221223 1620 I’m posting my old drafts UNEDITED. Deal with it. Update to this: I finished Ironman Louisville 2014. It was so long ago I almost feel like I need to do it again to maintain my Ironman cred.

In a lot of ways I’m surprised that I even signed up for Ironman Louisville. Sure, I’sve wanted to complete an Ironman for a long time, but I never thought I had the patience, or the will, to train for one. I wanted to complete an Ironman like I want to swim the English channel or climb Mount Everest. Those would be amazing accomplishments for me, but I am not willing at all to do the work required to perform those feats. I remember being out on runs thinking, “Geez, can you imagine having to get ready for an Ironman. Who’s got time for that?”

I’d been reading Bob Shuler’s blog for a little while. He’s the One Hour Ironman, and he maintains that you can complete an Ironman with about one hour of training per day. That seems a little too good to be true, but I also heard about Raymond Britt and Sami Inkinen. Both of these fellows are ameteur triathletes and seem to qualify for Kona at will. They also have a couple of other things in common. They both seem to be very meticulous about recording their workouts. Just look at their websites. They are both intensley data-driven individuals, but a lot of triathletes meticulously record their workouts. So what else sets them apart? They both advocate shorter, more intense workouts. Workouts like this more than make up for slogging through mile upon mile, hour upon hour of low intensity training, they say. Looking at their results, who can doubt them?

Making sure I’m training at the right level of intensity is a struggle for me because I’m so lazy. It also means carefully recording, and reviewing, your workouts. You have to know what you did last time so that you know what to do this time. This doesn’t mean more miles necessarily, but rather making improvements on your pace, power, etc., during your work intervals.

The other thing to remember taking on this kind of training is to make sure you recover before your next hard workout.

Check out these guys’ websites and books. You’ll learn more from them than you will from me.

My strategy going into summer is to make sure I’m making improvements with each workout by not being so lazy, looking at those previous workouts and using the data