This is one of 14 updates about my 2014 challenge to complete an Ironman – you can see a list of the others here. Along with being an Ironman hopeful, I am a practitioner of the quantified self movement. One week per quarter for the past seven year’s I’ve tracked everything I did for a week in a spreadsheet. This data has been great to see how my life has evolved over time and is particularly interesting now that my training plan is in full swing. When I started researching what it would take to train for an Ironman, I had a hard time finding real life examples from other athletes. There were some posts by professionals and there were training plans, but it was hard to see what real life would look like. Especially for someone that was also a husband, father and working professional. I hope that this post will
I have not made much progress in the past two months. To date this year I’ve read: The Millionaire Next Door* David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants* The Joy of Less The 4-Hour Workweek* The Art of War* Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People* Warren Buffett’s Management Secrets* The Triathlete’s Training Bible I am currently Reading: Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Shepherding a Child’s Heart Les Miserables* *Denotes audiobook I’m having a hard time believing Les Miserables is only 60 hours. I feel like I’ve been listening to it forever and checking the table of contents recently I realized I’m not even a third of the way through it. I’ve grown a bit tired of it and now instead of listening to audio books for all of my workouts, I’m only using them for my
This is one of 14 updates about my 2014 challenge to complete an Ironman – you can see a list of the others here. I have now completed five months of my nine month Ironman training plan. Next week I finish with my base period, hit my max mileage… and then the hard work starts. I am training based on a custom plan that I designed. In this post I’ll share my philosophy and workout plan. But first a training update. Training Data May has been a solid month and last week was one of my best weeks of training yet. In the past seven days I’ve hit new distance records in all three events: 2.5 mile swim, 92 mile bike and 15 mile run. I have also taken steps to work on all of my weak areas that I discovered at my training race – detailed here. I have
This is one of 14 updates about my 2014 challenge to complete an Ironman – you can see a list of the others here. I am just about at the half way point of my Ironman training which will span from January until September. This is a great time to get a benchmark of how my fitness is as well as to identify my strengths and weaknesses. That will let me adjust my training plan accordingly to maximize my results come Ironman Lake Tahoe. To get some data on my progress so far I signed up for the Wildflower Triathlon’s Olympic distance race. Olympic distance is about a quarter of the length of an Ironman so this is a good benchmark, but won’t throw off my training too much. But before I detail the results of that race, here is how my training has been going. Training Data I have
This is one of 14 updates about my 2014 challenge to complete an Ironman – you can see a list of the others here. I am now six months out from my race. I would love to say that things have gone swimmingly, but I feel like I need to be honest in this blog. The last month has been a rough one for training as I hit physical and mental blocks. The good news is that I, have found a path around them and feeling back on track – I’ll discuss this more later in this post. Training Data The chart below is my training which I am now grouping by week since the daily level is too small to be legible. There isn’t a key but blue is biking, yellow is swimming & green is running. You’ll also notice some red (surfing) and dark green (stationary bike trainer)
I am ahead of schedule… sort of. To date this year I’ve read: The Millionaire Next Door* David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants* The Joy of Less The 4-Hour Workweek* The Art of War* Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People* Warren Buffett’s Management Secrets* I am currently Reading: Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Shepherding a Child’s Heart Le Miserables* *Denotes audiobook That is why I feel I am only ‘sort of’ ahead of schedule. Six of my eight completed books were audio books. I haven’t been reading as much as I’d intended, but I have really been enjoying my waterproof iPod during my training bikes, swims & run (plus the occasional car trip). I had intended to stick to non-fiction for audiobooks, but I was cruising through them. Some are only 3-4 hours long
This is one of 14 updates about my 2014 challenge to complete an Ironman – you can see a list of the others here. Big Goals Goals are a good thing. They help us to focus and give us direction. But goals that are easy to achieve defeat much of the benefit of having goals in the first place. I much prefer big goals. Big hairy audacious goals (BHAGs). I’m often inspired by the founders of my current employer, Steve & Clara, and one such way is the size of the goal they set out to achieve when they founded Hearsay Social. They wanted to change the way people do business. Over the past four years the company has taken huge steps in that direction – steps that we might not have taken if we did not have BHAGs. Looking at my 2014 challenge, I wanted to complete an Ironman.
2014 Goal: Read 24 Books I’m on track.* In January I completed ‘The Millionaire Next Door’ and am half way through both “Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring” and “David and Goliath”. *The asterisk is because of a decision I made that audiobooks count. It wasn’t my original intent to listen to books, I wanted to read them. As I started I realized how much time I would be spending training for my Ironman, 1-5 hours a day, so I invested in a waterproof mp3 player and got some audiobooks so I could leverage that time. I’m going to try to consume less than 50% of my books as audiobooks and I’m going to try to limit it to the non-fictions. I feel like I am able to learn from a non-fiction even when listening to it while I’m not able to slow down and imagine the world
Yesterday I surfed Mavericks. This has been a goal of mine for about two years and I’ve been actively preparing for the past year. I am so stoked to have completed this challenge and very grateful to have done so without harm. Here is the story along with some of my thoughts and observations. Final Preparations The last month or so has been amazing for surfing in central California. We’ve had a run of swell where it seems every other day is 10ft+. I’ve been getting out to Ocean Beach before work and spending plenty of time in the water. There is a saying (or at least there should be) that it is better to succeed late than to fail on time. I originally challenged myself to surf Mavericks in 2013 but extended my deadline because Mavericks is a winter wave and only broke twice in the 2013 half of this winter.
Last year I blogged about a few efforts I had defined for my year and really enjoyed it. I stretched myself a bit, had something to strive for, and had a decent success rate. One of the most surprising benefits was that by explicitly setting a challenge, and knowing I would do this in future years, I had an easier time saying no to other ideas I had. I realized that I could set them as a challenge in the future, and thus felt no guilt that I wasn’t doing anything to achieve them in 2013. This year I will do the same. I’ve of course learned a bit and will be making a few modifications to the process. Goal – Something I want to accomplish that is measurable and relatively continual. eg. exercise X times per week or watch less than X hours of TV per week. Theme – A