Cairns Ironman - Part 1 - the build up

For those of you out there who think short stories are good, I would recommend you skip to the race day blog. However, I will start the story a little under 7 months prior to race day - the day I signed up to a full Ironman distance triathlon - 20 November 2013. There was nothing remarkable about  the day to many people. Bex and I were back from honeymoon and I decided I wanted a new challenge. We talked, decided I was crazy and then Bex agreed to a post Ironman holiday in Port Douglas and all of a sudden I was signed up.

For the uninitiated, an Ironman consists of: 3.8km swim, 180km cycle and then a 42.2km marathon. 226km of pain/pleasure/suffering/enjoyment, etc. When (indeed if) you make it to the race day blog you will notice this barely begins to cover the emotions I felt on race day.

Training began by ne asking Bex for a turbo trainer for Christmas- long hours on the bike could be better covered without moving and to prepareffor Cairns humidity the garage would be my best friend. I also did lots of running - I trained for and did Six Foot in 5:07 (a PB of 1 hour and 18 minutes), Adam and I did the Wild horse Criterium (an 80km Bush run in Queensland starting at 2am on Easter Sunday) and many other races. I joined Balmoral tri club and tried to enjoy the swim... I did some short course tris with them to get better at transitions, I did the Husky Long Course tri (almost a Half Ironman) and I meticulously wrote all my training down on my trusty excel spreadsheet.

The numbers (from 2 December 2013):

Total. training - 260 hours
Swim - 37km
Cycle - 2,286km
Run - 1,162km

That sounds like a decent amount of training to me. However, that training does not assist with one thing about becoming an interstate Ironman... Packing my bike into a bike box (borrowed from an NRG friend, Andrew Lovett).

Bex and I did get the bike packed and then set off for the airport on Friday morning. Nicky Darwin was joining us and Adam and Evie would be staying in Sydney... Or so I thought. We get to the airport and all the Darwins are there - coming up just to support me trying to do an Ironman! Now, given we live so far from home, it shows how awesome it is to have great friends:-) Most importantly (and sorry if this becomes a theme...) Bex is amazing. I cannot believe she puts up with everything I do - she must be nuts!

Anyway, Friday night is the welcome dinner and we hear some great stories of people overcoming adversity to complete an Ironman. I won't go into them here, but Google John MacLean if you need inspiration. Saturday morning I did an 11km cycle to check the bike was ok (all seemed well...) And then took it to transition 1 in Palm Cove (30km north of Cairns).

I did a walkthrough of T1 and checked out the swim start - very choppy waters:-(  I packed, repacked and repacked again all of my trsnsition bags and all was looking good. Big pasta dinner, lots of coke and then a good night's sleep (until 4am) and then race day will be here!

Come back soon for the blog "What happens in an Ironman..."