You may have noticed that of late my journal entries have been a little thin on the ground. This is because somewhere between last May when my IronMan saga began and today, somebody has clearly sneaked into my life and stolen all of the free time I used to have.  

Today for example I got up at 4:30am, was on the bike just before 5:00 for a hard 2 hour hill session and then it was a quick shower before breakfast (taken on the run) followed by the rush hour commute into the office. Straight after work it will be down to the track at 6:00pm for an hour of group torture Claire Kinsley style, before I finally get home again at about 8:00 o’clock tonight. 15 hours after I left. 

And apart from variations in the type of sessions, this routine happens every day of the week except on Friday when I only have an early swim session in the dam. Thursday evening is particularly fun as I get to run the 22kms home from work. 

And do you know what? I am loving every moment of it. Near our home is a pass that meanders through the outlying wheat fields of the Boland region here in the Western Cape and riding there in the early dawn light is a privilege that I wouldn’t get to experience if I wasn’t committed to my goal. Watching the birds of prey rising on the first of the early morning thermals is enough to make even the most jaded of cynics whoop for joy. 

Yet best of all is coming home after a hard training session and seeing my wonderful wife at the door with a huge smile on her face keen to know how the training session went.  

I was told at the start that having a partner who buys into the scheme on day one is perhaps the single most important thing anybody who plans on doing IronMan can have. Although she must feel terribly neglected, (something she would never admit), she still remains my biggest fan and you can’t buy that.

The strange and the bizarre seem to follow me around. I think it’s a genetic flaw. 

In December I was out on an early morning training ride when a car pulled up next to me and the driver announced that he had appointed himself to be my support crew. He then leaned across his passenger seat and offered me a puff of his marijuana spliff. If it wasn’t so funny it would have been terrifying, just thinking that this moron was out driving on the streets so early in the day. I politely refused his offer and suggested with just two words that he should go away. 

 The ‘bong incident’ as we now call it, paled into total insignificance compared to what happened later in the day. I was running through my neighborhood  on the normal route I take when I heard a huge commotion behind me . 

Turning around I saw a large crowd of men charging down the road towards me with knives and pangas in hand. I wasn’t overly concerned about this, as judging by the size of them there was no way they were going to either outpace or outlast me, but still the adrenaline started to flow.  

It was while I was pondering  the local residents reaction to runners in their street that I got run over by a sheep. With a big number 78 painted in purple on its back.  

And that’s when it dawned on me that they weren’t chasing after me at all, they were just trying to recapture the sheep that was about to be slaughtered on their front lawn and that had somehow managed to escape. 

Now I confess to being a bit of a tree hugger and I have a soft spot for animals, particularly those about to become the main focus of a communal barbeque, so I slapped the animal on its backside to encourage its escape and the last I saw of the poor thing it was hightailing it down the main road being chased by the baying hoard. 

Why does this sort of stuff only happen to me.

My first triathlon is under the belt and I chose a real belter to start with. Temperatures were in the high 30′s during the run and it is a miracle that so many people even finished it.

Swim, Bike Run, done.

Allow me to throw in a random idea here. Has anyone ever thought that as this is Africa and our Tri season is in summer that we should look at having the swim as the last event not the first. Or do them in winter. Just asking.

Anyway, everyone was very friendly and helpful and no one gave me any weird looks because I was the new boy on the block. Probably no one knew or even cared, but I still had that first day at school feeling. Triathlon is a lot like mountain biking in that regard. Everyone greets you and all are welcome to join the brotherhood. Unless you are swimming that is, because then everyone is fair game and your mortal enemy. Triathlon swimming etiquette has all the finesse of a shed that’s been dropped out of a plane onto your head.

After the race I was packing away my stuff and found a Nike running cap that doesn’t belong to me in my transition area. Not wishing to create bad karma I handed it in to the organisers. Karma thanked me very kindly about 10 minutes later when I misplaced my Garmin cycle computer/GPS which has never been seen again. If anyone finds a lonely Garmin Edge 305 it belongs to me.

Enough waffling, where am I with IronMan?

• My accommodation in PE is organised and paid for.
• My entry has been made and paid for.
• Wetsuit is paid for.
• Tri Bike is paid for.
• My coach is coaching me and paid for. (In her case I have to give her back afterwards, everything else I get to keep).
• New running shoes are paid for. I’ll need new ones by January.

Does anyone else see a pattern here. Seriously, it would be cheaper to raise kids than to do IronMan.

Commitment to IM takes many forms. Financially it is almost as painful on the wallet as the physical side of it is on the body. Yet it doesn’t seem to matter. Most nights I’m too tired to lay awake worrying about the expense anyway.

Admittedly I didn’t have to buy a Tri Bike (but it’s soooo cool) or pay a coach but I need this thing to go as smoothly as possible and that’s the best way to do it. I estimate that by the time I’m done I will have invested almost R25k on a 17 hour race. That’s right, 25 chest thumping, howling gorillas. That’s almost as insane as swimming/cycling/running an IronMan.

The biggest investment however has been in my health, and that includes both the physical and mental side of it. I am now so much stronger on both counts than I was in May when this all started.

In those terms I reckon any amount of money I have spent is nothing short of a bargain.

I detest gardening, and just because I’m me and for no other reason, I appear to have picked the worst piece of ground to embark on my first attempt at growing something outside. Bearing in mind that my garden is huge, this is quite a feat in itself.

Result so far.

I have become a standing joke in my street as the rest of them, plus various family members… now take great pleasure in telling me that they never knew I was into extreme gardening.

Well just for the record, neither did I!

I’ve been wrestling with a palm tree and the sod thorned me right in the temple. My arms look like a teenage Goth’s cry for help, and my dustbin looks like it’s swallowed a triffid. Goodness knows how Keith Kirsten manages to stay sane.

Still, at least I can forget about it for another year. I finally have an easy care garden (now sans dead cat)that is all gravel and woodchip with plants being restricted to planters.

IronMan in comparison to gardening should be a doddle.

This Sunday marks a big day in the Chris H IronMan quest. It’s the day of my first Triathlon event ever. (Or ‘Eva’ as the hip kids would say).

I’m feeling pretty upbeat and comfortable about it even though my legs are a mess of stiff muscles thanks to Kent’s track/lunge training on Tuesday night. I’ve done a couple of Duathlons already but never had the pleasure of swimming in the washing machine.

My swim on Monday night was a great confidence booster though, my bike is clean and oiled and my running shoes still have plenty of life left in them. So I’m sitting here like a tightly coiled sponge waiting for the big day to arrive.

For a while now I have been trying to work out how to improve my athletic performance. I was concerned that my training didn’t appear to be giving me the huge performance return I was expecting on the time I have invested.  As usual I had it all wrong, but just how wrong was a revelation.

I have been looking at what I could lose to make a gain. The obvious first ports of call were body mass and age. Well my age is what it is and can’t be changed. My weight is healthy and very unlikely to drop by more than a kilogram between now and IronMan. So what else is there.

How about losing my mental limitations. Bingo! I had a self imposed glass ceiling that was keeping me back.

My first indication of my mental barrier was on the recent 200km long Double century cycle race. Prior to the event there was a great wailing and gnashing of teeth at the prospect of riding up the dreaded Op De Tradouw Pass. Luckily I didn’t look at a route profile or take note of exactly how long or high the pass is before the event, so when we got to the pass I just rode up it. Expecting it to be far harder and longer than it felt, I was absolutely amazed to see all the support cars in the feeding station just ahead of me. I was already at the top. Easy Peesy, but how could it be. 

It’s very simple really. I have been training like a maniac but not pushing myself to my new and unknown limits. For years I have performed at a speed that is comfortable to me, and I have been content to continue operating at that same level. What I hadn’t realised until I rode up the Tradouw Pass is that my thresholds have shot upwards and I haven’t been taking advantage if it.

I tried it out in the pool as well. When I started swimming in May, the best I could manage was 2.5kph yet now, armed with no self imposed limitations I can cruise along at 3kph. Last night in our pool session,  I overtook people  for the first time ever. I even lapped one swimmer. On my MTB, instead of spinning out at a super high cadence I now use the power in my quads to muscle through short technical sections. And I can run at 11.5kph instead of 10.  

It is so easy now I’ve stopped thinking about it.

This weekend marked a milestone in my training when I had my first open water swim and also my first swim in a wetsuit. Who would have thought it could be so traumatic. 

Problem number one when swimming in a triathlon wetsuit is that they are so tight. They are designed that way to keep the body sleek, and to stop water sluicing between the suit and your skin. This has the added disadvantage of restricting expansion of the ribcage, which is a problem if your plan is to both swim and breath at the same time. 

Swimming in a wetsuit appears to require a whole new breathing technique that entails consciously using the intercostal muscles to super expand the ribcage thereby ensuring a full lungful of natures finest air. After a while it got easier as the suits neoprene expanded slightly in the water, but it was never comfortable. Hopefully practice will make it easier and less claustrophobic. 

‘But’ as the adverts say, ‘that’s not all’.  

I admit that when visualising my IronMan swim I obviously hadn’t thought the whole thing through, in particular the fact that only swimming pools have nice straight lines on the bottom to aid navigation. The farm dam I was swimming in was so dark and gloomy that I couldn’t even see my hands let alone the bottom in the primordial slime that the brochure quaintly described as ‘the farms trout dam’. 

This made for some erratic progress until I eventually learnt that it was time to steer back toward the middle of the dam when I could no longer move forward due to swimming in the thick weeds that lined it’s edge . High Court judges have been known to drive in straighter lines than I was swimming in.  

I desperately need to learn how to do sighting strokes. That or employ someone to paint a line on the bottom of Nelson Mandela Bay in PE come next April.

Training for an IronMan is nothing if not an educational experience. I have learnt so much about random arbitrary stuff that I would surely be a shoe in for a spot in the finals of The Weakest Link or Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. Here are some examples of what I have learnt but am still amazed by;  

Swimming is a full contact sport.
Really, it’s actually quite painful. 10 people sharing a 25 meter lane in a swimming pool is always going to resemble a cross between a Jacuzzi and WWF wrestling. With an angry crocodile thrown in for good measure. The trick is to get in as many good shots as possible before the others beat you into submission or you drown. I have been punched, kicked, swum into from all sides, and on one memorable occasion I was vehicle ‘B’ in a head on collision. All of this is character building and apparently prepares you for open water Triathlon swimming. 

04:30 am is too early to get up to ride my bike.
Actually 04:30 is too early to get up to do anything. I can think of no earthly reason to get out of bed that early. There are however hundreds if not thousands of people who do just this. Whole phalanxes of them weave around on their bicycles in the pitch dark pre dawn trying to find inner fulfillment and, no doubt, the way home. The only exception I can think of would be if war breaks out and we get invaded. I would then get up at 4:30 am just to get a decent head start on the enemy.  

Core exercise is core.
2 Months ago I stopped doing core exercise (Don’t tell Claire). This was a bad idea. I can feel the difference in my pedal action after 3 hours on the bike. I found myself trading off the time taken to do care exercise against what I thought was more beneficial exercise like running. I was wrong. Not doing core compromises my ability to do other stuff. 

Wind is not your friend.
Some would have you believe that training in the wind is good for you. ‘Treat it as a hill’ they will say. Rubbish. Wind is depressing. It just sounds sad and miserable and no amount of spin will change that. I ran in such a strong wind last night that I couldn’t even hear the music on my I-pod. On this subject, If anyone knows how to turn off the wind on race day please let me know. It’s the missing piece of my race master plan. 

Get a coach of the opposite gender.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t have the get up and go to do 230 hours of training in six winter Months without being motivated to do it by somebody else. A hot tip here is to get a coach of a gender different to your own. Not because you need a date, but because your ego will ensure that you do as much as possible to keep to the program without an undue amount of whining. I discovered by accident that my coach Claire Kinsley was the Sports Illustrated beauty of the year in 2003 and 2006 ( There is serious mirth potential there when I work out how to use it against her). Anyway, the point is that no male on earth is going to disobey a Sports Illustrated model. I actually have no way of knowing if this works in the other direction (male coach, female athlete) but I am sure that my female friends will put me right.

People read this stuff.
Amazed? Me too. Yes, it’s true, you are not the only one who reads this babble. I get complaints from people when regular updates don’t appear. Who would have thunk it?

For a guy who was born in 1959 the concept of visualising my sports performance prior to an event seems more than a little odd to me. It’s all so new age. In the context of me competing in IronMan ‘09, visualisation means mentally placing myself at various places on the route and in my mind’s eye producing a stellar performance on the day. I tried it, and let me tell you it doesn’t work. It’s possible that my mind may be faulty. 

The whole visualisation experience was so unnerving I had to have a bit of a lie down and a cup of tea afterwards. In the swim I was stung by a jellyfish, 160 km into the cycle I ran over a stray dog and was left fending for her six little puppies and all of the feed stations on the run were manned by cloned version of my coach wielding big whips and shouting ‘hurry up my boy , I’m tired and want to go to bed’. Imagination is a terrible thing. 

Back in the real world I discovered a secret that actually works. Smiling. 

On heritage day we went for a ride from Tokai to Cape Point. All went well until we reached Glencairn when the mother of all rain storms hit us. Most people would have ducked into the nearest bus stop or coffee shop to wait it out. Not our lot. On no, we just carried on riding into the ever growing murk. After 5 minutes I had to take off my cycling glasses as they were so covered in road muck I was riding blind and a serious danger to pedestrians. I was as soggy as a drowned rat and my feet were numb from the cold. (Snow was still visible on the mountain tops across the bay). It was so cold that I even had an ice cream headache from the wind chill. 

And that’s when I discovered smiling. And laughing. I waved at passing motorists. I smiled at them at traffic lights and I laughed out loud at the insanity of it all. Before I realised it we were already at Cape Point and ready to turn around. This, in theory, was to be the point where the ride got better, as the wind would now be behind us. Except that nobody told the wind, which remained resolutely in our faces. 

There is a reason that Nature is female. Mother nature is a typical woman. Mostly insane and often vindictive. When I was a child living in Wales my mother would send me outside to play in waist deep snow because ‘the fresh air will do you good’. Of course it didn’t, it just made me miserable and cold. Not half as miserable as her though, because usually 9 Months after I was turfed out into the arctic wastelands she would produce another little brother or sister for me.  

It took me 40 years to work out what she was up to. If I had only been born 30 years later I would have been given a games console and left to my own devices rather than being freeze frozen in deepest Wales and that would have been no preparation for IronMan training in our Cape Town winters at all.

Thanks Mum.

I am now five Months into my IronMan training and it is not uncommon at this stage of the training schedule for a lot of athletes who want to do IM to drop out as the sheer amount of work and time that has to be invested becomes a reality. I have solved the problem by adding more events to my schedule. More events equals more determination. 

Next year will see me tackling the Total Sports Challenge in January (2 man team), Sani2C in March, IronMan in April and lastly, X-Terra Grabouw two weeks later. Bring it on. I am working on the principle that TSC and Sani2C will be good training for IronMan. I hope I’m correct. Turning 50 is going to be memorable. And expensive. The entry fee for Sani2C alone is R6450.00, and we still have to get to Natal and back. 

At our Tuesday training session this week we did something different. Track training. After a 20 min warm up run in the forest we started the track session by doing kick drills with our legs while running behind Claire who was demonstrating how we should be doing them. Well that was the plan. Of course behind her was a bunch of fully grown men who were performing tribal war dances, improvisational dance and pretending to drive stock cars round the track. And of course being men the conversation was inevitably ribald and involved ‘equipment’ . It must have been like trying to herd tom cats in a strip club for poor Claire. 

Her revenge was very sweet when she hauled her next bag of tricks out of her training hat. We had to do 4 x 1 km sprint repeats at 4min 50sec / km with 2 minute breaks in between. The fast guys had to do 6 x 3min 50 seconds per km. On a soft grass track. I’m glad I’m not at big school yet.  

After the sprint session we were subjected to squats and lunges and this part was conducted by coach number 2, Kent Horner . Anyone who has read a local running/cycling/multisport magazine recently will have seen a photo of Kent ‘world class Tri-athlete’ featured in the USN adverts. Now I know Kent, and he is a first class bloke, but I mostly read these magazines while perched on the loo and it’s hard for a chap to concentrate on the job at hand with Kent staring at you from page 3. It’s doubly hard to even sit now, having had him turn my legs into a palsied mush of stiff muscles with his training. 

Suffice to say that next time us guys will all be listening to and obeying Claire, because while I don’t speak for the others in the group, I personally could hardly walk after Kent had finished with us. Two days later and it still hurts to sit. You too can suffer with us at www.mytrainingday.com

Thanks to the miracle fingers of Benita De Witt my ITB injury is gone and my injuries are a (no doubt temporary) thing of the past. My mother once told me that you don’t appreciate good health until you are sick. How right she was. Mind you I didn’t appreciate peanut butter until I met a Khoisan who wouldn’t shut up. Try talking San with peanut butter sticking your tongue to the top of your mouth.

Anyway, my training is ramping back up as we head towards summer, the spring is sprung, the grass needs mowing and love is no doubt firmly in midair. Last Saturday dawned unusually bright and sunny, if a little cold, so in celebration I dragged my body out of bed for an early morning ride with the friendly folk from City Cycling Club in Cape Town.  

Meeting up just 2 km’s from my house we set off on a glorious ride through the Waterfront and around the coast into Camps Bay and then up to the top of Suikerbossie. The company as always was superb and the scenery sublime. This is what sport should be all about. Out in the sun, feeling on top of the world and having a fantastic time. I really must make the effort to join City Cycling Club. They are a fun crowd always welcome non club members on their rides and have cool club kit. www.citycyclingclub.org 

By the time I got back home I’d only managed to clock up a meager 65 km’s so I changed to my mountain bike as my primary weapon of choice and then it was off to the farm to join my wife who had already been training there for an hour or so. Shock, horror!! The woman has become a beast on a mountain bike. On one downhill eroded section she totally blitzed me, taking almost a minute out of me over 2 km’s. The only common factor is the training of Ms Claire Kinsley who refuses point blank to take bribes to give the missus bad training advise. If anyone sees a mad flying Hungarian on a Raleigh full suspension, it’s my wife. Stand well back.

Two more hours and 35 km’s on the dirt bike later the morning training was over. A shower and lunch saw me ready for the afternoons 1.5km swim at the local gym which sailed by (the swim not the gym, it had stopped raining by then).  Swimming is becoming much easier but my elbows ache. Can you get swimmers elbow?

IronMan training is every bit as time consuming as everybody has said it would be. On any one day I will be doing a combination of early morning swims, late night runs or indoor trainer sessions and it is only the prospect of warmer days ahead that is keeping me motivated. I can’t wait for the sun to go down late enough for me to safely do a 3 hour ride after work, or to run in the hills without stumbling off a cliff in the dark. Never have I so looked forward to summer. 

Tonight I ride home from work and then ride back in tomorrow morning. If you see a cold, windswept cyclist on a mountain bike battling into the South Easter around the Pinelands/Thornton area, give me a wave.