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I learned a lot yesterday while doing my first 70.3. (http://www.ironmancalifornia.com/) Before I get into that, though, let me say I’m happy I finished and am thankful I have the opportunity and good fortune to be able to do stuff like that. I’m incredibly lucky to be in good health and live in Southern California where we can train year-round and participate in so many events. Anyway, in no particular order, here’s some of yesterday’s take-aways (some obvious, some maybe not so obvious).

• When thinking about triathlons you need to keep in mind that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That is, taken separately, the events are hard. Put together, the whole thing is a bit of a nightmare.
• I have this delusion I’m tougher/more fit than I really am. I’d rather change reality to match the thought instead of doing the opposite (and lowering my expectations). That’s going to require some training mods, though.
• In order to be able to really compete you have to move away from training hard to training hard with the right plan. I’ve tended to shy away from all of the “science” when it comes to training. I don’t want to turn my hobbies into “work.” But, if I want to step things up a notch I’ll have to figure out a way to keep things lite and fun.
• The run is pretty much all guts.

There’s some other stuff I took away from yesterday’s race, but I think those points sum up most of it. I was a little disappointed with my performance, as I thought I had put in the right amount of training going into the race. But I realized about half-way through the bike portion that I hadn’t trained at the right level and wasn’t really prepared for how intense it was going to be. I cracked and moved into survival mode just so I could finish. It was cool because I dug deep and stuck it out, but I think I could have done better.

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