Last Sunday, after months of preparation I’ve finished my first marathon distance race. My plan was to get to the finish line in 3:45. It took 14 minutes longer though, but I’m still really happy to do it below 4 hours. Here is what I’ve learned.
If you have seen this blog before then you are probably familiar with my list. While it is still a big source of motivation / progress check for me, here are a few things that I’d like to accomplish this year.
Time flies. It seemed like really long time till the North Shore marathon when I signed up. Now there are only 11 weeks left. My training goes well and I’m fitter than ever. I’ll be ready. I believe that I have enough endurance now to complete marathon and most of my focus is on strength and speed. It doesn’t come easy though.
After finishing 70.3 Auckland (and sucking at it!) I knew that it’s time to step up and tackle that 3 headed beast they call Ironman. In the begining I was thinking of doing one in the end of 2014, but in the end I decided to wait till March 2015 and go with Ironman New Zealand. This is how I’m going to prepare for it.
I’m sure many of you heard about the 10,000 hour rule at some point. In short, it states that in becoming a world-class in something requires 10,000 hours of practice. There are many articles disputing that claim, but for the sake of this entry, I will assume that the 10,000 hours rule is correct. Where does it put me then?
This was a long season. It started in London, went through Lanzarote and finished in Auckland in the middle of summer in January (or as the rest of the world call it - winter ;)). That’s why after finishing my 70.3 race I decided to take it little easier for couple of weeks. I let my nutrition go crazy, gained few kilograms (thankfully mostly due to weight lifting) and lost a lot of endurance.
I was too slow and too tired to have good photos taken :p. Instead - photo of Gomez and Brownlee fighing for 1st place!
I don’t think that I’ve ever been so focused in my life. When I ended working for my last company I had the most unproductive period of the last year (and yet it definitely was not the most unproductive period of my life… sad but true). Lack of need of getting up early, not knowing how is next week going to look like and general boredom - not the best combination.
After I moved to Auckland it took me few weeks to settle down and figure out everything. I’ve found quite good gym, near by swimming pool and good places for open water swimming. But most importantly I’ve found new motivation for training. I’ve set up general plan for the whole year again, but that will come to life after my next race. Race, on which I’ve focused all my strength in last few weeks.
I can say that 2013 was the year of changes. It started in London while I was working in big gaming company with even bigger plans ("we will be making 300 million $ per year" they said). I had plans with that company, long term plans. Well, the year ended up on the other part of the world in much smaller (yet still quite big for New Zealand) entertainment company that actually feels more like family sometimes. Life plots crazy scenarios. I started last year with publicly announced Goals and it worked well for me, so let’s make it a tradition.