always. Several reasons: (i) I did not know how to broach this topic without making them feel bad. If I knew how to communicate, I would have done much better – if you have ideas, please share those with me. (ii) For my friends/family, who are very much my well wishers and I love them dearly, it is not simple to conceive the concept of a crazy training schedule. It is difficult for a sane person (like my friends and family) to relate to some, or any insane activities, like my training! For example, my Sunday is not a “sleep-in followed by an easy stroll at the Farmers’ market”-day, I will have to bike 60-80 miles followed by a 10-12 miles run! This is such a foreign experience – it is impossible for a person, who has not witnessed it, to realize the scenario. I remember, how I felt when I, at that point still in India, heard from a friend that in New Haven, the temperature was negative 15 C. New Haven is the city of Yale, where I was going to start my graduate school the following year. I felt that it was very cold! But, I had never seen anything below negative 2 C. So, I could not relate to what a negative 15 C was, beyond just being a low number! We struggle to relate to experiences that are way too outlandish to us. Here too, I wish I learned to articulate clearly, as I know that my friends and family do love to understand and relate. If you have been successful, please share tips with me.
Next is food –
this one, I nailed! If you are one of those people who can eat the same thing everyday – in other words, eat to live – then, lucky you, skip this part and move on! I really, really love food. If I need to eat the same dish on two consecutive days – I feel depressed! Honestly, sometimes, I feel that the only reason I am doing Ironman is that I can, then, eat a lot more than I could otherwise! I eat everything – my philosophy is if five people have eaten it and stayed alive, I will give it a try, as long as it is healthy – and, I am very serious about the health factor.
Taste, variety, nutrition, fast preparation – these four factors have been pillars of my gastronomic life. Thankfully, they are necessities for a time-crunched Ironman athlete. This is how I did it:
Strictly one grocery trip per week or per two weeks.
I started this long time ago, when I was a graduate student and did not have a car. Later, it became one of the greatest tricks for time (and money) saving. We do the entire grocery on Friday evenings, or sometimes on Thursday evenings.
Earlier we needed to plan exactly what dishes we were going to cook and what we needed to buy for that. By now, we have, more or less, standardized this part – we have a fair idea about what veggies we would need to buy, whether we need to buy fish/meat/poultry/eggs (as a standard rule, we try to maintain a steady stock of these). We always buy a lot of fruits. Also, since I started training for IM, we pay importance in buying some extra protein sources – fish/meat/poultry/eggs, plus, tofu, protein rich yogurt, smoked salmon, cans of egg white, kefir etc.
We go to a number of different grocery stores during this trip – the obvious ones (i.e. popular super markets like Trader Joe’s, Costco etc, in the US), and some local gems. In the Bay area (area around San Francisco, in the US), where we live, there are some local grocery stores that are cheaper than, even, Costco, for locally grown and seasonal veggies/fruits – this, also, helps us with buying more seasonal items that are organic and locally grown. If one can afford Farmers’ market – that would be even better. Our experience with Farmers’ markets, in the Bay area, is that they really rob you off, plus they happen at very inconvenient times (I cannot imagine doing grocery on a Saturday, just before or after my 6-7 hours’ training!).
Doing the entire week’s (or two weeks’) grocery shopping on one day takes about 3 hours or so of the Friday evening. We return home with 7-8 bags, 100% full, with grocery. However, a trip to a grocery store, just to buy milk takes an hour, and sometimes more (like the Seinfeld joke)! Plus, multiple trips to grocery stores lead to unplanned purchases – more expenditure, and quite often, a lot of food wasted. More over, doing the entire grocery on Thursday/Friday means – during the weekend we have plenty of options to start cooking whatever we want – that takes us to the next point.
Cook multiple dishes during the weekend.
Variety of food is not only important for spicing up our lives, but also it is the key to have all different kinds of nutrients. Unless one starts thinking about every single specific nutrient our body would need for the grueling IM training – and there are, perhaps, hundreds of them – this is the easiest approach. All in all, variety of food saves us from over thinking and also to enjoy our life.
So, we would cook three to four different dishes with combinations of different colors of veggies, meat, poultry and carbs.
As carbs, we prefer brown rice, bulgur, potatoes, yams/sweet potatoes or pasta (and quinoa, but I digest quinoa so fast that sometimes I feel hungry by the time I finish my dinner :-)). Again, it is important, for high level exercise, to eat as many different types of grains as possible (I would love to refer to the beautiful historical discussion about variety of grains and human nourishment in Yuval Harari’s book, Sapiens).
Easy way of cooking three/four dishes in bulk scale is doing them in parallel. We use a slow cooker to get the chicken/lamb going. In the mean time, we use a pressure cooker to make a mixed lentil dish with veggies. We have a few stove top pressure cookers, which are way better than those large, expensive electric ones. The stove top pressure cookers can be used both as cooking pan/wok and then as a pressure cooker – so, they are ideal for one pot cooking. We can sauté veggies with spices or herbs in the pressure cooker, then cook the lentil a little bit, and then add water/broth or whatever we want (like coconut milk, if I am looking into a high calorie diet), and then pressure cook. When the pressure cooker is going, it is not that difficult to make an elaborate dish on the side; use of oven can make the third dish also very easy to cook, but still fancy! We do make a pasta dish, heavy with veggies, in large scale over the weekend. Other kind of carbohydrates are so easy to cook, that we generally just make them, whenever we need to – however, when we make it, we make enough for, at least, 4-5 meals for two people.
Thankfully, in California, we are blessed with very good fresh veggies and fruits. This helps us to consume a large quantity of veggies (and, of course, fruits) raw, like a salad.
Desserts.
As I feel very sad if I do not get a dessert at the end of my dinner, we try to make a dessert too. There are plenty of recipe books by athletes and on internet that gives recipes for desserts that are high in protein, and are not sugar bombs. If we cannot make a dessert, high protein yogurt with almond butter, chia seeds, some fruit preserves, dark cacao and/or honey (in various combinations) make quite good instant desserts that have everything that a body would need at the end of hard training days! Otherwise, dark chocolate (more than 70% cacao content) works. All in all, we always keep a steady supply of high protein yogurt, dark chocolates and the other ingredients I talked about. It is important to know that the high protein content of the desserts is an important consideration (I am not saying that I never eat an ice cream or those yummy cakes that have anything but protein, but that is not the norm). A high protein dessert, taken 30-40 min before going to bed, is an important step for good sleep and recovery.
Limit ‘eating out’ to strictly once a week.
This is for three different reasons – (a) Health: We need to eat healthy, hence eating out is never a good solution. It is next to impossible, at least, in the US, to find food, as healthy as home-made, from a restaurant. (b) Money: As an Ironman trainee, I cannot eat junk fast food. Whenever I am eating out, it has to be some real, proper food – this is not cheap. Hence, money-wise, I can save a lot (hundreds of dollars) that can be used towards useful training expenses – as we all know Ironman training and racing is a very costly process, with never ending prospect of spending more, to get more! (c) Time: Going out to a restaurant, or even getting ‘take out’, takes time. Of course, ‘take out’ takes less time. Still, according to my calculation, making the decision where to order the food from, then getting dressed to get the food and then finally sitting down, at home, for dinner takes about 45 minutes – and, we live in one of the most restaurant-dense neighborhoods in the Bay area. If I had to drive, or wait for the food to be delivered (which is almost impossible with good restaurants; they do not deliver food!) it would have been much longer. Compared to that, heating up our home-cooked dishes and throwing in a fresh salad or some fast cooked greens take 10-15 minutes – that saves me 30 minutes to sneak in a weight training session! Then, why do I eat out, at all? Because, I live and dream of food! Also, I do appreciate the art in a great dish at a great restaurant.
2. Decide when you are mentally 120% ready for which exercise.
I do not have time for some junk miles or some junk exercise. Every single time I do exercise, it is a part of a very focused training regime. Consequence: when I go for a run or bike, I would not be one of those people who are spending half of their time taking photos or on snack breaks. Or, I would not be one of those people who would go to the gym and spend half the time doing something on the phone (and occupy a weight machine for 30 min, using it as a chair! It is not a chair – get off!). It might sound like training should become a drudgery for me. Well, it would be if I am following a training plan without thinking.
First couple of months of the training, or I would say before beginning the serious part of the training, I tried to look into myself without bias. I utilized this time to do some trial and error in planning a training regime. For example, I needed to understand what days and times of the week, I can go for a hard interval run/tempo run. Initially, I was trying to do this on Monday/Wednesday evenings. That way, I could use the Wed-morning for swimming. Very soon, I realized: (a) because of the extremely cold and strong sea breeze in the evenings, in the Bay area, I cannot assess much from this sessions. Depending on where the wind was strong or whether I was getting too cold during a rest/recovery time (in intervals), my performance was too erratic. (b) Plus, on both of these days, at the end of the day’s work, I was mentally not that fresh to get into a solid concentration mode that is necessary for these sessions, especially when it was freezing and windy outside. Therefore, I had to move these sessions to mornings.
I am not doing Ironman to earn money, therefore doing every single recommended session is not a necessity. In fact, what I found from my Marathon training, when I went under 3 hours, is that it is much more useful to do whatever I can do with 120% perfection. That Marathon was only about a year since I started running, and during my training, I was running only 4 hours to a maximum of 5 hours a week. This kept me fresh and very motivated every time I hit the road – I did not end up doing a half hearted tempo/intervals, neither did I rush those zone 1/zone 2, low heart rate-long runs just to get done with them (and go into zone 3/zone 4, in the process). Needless to say, Ironman is four times a Marathon! Therefore, no way I can train for only 4-5 hours a week, but thankfully, it is three different sports, plus strength/weight training – the variety helps.
If one day, I am really not feeling like spending the entire (almost!) Saturday doing crazy exercise, I would go for a walk with my wife or a bike trip with some friends and take as many photos, and eat as much snacks as I wish (hey, I would burn them in no time, during my next training session)! Just, not make this a habit! Yes, I understand I skipped a training session or two, but, I would not have done them with the conviction these sessions demand. Now, at least, my soul is happy, my muscles did not degrade, and I am dying to nail the next session!
(Disclaimer: if you can nail every single training session at the required intensity without putting your heart in it, then I would say, put your heart in it, and you will be a champion!)
3. Try to have blocks of time without any distraction for doing my work (not training).
I recently watched a YouTube post from GTN, where they joked, “you have the Monday to rest, at your desk, after all!” This does hit a very important aspect of Ironman training. For my work, which is almost completely cranial, I need to give a chunk of time for my mind and body to get to the resting state, so that I can fire up different parts of the body (brain!).
Therefore, while planning my training for the week, I would move them around in the day, so that when I get to the desk, I have several hours of no other distraction. If I have meetings from 9 am to 11 am, it is very prudent to plan a tempo/interval session, which are, generally, one to one-and-a-half hours long, right after the meeting. Then, I can eat a lunch (as it is home cooked and boxed, it takes 2-3 minutes to get it ready), catch a short nap for 20 min or so, and I am ready to roll by 1:30 pm till late evening. I can even wear those muscle compressors and stretch my feet under my desk – double up the rest and work! After all, with about a 1000 Cal burnt and with a nap, my brain is now super active with lot of blood flow!
(Disclaimer: thankfully, for my work I always had the freedom to work according to my schedule, roughly – without this freedom, I do not know how I would train. Also, I do not know if a company, in this era, forces specific hours on their employees, whether they get the 100% from the employees!)
4. Transitions have to be fast.
I am not talking about T1 and T2 (Transition 1: swim to bike; Transition 2: bike to run). They should be fast too! At least, nobody should be a fool like me – I did not practice for T1 and T2, at all. I thought, just changing into some shoes and putting a few things in my pocket – how long can that possibly take? Well, it turned out that I took close to half an our, in total, for these two transitions in my Ironman race! And, trust me, I was not lounging! I just did not pay enough attention to the time and I did not make it a habit to do the mundane tasks, involved in T1 and T2, fast. Consequence: what takes people 5-9 minutes, that took me 30 min!
In this section, however, I am talking about transitions in daily life from one task to the next. Just like T1 and T2 in a race, in everyday life too, time flies when one is not looking at the clock! We need to make it a habit of looking at the clock and be mindful about the passage of time between two tasks.
How does this work? Here are two hypothetical, yet quite regularly happening scenarios.
Scenario 1: I noticed that my morning meetings would end at 11 am. It would take me another 5 min to wrap up things in office. Another 5 min to change. Another 5 min to go to the bathroom one last time, grab a bottle of water/electrolyte. So, I should be able to start my run by 11:15 am. Pay attention here, I am giving plenty of time for every little task. During T1, in a race, we achieve more than this is less than 5 min, in total (well, at least, ideally we should!). So, I am already allotting 300% time compared to what we should be taking. However, when I actually start running, I looked at my watch, and it is 11:35 am! I have no concrete answer, if you ask me, why it took 7 fold time than what I should have taken, and more than double to what I calculated in a very conservative fashion. The only thing, I can say is that I was not using a stop watch for every single mundane things.
Scenario 2: Both me and my wife returned home at 6:10 pm from work. Both of us have no exercise or training scheduled for the evening. In other words, we would take a shower, heat up our food (that had been already cooked during the weekend), make a salad or boil some green veg and add some olive oil/salt/condiments and (yeah!) we are eating our dinner! How long can it possibly take? Well, let us say we will start heating up the food before going for shower. And, if we are eating the boiled green veg, then start heating up some water in a pan on stove top. Transferring the food to our respective plates and pouring some water in a pan – 5 min. Then, while they are heating up, we are taking our shower and change. Let us give that another 10 min. Then, we put the green veg to the boiling water and boil for 2-3 min (this cannot be any longer, as we like the veg to maintain their crispness); drain the water out – 1 min; add some olive oil/salt/condiments and mix – 1 min; so, in total about 5 min. Let us give another 5 minutes to get our drinks and settle down at the table. So, we should be starting our dinner by 6:30 pm (and this is after considering a 33% extra grace period). But, when we actually sit down at the table, it is past 7 pm! What were we doing!?
Everyday, our lives consist of several very different tasks, and moving from one to the other. Many time, the tasks in our lives cost us exactly the time they should. Many times they are time bound by nature (like meetings, our sleep, our time to drive to and from places). But then, we never prepare ourselves for those ‘times’ that are in between, when we are doing, well, nothing, really.
If we end up saving 15 to 20 min from each of the 10 transitions in our everyday life, imagine how much more time we will have to kill ourselves on that bike or, relax/recover!
5. Three pillars of Ironman – endurance/fat burning efficiency, VO2 max and muscle strength.
I needed to understand what are the physical necessities for successfully covering 140.6 miles in water and on land, without spending entire days for training! The clear and objective understanding of the three pillars that we need to answer for having the physical stamina was the key.
I always kept attention that I am not completely neglecting one of the three pillars, or not overdoing one. I understand, endless zone 1or 2 trainings, lasting hours and hours, are extremely beneficial for increasing our endurance/fat burning efficiency. But, when we have limited amount of time, this training style comes at the cost of missing out interval trainings (at zone 4-5) or strength/weight trainings – these are essential for increasing VO2 max and muscle strength, fast.
While Ironman is called an endurance sports, we need to consider the following – if I cannot pick up a certain speed on the bike and end up spending 7-8 hours on the bike, or if my muscles simply do not have any strength left after 5-6 miles of Marathon, will I be able to finish the race? Interval trainings are painful, but take very little time. Strength/weight training, sometimes, might make us a bit uneasy in our subconscious mind – you know, I am an Ironman, a Boston Marathoner etc, and I am doing some maneuver with a 35 lb (17 kg) dumbbell, whereas the girl next to me is working with some 50-60 lb stuff – that is annoying, to say the least, for our competitive spirits (:-). But, the strength training takes very short time, if one is organized, and gives huge benefit for time-crunch athletes.
I am not a coach, and I would not spend time talking about what drill is good for what. There are plenty of books, YouTube posts and blog posts from real coaches to talk about this. By spending a week or two, one can educate themselves and plan accordingly. However, buying a training plan from TrainingPeaks (the ubiquitous training log platform for Ironman) saved me a lot of time from planning everything from scratch. I did not have a coach for my Ironman training, other than one (Tina Hepper) for swimming, where I was totally new. If one has an experienced coach, then it is well and good. However, as Ironman athletes, we need to learn ourselves.
6. Fourth pillar of Ironman – staying alive and moving for hours, when I actually feel dead.
This one, I learned in the hard way – yes, during the actual race! I did Marathons before that, but they barely last for 3 hours or less. I did not appreciate how much emotional preparedness is necessary to keep on moving at a fairly good pace for 10+ hours! During the race, I started noticing that I was losing patience with myself, I was getting desperate that ‘this thing’ was not even half way through, and I had been racing for 5 hours! I remember that after 100 miles (160 km) on bike, I started feeling like, “really, they had to add another 12 miles”! These 12 miles (19 km) were all down hills, easy ride for me, but still I started feeling exponentially exhausted. After that, I had little mental ‘match sticks’ left to burn for Marathon. I started getting very impatient at the beginning of the run, and started picking up pace way too early, I started covering almost 7 min-a-mile (4:20 min/km) – clearly, my brick workouts (training that involves running right after a bike ride) were paying off…..till, they did not! My muscles suddenly cramped very badly, I became completely immobile – a consequence of taking too much load, too early. Then, my already tired mind got even more tired, and I simply walked for the entire first half of the Marathon! This was, partly for muscles, but not entirely! A lot was to blame my weak mental stamina. Needless to say throwing in some very long, even if slow, training regimes during the weekends could have helped me (I hope!).
7. Fifth pillar of Ironman – peace, confidence, tranquility (do not let external factors influence).
I do not know about others, but I have never done a 50 miles cycling, and felt like going for a run right after that, instead of going for an ice cream! It never happened to me. Compared to that, an Ironman race is simply too tough to feel good about anything (at least, for me)! In fact, after 30-40 miles on bike, in the race (after the swim, of course), I do not feel good about, even, food! Do I not have the physical stamina after just 30 miles on bike? No, it is not physical, it is mental. Yes, physical tiredness is the underlying cause, but the struggle is in our mind. The trouble is at the controlling center of our body, the brain. This starts making us lose concentration, lose the smoothness of bike pedaling, or rocking of the body, or simply becoming slower and slower as we feel more dejected by the minute. Again, with a more-or-less proper training the physical part of the struggle, at this point, is minuscule. However, as the brain’s tiny control signals start malfunctioning, the body start malfunctioning and the world becomes a terrible place by the second! Therefore, my firm belief is that an Ironbody can exist, only, under an Ironbrain.
I discussed about my struggles during the race in a different blog, and will share more in future. Here, in short, I would like to point out the importance of building in the aspects of confidence, peacefulness, and tranquility during the training. In other words, training of mind. As time crunch athletes, this is one place, where we get to work more often than the professional athletes do, I believe. We have myriad of responsibilities. Everyday many things are going wrong or worry us, that are not our VO2 max or our bike or swim splits! When we are training, basically, we are wasting time or not doing the jobs that are more essential, than training, in our life.
Generally, when we are under stress or disturbed from things outside Ironman training, our responses are of five types:
(a) we try to attend the problem in life and get done with this – if this is possible, this is, of course, the best path. But seldom, the problems with solutions bother us. It is also very unlikely that we have a problem that can be answered in 2 hours’ time and still we are severely bothered with them. I am not talking about some sudden responsibility coming up at work/life that needs to be attended right now, as described in the next point. I am talking about the problems that actually bothers us in our mind. Therefore, this scenario, although included here, is not exactly a part of this discussion!
(b) We still try to do ‘something’, to work on the problem, knowing very well that we will not be able to do anything to solve the problem in next 1-2 hours. But still, we would try to keep ourselves busy trying to help our mind feel better that we are working on it. In the process skip the 1 hour training that was scheduled on that day.
(c) We sit on our sofa, munch on some snacks, watch something on TV, and skip the training.
(d) We still go for our training, but feel so drained that we do not perform what the training entails (in other words, we are violating point # 2 of this blog).
(e) We hit that treadmill or bike and put our entire rage on it, we go really fast and, simply, smash it!
According to me, none of the above are helpful. Not even the last one! Ironman is not a 100 m dash, one cannot do it with the enraged mindset.
This is where the training of mind comes along. I would still go to my training. Take a little pause in the beginning, may be for 5 minutes or 10 minutes. Or, I will make my warm up longer. I would utilize this time for some meditative mind plays. Slowly disconnect myself from the the ‘problem matter’. Or, internalize the matter and make it a subject of ongoing investigation, in my mind, as I continue. The latter is very different from being distracted. It is working on the issue passively. When subject matter is an emotional issue, passive thinking gives a clearer view and a fresh perspective (and, almost always, things that are bothering us immensely have a large emotional aspect) – this is especially very helpful during long runs or long open water swims. Once, I have either disconnected or internalized, I would get to the main set of my training. I would pay attention that I am doing the training at the recommended intensity and my heart rate is not all over the place.
Disconnecting the mind or internalization – these are, of course, easier said than done. For me internalization works better. I would always tell myself that the training, such as, swimming some intervals, or doing a tempo run do not really require a lot of thinking. I mean, the training plan is already set. Now, I will just have to move my legs and/or hands at a certain speed for a very short time. Therefore, I CAN do it. So, I would make the warm up a little longer, get myself into the rhythm, in the zone, and slowly fall into the groove of motion. Slowly this groove of motion will start kicking in serotonin, or something that we are yet to know, and the mind would be relatively relaxed. I would complete my training with confidence, at peace and with a tranquil mind that does not get affected by external spikes.
This is a practice. This does not happen in one day. However, the training intensity or demands are also very low, in the beginning, and then they become longer and tougher, finally culminating into the race. Therefore, if we start practicing from the very beginning, with time, we would start training our control office, our brain, to be really, really good. And as the years pass, we would become better. Our muscles’ capabilities have limits, defined by VO2 max or the maximum weights they can move. But, limits of our brains’ capabilities are yet to be found.
8. Sixth pillar of Ironman – The only certain part in life is the uncertainty (and death)!
Yes, sadly! I can be as much disciplined, as much control freak, as much of a great planner as one can possibly be. Still, I do not know what will happen, even after an hour later, with certainty. We try not to think about it; we would go mad if we let our mind continuously delve into the reality of uncertainty that we live in. But, we know!
Training for an Ironman race, and the race itself epitomizes this important aspect of life. Should we continuously worry about this? No, we will go mad! Should we prepare for every situation? That is not possible. We do not know most of the possible situations! We draw pictures of situations based on the history, but in reality, it is always a new situation – and we say, “oh my God! It never happened before!” Yes, of course! Obviously, we should not be stupid! Yes, I should carry some extra tubes and some CO2 cartridges on my bike, but punctured tires is just one of plenty of things that can go wrong on a bike? What if I fall from the bike and get a lot of deep cuts and bruises all over my body, but do not break a bone or tear a muscle, will I have the mental strength to continue, or will I feel too upset, shocked and dejected?
Similarly, in everyday life new things pop up that threatens what we would have done if the world was the same as yesterday! We, no way, can make preparations for these infinite varieties of uncertainties. The only thing we can do: cultivate the humility to recognize this important aspect of life, we can adopt, and we can smile.
