The hardest part of Ironman training is probably not what you think. As a newcomer to triathlon and the Ironman experience, I thought the swim would be the hardest part of my training. It wasn’t just my lack of technique, endurance, speed, buoyancy, and grace that worried me. Devoid of any discernible style known to the swimming community, I knew an anvil stood a better chance of finishing the swim leg of Ironman than me, but that wasn’t it. Swimming just seemed incompatible with my lifestyle and I didn’t know where to fit it into my schedule. However, that turned out to be one of the simplest problems to solve. Instead, I have come to realize that the hardest part of my training happens at 4:30 AM when my alarm clock goes off.

I have always been an early riser. That doesn’t mean I like waking up early. It means that for various reasons I have always had to wake up early. When I was in school, our wake-up call happened at around 5-5:30 AM. Classes started at 7 AM and the bus ride to school sometimes took well over half an hour. I remember distinctly sitting on the curb, freezing cold in the dark waiting for the bus to pick us up. It wasn’t fun and I simply accepted it as part of life. The weekends were slightly different but we still didn’t get much of a break because we had karate training in the morning. In the ninth and tenth grades I had military training at 6 AM on Saturdays. Try being a 14-year-old with a bed time of 9 PM on a Friday (Spoiler: no, I never went to bed at 9 PM on a Friday and it showed during training on Saturdays). Then I decided to go to college at the Air Force Academy and let me tell you, they really don’t like it when you sleep in late. Even on the weekends I had to get out of bed very early because I was either learning or teaching other cadets how to fly gliders. Karate, military training and soaring were all wonderful experiences and I am extremely grateful that I got to do them, but the part of the price was the early wake-up call.

A common phrase among triathletes is “I can’t, I have to be up at 4 AM” and this is really the crux of the problem. Triathlon requires discipline and discipline comes in many shapes and sizes. You have to follow a training plan and schedule and that requires some discipline. You have to follow a nutrition plan and that requires a different type of discipline. And, if you are like most of the triathletes I know, you have to wake up early. People like me have families, jobs, and other responsibilities that usually are one of the excuses we make to avoid getting involved in the sport. We just don’t have time, right? After training for about 6 months now I can unequivocally say that this is just not true. The time is there and it always has been, but you have to find it. And it just so happens that some of that time can be found well before dawn. It means that changes have to be made to your daily schedule and you probably will also need to go to bed earlier than you were used to. It means you will sometimes ride or run in the dark, and it will probably be a little cold. That’s when you have to really dig deep for your motivation: how bad do you want it? Once you are out of bed and get some inertia going, everything becomes a little easier and you get on with your training; it is just those first few minutes that get to me. I know I can dig deep during a particularly challenging run or swim and get it done. But getting started, that’s always the test.

There is also something that I’ve started calling the Society of Early Morning Training. Those are the people I come across before dawn. Some are jogging, some are riding their bikes, some are simply walking, and I can tell some are really pushing their limits. And we all wave at each other. It’s support from strangers bound only by the fact that we happened to share the same road very early in the morning. Some of them I  know by name, even if I have never talked to them, because they always show up in my Strava flybys. It may not seem like much but to me that simple act of saying hi is important  because I know they probably also struggled to get their shoes on earlier that day. We all have goals that we are trying to accomplish and part of the price to reach them is that we are out and about before the sun is up.

I am not going to pretend that my record is perfect. There have been many mornings when I have simply decided that I could not get up. The training still got done but it usually meant having to rearrange my entire schedule for the day. But the the early wake-up call has gotten easier and I have to come accept it as part of the triathlete life. I may not enjoy it but it serves me a reminder of the goals I have and the little things I am doing to get there. So off to bed I go.

Injury update: So I got shin splints. At first I was worried that the injury in my leg would be a stress fracture but the bone scan showed it is shin splints. Now, I have not had those in over 20 years, and I am still not sure sure why or how I got them, but I suppose it’s better than a stress fracture. So now I have a walking boot that I have to wear for the next four weeks. I can still swim and ride my bike (though I am not allowed to get off the saddle) and I might be able to start running sometime in September. My goal is to do the Kerrville sprint triathlon on September 29 so we’ll see how that goes.

So far swimming has been the hardest part of transitioning to triathlon. As a kid I didn’t have much formal training. My dad taught me to swim when I was seven or eight years old in exchange for a pair of goggles. I still remember him teaching me to float, move my arms, and turn my head to breath. It took the better part of a day and I ended up learning the basics (and getting said goggles) but that was about it: good enough for a social swimming pool. Fast forward ten years and my next encounter with swimming lessons was as a cadet at the United States Air Force Academy. As part of the curriculum, during freshman year (formally called fourth degree year) all cadets learn the basic strokes and also water survival. Somehow, the water survival part actually stuck because a few years later I saved my dad from drowning in a river in Colombia. I wasn’t a strong swimmer but it was one of those situations when your training comes back to you and you act instinctively. I am sure it wasn’t a textbook rescue but my dad is alive and well so I must have done something right.

Now, twenty-odd years later I have had to learn how to swim again because, as I found out, my technique was really bad. I started swimming one day at the local school district aquatic center because I figured it would be a matter of building endurance more than anything else. I mean, how bad could my form be, right? Wrong. While I still remembered some of the things I learned at Air Force and tried to apply them in my early swims, it became apparent to me that I was much slower than just about everyone else around me. Most of the other swimmers are considerably older than me so it was really humbling to discover just how slow I was. Looking at other people’s lap times on Strava didn’t help either. Additionally, I was also getting very tired after just a few hundred yards, and here I was thinking I could swim almost two and a half miles. Classes, I needed classes.

I started researching swimming classes and learned about the Master Swimmers program. These are lessons for adults usually taught very early in the morning. One of my coworkers had attended them for a year during his Ironman training so it seemed like a good idea. However, none of the programs I found really fit my schedule. It was then that I discovered Mark Saroni (my coach) and Paragon Training (my team). I want to write about Mark and Paragon separately so suffice it to say the guy is an absolute badass and a great coach, and Paragon really feels like a family even though I’ve only been with them for 3 months. Around May I started swimming with Mark twice a week and yes, my technique was really bad. It was so bad I actually had to use two pull buoys tied together to help me hold my feet up. Since then my technique has improved quite a bit, as revealed by my lap times which are slowly getting better.

At first, it was very hard for me to relax in the pool. One of my biggest problems was my breathing. Aside from the fact that I tend to raise my head when I breath (which causes my legs to drop and act as an anchor), I just kept holding my breath for as long as I could before taking my next breath. Half the time I found myself more worried about not drowning than actually maintaining proper form. And let’s be honest: swimming in a pool is a little boring. You are staring at this blue line beneath you and every so often you turn around and count another lap. Many times I lost count after 20 or so laps so I am not even sure my early times are accurate and they may in fact be slower than I think they were. But I had a breakthrough last week. I was finally able to control my breathing and let my mind go. For the first time I was able to swim non-stop for close to an hour without feeling panic or anxiety. And I actually enjoyed it.

IMTX is still a few months away but it was important to me to reach this milestone. I needed to gain confidence in the water and now I actually believe I can do this. I have a ton of work to do to improve my technique but now I can actually focus on that instead of trying not to drown. I am still slow but now I am consistently slow over long distances. I call that a win.

I will be racing Ironman Texas on April 27, 2019.

There, I said it.

I start documenting my road to IMTX 2019 with all sorts of doubts in my mind. In theory, I have been training for four months. In reality, I am writing this as I nurse a foot injury that has kept me from running for the last 10 weeks. I went to see a sports doctor yesterday morning and he ordered a bone scan which I promptly got yesterday afternoon. Now, I am not a radiologist but my shin lit up like a Christmas tree in the images I saw and I’m afraid I will be diagnosed with a stress fracture. As a newcomer to the sport of triathlon, training for Ironman is hard enough without the looming prospect of an injury but those are the circumstances I am facing and will overcome because make no mistake: I will be racing Ironman Texas on April 27, 2019.

Why am I doing this? I suppose everyone who ever attempted to do a full distance triathlon was just looking for a challenge. In my case, I was always in awe of the distances involved: 2.4 miles in the water followed by 112 miles on the bike followed by a full 26.2-mile marathon. I mean, running a marathon is quite an accomplishment on its own but these people were running it after a 112-mile bike ride. That just seemed well outside of my personal limits. I am not a strong swimmer by any stretch of the imagination and I have not ridden a bike in about 20 years. And then there’s my love-hate relationship with the run. See, I think I can run and I like doing it but for some reason I have developed runner’s knee and can’t run without a brace. Instead for the last 12 years I lifted weights as running took a secondary role in my life. Then, my sister went and did IM Cartagena 70.3, which was pretty bad-ass, and she followed it with IM Los Cabos. And then my brother-in-law raced IM Lima 70.3 so all of the sudden it seemed feasible: maybe I could do it. So here I am, after many years of thinking about it, finally having the guts to go and race a full Ironman.

Documenting my road to IMTX is important to me. I think it will help keep me focused and maybe one day, when my daughters are older, they will take the time to read it and realize that it is never too late to do anything and that discipline and hard work can take you far in life.

As of today, I have 39 weeks to be ready. I don’t know if that is enough but it will have to be. As I mentioned earlier, I have been kind of training for about 4 months. It hasn’t been the most structured of programs, especially because the leg injury threw me off course, but it has been fun and challenging. For a newbie I think I have made progress and there’s no doubt in my mind that I can be ready on April 27. Well, maybe there’s a little doubt. Okay, maybe I am terrified. In reality I am extremely anxious and I feel I should be running on a bike in the pool because 39 weeks is not nearly enough time.

And with that confession, I am off to bed because as triathletes like to say: I have to be up at 4 AM.