I am 21 and feel like a completely different athlete. I haven't done a quality swim workout in about 9 months and my last brick workout was my last race... Just about 1 year ago.
1 year ago I won my local triathlon with a personal best time of 1:05:something. The next fall I planned on taking a little break and hitting the pool hard. That never happened though. By January I had decided I would exclusively ride bikes from then on. I kept true to my word too. At least until June.
This is almost exactly what happened to me coming out of grade 12. I decided to be a biker full-time and managed to go only a couple months before I couldn't avoid putting the shoes back on. They're on a lot more often now than ever before. I'm going to run a marathon.
The reason I chose a marathon is on the surface strategic but I think it really comes down to raging narcissism. On one hand I think I quite running every 2 years because I feel like I plateau and that's a sad feeling. During my retirement from the sport I thought about my running limiters and there was one glaring problem with all of my running training, ever. The biggest running week I've ever had was about 45km. I have no idea how I've been as successful as I have been running an average of 30km a week during my hardest weeks but it's worked... sort of.
So that's the reason I tell people when asked "why a marathon?". The first reason I picked a marathon? It seems like everyone has done one and when I tell people I do triathlons (sprint at that), there's a chance 1/50 people think "yeah that's good... but it's no marathon. I've done a marathon, heh...". Plus Oprah's done a marathon. I find it hard to consider myself and endurance athlete knowing Oprah has run further than me in one go.
After finding the right way to answer "why a marathon?" I started thinking... Maybe I've been neglecting real base work in all my disciplines. Wouldn't it be a good idea to up the milage in all of my sports? I can hammer out a good short workout like you can't believe, but I know I can do better. Maybe this is the missing link? It was a very short jump to deciding a 70.3 was the right decision. Obviously not right now, I haven't done any honest work in the water for the better part of a year, but why not? What makes this proposition even more attractive is the massive amounts of time I will have coming next September. For new readers, I have just finished the 3rd year at UWO studying physics. This didn't leave a whole lot of training time during the school year. Now for the twist - I am currently on a 12 month internship. Sorry, I mean a 12 month PAID internship. Well paid internship. This means freedom between 5pm and 7am and all weekends. This means an entire next summer without the obligation to work so that I can survive the next school year. If I want to make an athletic breakthrough before my mid-20s this is the time to do it.
Now, it's not as black-and-white as that. I am very sure about my marathon plan, in fact I plan on racing the Scotia Bank Toronto marathon in October however the 70.3 plan may not happen. Right now it sounds appealing but there are other fish I may be interested in trying to fry. For instance, wouldn't next summer be a fantastic time to try having a race season like real triathletes? I would like to see what I can do racing more than once in the summer. I even have an extremely ambitious race I would like to do that would require a lot of money (which I will have):
At this point I start to get all giddy about the future and lose my train of thought because then I start thinking about things like how I want to transition to racing olympic distance primarily, then I realize that I really really like biking and maybe I just want to do that and then...
I realize I haven't done anything and I'm still just sitting on my couch thinking about stuff. To that end, it has stopped raining finally and my delicious chicken-and-avocado sandwich is just about digested so I ought to head on on my bike. Tonight it's 4x10 mins at 260Watts.
Maybe next post I'll update you on things that I've actually done.
Adam "It's so much easier in my head" Fortais
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