An Update to my Triathlon Journey

My beautiful wife and I in Aspen, Colorado

Well, it's been awhile since I've posted and I figured it was time to update everyone on my triathlon journey.  Our last post was around the time of Ironman Austria and since then, much has happened.  I took about two months off while my wife and I got married in Colorado.  We then took a nice honeymoon in Kenya to see some incredible animals (nature is a cruel place) and spent a short period of time hiking through Uganda and Rwanda trekking Mountain Gorillas.  A fantastic trip, I highly recommend it to anyone.

St. George, Utah.

Since then, I have delved deeper into my pursuit of health and fitness with the goal of focusing on the 70.3 mile distance.  Ultimately, my goal has been to compete and complete another Ironman 70.3 with a PR.  Not only that, but I am hoping to do this on a much more challenging course.  I settled on an early season race (for reasons I will explain in another blog post) and one in a beautiful setting.  Ironman 70.3 St. George, Utah. This is a stunning course with a 1 mile swim around a beautiful red rock island, a 56 mile bike with 3,500 ft vertical gain through the "feared" snow canyon, and finishing with a grueling 13.1 mile run with 1,200 ft vertical gain.  No easy feat.

So far, my training is pretty much on target minus a few road blocks.  I have taken a much stricter approach to training.  I have fully built up a training plan including base, build and peak phases.  I have broken down weeks based on training volume.  I have dialed in my diet and focused more on fat as an energy source leaving my glycogen for shorter sprint and power efforts sprinkled throughout (I'll delver further into these in upcoming posts).  All-in-all, I am happy.

I immediately regretted the run as I knew I was going to hurt myself.

I am currently less than seven weeks out from this race and had one of my largest "road blocks" a few weeks ago.  When running through a forest trail in the Philippines, I hit an open "less" technical portion of the trail and dropped my attention for a split second.  Next thing I knew, I had stepped on a root inverting my ankle along with the sound/feeling of pops on the lateral side of my left ankle.  I slowly hobbled back to our resort (took me nearly 4 times as long as it took me to get out there) and started the "p-r-i-c-e" (protect, rest, ice, compression and elevate).  My foot had doubled in size and it was quite uncomfortable, worse yet, we had less than 12 hours before we started our long commute home including four legs (boat, flight, flight, flight) that would last over 24 hours.  A few days later, the swelling started to subside and the bruising was prominent from my heel to the tips of my toes.

36 hours post ankle sprain

The good news was that I could still bear weight on my foot with only minor discomfort.  The largest problem was the lack of mobility due to the swelling.  Long story somewhat short, it's now 2.5 weeks later and I am able to run (albeit a bit slower).  I'm incredibly lucky that this was not a 4-6 week recovery before getting back into my shoes.

There is much to catch up on, but that will come in additional posts (including upcoming changes to personal life, what I have learned about personalized healthcare/nutrition, training tips, and much more).  As for now, I have 7 weeks minus my taper period. So I have to make these next few weeks count.  Today is an intense interval brick.

Here we go!