Click here to see what’s included but please note the closing date for registration is fast approaching: 1st March 2010.

Not entered The Outlaw yet? Sign up here.

Places are limited and offer those who take part a unique insight to the specifics of the Outlaw and iron distance training and racing in general. The courses will be led by Simon Ward of TheTriathlonCoach.com, 220 Coach of the year 2009 and one of the UKs leading elite and age group coaches. You can find more information about Simon Ward and his coaching team by visiting their website www.TheTriathlonCoach.com.

The camps will take place at Holme Pierrepont, the start and finish venue for the Outlaw, on 21st March and 16th May – 20 and 12 weeks out from the event respectively.

Simon Ward said: “The camps will familiarise athletes with the various aspects of the course, which looks like it could be super fast! We’ll also cover things like planning and fine tuning your training, nutrition and race strategy.

“Iron distance racing invariably requires athletes to overcome challenges throughout their training and preparation and on the day itself. Attending a camp will give athletes every opportunity to prepare themselves for success.”

Athletes will have the opportunity to try swimming in Holme Pierrepont Lake during the second camp, and both camps will incorporate elements of running and cycling as well. Based at Holme Pierrpont, the camps will familiarise athletes with how things will be set up when the Outlaw takes place on 8th August 2010. Places for the camps, and for the race are still available, but filling fast!

Make sure you are properly prepared when the Outlaw kicks off this August!

Chrissie & Craig regaining their titles
Monique van der Vorst becoming the 1st female handcycle participant ever to finish an Ironman and beating the guys as she did it!
Watching Kyle Garrett miss out on completing the swim by 10secs, sob his heart out on the steps and then regain his composure to do an interview saying it wasn’t really that bad, “for me, everyday is a good day”. I really hope he gets another shot next year
seeing “Fearless” Phil Graves take the bike prime and then tough it out to make the finish line
All the great athletes we interviewed at the CompuTrainer booth – Phil Graves, Bella & Stephen Bayliss, Sarah Reinertsen, Scott Davis, Scott Neyedli – thank you for your time. You were great to interview (you can see clips of the interviews on the video)
swimming with dolphins
Coming face-to-face with a 7ft shark in a cave while diving.

I know some of you dont believe that I do any work out there, honestly I do, but we have great fun as well. It’s all part of what they call a lifestyle business.
Maybe I’ll talk more about how to set up lifestyle business in a future post.

In the meantime enjoy the video compilation which shows some of the interviews we did in Kona mixed in with some race day clips.
Thanks for reading.

Stay healthy & have fun

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

and a quick look at the athletes lining up to rack their bikes on Friday afternoon

Click here to view the embedded video.

Tomorrow, its race day. Should be plenty of cool footage to shoot. Stay tuned.
Mahalo for watching

The Bike Expo

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Run Shoe Expo

Click here to view the embedded video.

Tomorrow I promise you; No more nice kit. But we will be taking a quick look at Lava Java and the line up for bike racking.

Mahalo for reading & watching

At one time only official product sponsors could exhibit and the whole show was in the lobby of the King Kamehameha hotel. Not any more. As you can see from the video, the expo now covers the entire site of the community centre and this year K-Swiss & Newton shoes have taken space over the road in the front garden of the church (video of that to come later).

The Expo traditionally opens for business on the Tuesday evening of race week. The athlete parade starts at the King Kam hotel and ends at the Community centre at approximately 5.30pm funneling athletes straight into the Expo.

Obviosuly taking a booth at the Ironman World championships is not cheap and I’d guess that all of the exhibitors would be hoping to either sell plenty of product or generate enough interest to make the whole trip worthwhile. If you could see some of the booths in more detail it’s clear that some spend a small fortune on setting up and that would add to the expense:

1. a) because of the amount if kit they have to transport, and
2. b) because Hawaii is not an easy place to get to.

The video gives the impression of how busy things get right after the parade but we will get a better idea of whether the economic situation really is having an effect during the rest of the week. You might recall from the last posting that Kona seems quiet in comparison to previous years

Our booth is indoors, right next to the retail section, and shoppers have to walk past us to get to the merchandise. This is the good news. The downside is that there’s no air conditioning and it gets very hot, real hot… damn hot!!!. Of course I don’t expect you to feel sorry for me, but I’m just trying to give you an idea of how tough it really is! (lol)

The video also shows just how much schwagg people are buying. You can see one lady with an armful of kit and that is the norm. It’s just a shame that they dont take armfuls of CompuTrainers away with them!

Thats all for now. As I write it’s 8am on Wednesday morning and we have to be at work for 9am, ready to sell… a handful of CompuTrainers.

Mahalo for reading.

This means that Monday morning at the beach is usually heaving. Exit the water around 8am and you can’t move on the dockside. This year it seemd much quieter. As you can see from my video there were still plenty of people there but not as many as I would have expected to see or have seen in previous years.

Now maybe this shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. After all we have been through the worst recession for quite some time and although triathlon on the whole seems to be bucking the trend, there is a limit.

Even from mainland US, it is still quite expensive to get to Hawaii and once on the Island living expenses are high. Given that most athletes would probably stop for 7 days and that this is one of the peak weeks of the year for Kona (and therefore you’d expect hotel & condo rates to be higher), it makes for a pretty expensive trip all round. Now multiply that figure by 4, if you have a partner and 2 children to bring with you.

There’s no doubt that many of the competitors qualify on a regular basis and to repeat that level of spending year after year can take a toll on the finances. So you can imagine the train of thought for these athletes.

“Do I need to take 3 other people with me?”
“Maybe I can share a condo with those 3 other guys I know”.
All of a sudden 16 guests (4 x 4) on the island becomes 4.

All that said, there’s still a buzz in the town and as in previous year’s the excitement will continue to build until Saturday. Maybe those athletes will arrive on Monday or Tuesday. Obviously we are hoping so because it’s important for CompuTrainer that the expo is busy and that business is brisk.

The Expo starts on Tuesday right after the athlete parade. We’ll be setting on Tuesday morning and I hope to bring you another video blog from the parade and the start of the expo.

Stay tuned for further updates!
Mahalo

As the great and the good of Long distance triathlon descend on Kona, anyone in town and not connected with the race might think that they had landed on a different planet. For 2 weeks this place is “Ironworld”.

In “Ironworld” fat people don’t exist – I’m not being fattest here, just stating a common fact. If you have a body image problem then you definitely don’t want to be here. Just about everyone has a single digit bodyfat and looks great into the bargain.

It’s been a few weeks now since I did the Norseman and I have put on a few pounds since the race. This I keep telling myself, is part of the recovery process. However it’s difficult to walk down Alii Drive without feeling a little on the fat side (and I’m definitely not fat… at least not in “RealWorld”).

However if you did have a body image problem then Kona in race week is definitely not the place for you.

Every year the cruise ships are in town for the first couple of days of race week but by Wednesday they have usually disappeared. I now believe that it’s because the hundreds of fat passengers on board have overwhelmed the ship psychiatrist, and the Captain has to move on before the poor guy has his own breakdown.

Anyway this is the World Championships and as you’d expect from the top 5% (thats approximately) of the world Ironmen athletes, they have all arrived in great shape. I’m consoling myself with the fact that they dont look like this 52 weeks of the year and in fact once the race is over and they get back to “RealWorld” they’ll pile on the lard just like the rest of us.

So that’s it for my first Kona blog. I’m off out to get my green salad (hold the dressing) to keep up with the in crowd.

Stay tuned for more Kona ramblings tomorrow.

Mahalo

In one respect the Norseman is no different from any other Ironman. Its a big event that takes a lot of preparation and then a lot of effort on the day, both mentally and physically. On finishing it therefore takes a lot of recovery.

The start of Post race recovery

One definitions of recovery is “a return to a healthy or normal condition. That means getting back to where you were before the event.

However, the stress induced by a hard race, and which you need to recover from, includes muscle soreness/damage, energy depletion, dehydration, stress to the endocrine system, central and peripheral nervous system, not to mention mental fatigue. Each of these systems will repair at a different rate.

It’s easy to gauge when muscles are repaired as the soreness disappears but how can you tell if the CNS is recovered?

So how long does recovery take? I’m not sure you can put a time limit on these things. A lot will depend upon the individual. Not only on how long they have been in the sport, the depth of their initial fitness etc but also on their lifestyle, diet, age, gender, body size and a whole lot of other factors.

Personally I like to take at least 4 weeks of what I call “active recovery” training. Finding the right balance is important. Do too little and there isn’t enough circulation to remove waste products from the muscles. Do too much and you slow down the process of healing the muscles and joints. Low stress activity such as swimming and biking are fine at low levels of intensity and I like to add in other activities that I don’t get time to do when training such as kayaking or hiking. More importantly I don’t have much of a structure. I just do what I feel like doing and if I don’t feel like it then I don’t do it. A typical 4 week recovery programme might look something like this….

Week 1 – Just stay active. A bit of swimming cycling as commuting to work and definitely no running but lots of walking

Week 2- More swimming, still commuting to work by bike and maybe some running towards the end of the week (actually this time I was roped into racing at the National Relays – 14 days after Norseman – and boy did that hurt my legs for days afterwards!) I don’t know how OR why AG athletes want to race that soon after an Ironman and I certainly won’t be doing it again

Week 3 & 4- Back into my normal swimming programme still cycling as commuting and running regularly but only for 30 minutes per time and never on back-back days.

Also during this time I relax my eating & drinking habits, but never so much that I completely let go, and try to get as much sleep as my body tells me it needs.

What happens at the end of the four week period is still pretty fluid. I try not to put pressure on myself by entering a race in advance as I know that this will just force me to set a schedule for my body rather than letting my body set its own schedule. So I just play it by ear. This year we have a week in France and then 7 days later I go to Kona to work at the Ironman expo for CompuTrainer. This means that a full-on training programme will be interrupted anyway. Its more than likely that I’ll just be ticking over until the beginning of November and trying not to get to fat or unfit in the process. One thing is for sure, I’ll be chomping at the bit to get back into training, which is just how it should be.

Stay healthy & have fun.

Until next time

S

I set off out of T2 with a sort of limping shuffle as I tried to free up a tight hamstring/glute combo. The first 25k is pretty flat and circles around the lake. My goal was to run @ 10kmh pace – OK racing snakes, I know this sounds slow, SO, if you haven’t already, please read the Black T shirt Strategy posting to find out more about the race plan – At this pace I’d easily make the cut off times. At this stage I still had 5 1/2 hours to get to the 32k check point. Fortunately I’d taken enough “PowerBar Ride Shots” and water to last 8k because that’s how long it took Fi & Andy to catch me up. Fi had been waiting to support one of the other riders at the top of the final climb, then had to wait for a lift to T2 to hook up with Andy.

In the meantime I focussed on running. After being passed by a  couple of “racing snakes” I actually started to catch someone. My running is usually so crap this is a novelty so I was revved up. ‘Orange T shirt’ was about 400m ahead but I could tell I was closing in on him. The increase in speed must have caused so much friction that my foot started to burn. I had to stop to put out the flames – actually the laces were too tight – and ‘Orange T’ slipped away. Then guess what. ‘Popi’ passed me while I was just getting started. Time to teach him a lesson! “I’ll draft him for a while and see how he likes it” Trouble is we had a bit of a tail wind so actually I was sheltering him…again. Doh! Never mind. he stopped for a pee and I passed him. Then ‘Orange T’ came into view – game on! I inched my way back up to him until I could read the writing on the back of his shirt. OK it was large lettering & he was a big guy, but it was a start. Then my support arrived so I eased up again to change water bottles get more Ride Shots. ‘Orange T’ lived to fight on. He didn’t know how lucky he was. I never saw him again!

Now I was 8k into the run and hitting the 6min per km markers and feeling OK. Fiona joined me to run the next 5k and then Andy came back in the car picked her up to take her further along the road so she could prepare my next lot of fuel. I started to catch ‘Orange T’ again and then ‘Popi’ passed me – must have been all the energy he saved earlier!! -”Kort & Kont!”

15k and I  was still on target when I caught up with Fi again. This time I just chucked the water bottle in the car, took the next one and we started to run together. By now my adductors were tightening up and it was becoming painful to run. I tried the 8 mins run/2 mins walk strategy for a bit and this was OK, while I was running. It was the getting started again that was more painful. The I passed another guy. He looked worse than me and so I gave him a pat on the back and said”Come on mate,this is Norseman, not effing TinMan! Keep moving”. It must have worked because he passed me 5 mins later. Bastard! Should have kept my mouth shut!

We ran alongside the lake which featured in the aforementioned film – The scene where they sink the ferry -  and slowly shuffled towards the 25k mark, which is where Zombie Hill starts. I had slowed a bit below my target time but we were still only 12hours into the race so plenty of time.

It was about this time that the EIT kicked in – Exercise Induced Tourettes! At the check point, one of the organisers, who I had been speaking to the day before, was taking photos. “How are you enjoying the race?” “Its  f*****g brilliant! I’m f*****g loving it. Got any Coke on this aid station” “No, only water” “Bollocks! OK see you at the top then” and off we went.

I’d told Craig during our pre race conversation that I’d practised running up the Chevin (10% grade) and so that was in my race plan. No wonder he fell around laughing. “No one runs up there Simon. That’s why they call it Zombie Hill, because everyone walks like a Zombie!” Oh well,if you can’t beat them join them so I walked too. It was 10% all the way to 32k. It seemed to take forever. The hairpin bends and the 2km markers provided light relief as did conversation with passing athletes – “Hi How are you? Are you enjoying the race?” “Yes, are you?” “Yes” – as you can see it wasn’t a stimulating conversation. Onwards and upwards, upwards and onwards etc, etc. I had a blister developing on the ball of each foot from the walking action. I did so want to stop but at the same time it wasn’t that painful so I kept moving. We got passed by a “speed zombie” – show off. “There’s no prizes for coming 99th” I wanted to shout but I just cursed under my breath “Kort & Kont” “F**k, why did I have to see that sign. I knew it would be bad news. EIT is very dangerous”

I felt like I was in a bit of a twilight zone. I wasn’t in any pain (apart from the blisters and I’ve had worse – MDS 2001 – 6 on each foot. Hard as nails, me!!) but I couldn’t go any faster. Maybe I had turned into a zombie and I couldn’t feel anything! The all of a sudden there it was, the 32k checkpoint. Well inside the cut off we sauntered up as if out for an afternoon stroll. Actually I lie. But that’s what I was imagining in my head – like a scene in a TV comedy where the main character wants to tell his boss where to go and actually imagines himself doing it but in reality he meekly agrees to his bosses demands.

I have to say I was expecting something a bit more grand but they just marked me off on the chart and I was free to go. By now we were on the road which passes directly under the summit. I mean that in the loosest possible way as we still had about 1000m to ascend and another 10km and it still looked an awfully long way. At this point 2 things happened. Firstly it started to rain. Normally I prefer sunshine but on this occasion i was happy because the change made it seem like a different run – a 10k run in the rain. Secondly I realised that when Henry (another member of our party) had done this race the year before he was delirious. He clearly stated that the next 5k were flat and it was possible to run it. Technically, if you’re Jos Naylor carrying a small lamb back to its mother then running maybe possible. But, I’m not and it wasn’t! And neither was anyone else.

Checkpoint cut off time at 37km was 15hrs 45mins and I had about 2hrs to make it. Plenty of time. Even walking like a zombie. So we walked and so did everyone else. It was a bit like walking in a procession to a football match. Imagine a few stragglers heading to Elland Road. No one was passing or even trying to pass. Now it was all about just getting to the top of the mountain, which still didn’t look any closer. Then the road did go down hill. I tried running…for 50 steps, then went back to the zombie walk. Fi got a lift with Andy up to 37k and I was on my own. Actually, I wasn’t but no one else was talking so it felt like it. I started on the last resort, counting footsteps. 100 left, 100 right then have a quick drink then repeat. The past the 34k marker. Only 3k left of the 10k rain race. 100 left, 100 right and so on. Still the mountain loomed over us. Everyone is in the same boat, Si, just keep moving. 100 left, 100 right then the 36k marker. OK 1.5k to go. Then  something new; a sign for the tourist information centre in 500m. Great a new game. Lets see if it really is 500m. My steps must be about 1m long so it’ll take me 500 to get there. Start counting 50, 100, 150 round the corner and some car come into view, then a car park then the tourist info place, then I see people heading up the mountain. This is it. I’ve made it! 350, 400, focus on the tourist centre. Walk straight past the checkpoint table and Andy. Then a voice shouts “Simon, STOP” Its Andy. I’ve been so focussed that I never even saw him. Wow, I wish I could get into that zone more often.

Again nothing grand. A quick tick on the list and not even the once over by the doctor. “Are you sure you don’t want me to see him? I have EIT” “No I just need to check your mountain bag and you are good to go” Andy had already done it so that was it. A quick change into some warmer clothes and we were ready for the last leg.

Heading on to Gausta

The Black T shirt strategy had worked. I was inside the cut off by a long way and now all I had to do was wander up the remaining 5k (5-600m of ascent) and it would be over. The race rules are that you either have to ascend with your support crew (Fi) or another athlete. Fi was dead keen to go as she planned to do the race in 2010. We set off. She the shepherd striding away and choosing the route and me the faithful, knackered, sheepdog trying to keep to heel. Actually the mountain path, although very rock, was a welcome change from the tarmac. I felt much better than i thought and we made good time – meaning that no one overtook us – apart from 1 cheery Norwegian girl who was running with her support team struggling to keep up. The weather had closed in quite a bit so the top was now no longer visible. I’m not sure whether this was good or bad. All of a sudden I felt a bit light-headed. Time for some food. Then I realised that I hadn’t eaten for sometime. I munched on a PowerBar as we continued to climb and then I felt sick. I resisted the urge to chuck up although it would have been something different to do. Lost of support crew were descending, having got their athlete to the top, and there were even some with race numbers

“Duurrrr, why didn’t you just get the lift down? Have I missed something? Is there a Gold T shirt for walking back down again. I don’t like gold anyway, so I’ll take the lift”

The we reached the false flat. Still not there but the top was back in view…and still some way. “Keep going. You’ve got the T black shirt but it’s not over til you reach the top” A few more steps. “Athletes to the  front, athletes to the rear, but I’m stuck in the middle with you” No one racing now, all just engaged in their own personal battle with the mountain. The some descending comedians approach. “Hey, doing well. Its only 15 minutes to the top now! Nearly There”. So I think “Does that mean it’s taken you 15 mins to get down to here or it’s going to take us 15 mins to get up there” In my tired state I could still smell a rat! We pressed on. Then more comedians “Only 10 mins now. Keep going”. Same question! Then another comedian but on with a different clock “15 minutes to go now” “Oh fffff….. Stop he’s only trying to help. The EIT seems worse at altitude! Right, getting bored and tired now, so back to counting steps. 100 then look up, no nearer, 100more then look up, a bit nearer. 100 more, I can see the sign, 100 more I  can hear clapping, 100 oops no didn’t quite get there. I’ve made it. NO we’ve made it. I couldn’t have done it without Fi or Andy or the rest of the support crew that helped me during training (I’ll write a special article about the value of a support crew later)

The end. A fantastic journey of 10 months. I’ve enjoyed every bit of it and now I’m standing on top of the world (metaphorically) with a great sunset and my best friend. Life doesn’t get much better than this. And then we had tomato soup.