It has begun!

I’m here at college in Provo, UT attending BYU full-time and preparing to apply to dental schools this summer. As daunting and time consuming as that sounds, it doesn’t even compare to the mental and physical exhaustion of preparing for my first Ironman. Luckily, I won’t be undertaking this endeavor alone. My brother(Robby) and Dad(Randy) are also training and preparing for the same race, along with two of our family friends, Trey Leonard and Sam Barnes. You can follow along with the training that Robby and Randy are doing by reading Robby’s blog at http://www.ironprep2009.blogspot.com. In the 6 or 7 months since I registered for the race back in July, my preparation has consisted of me acquiring gear mostly through birthday and Christmas presents (yes, I might have taken some advances on a few holidays from my parents), taking a beginning swimming PE class, and gathering as much information as I can to help me train successfully.

I started my official training 3 weeks ago upon the start of the school semester which gave me 24 weeks exactly to prepare. As a student here at BYU, I have many resources which are greatly aiding me in training. One of the biggest assets is being a member of the triathlon club here at school. From the club, we have a team of guys and a team of girls training to compete in collegiate nationals this spring. There are team practices every weekday along with an outdoor ride/run brick every Saturday morning. Another benefit of the BYU triathlon club is that I was able to buy a 4 month pass to Gold’s Gym which gives me more access to pools for swimming and allows me to attend our club hosted triathlon spinning classes.

In my school schedule I was able to enroll in an hour-long swimming PE class twice a week which has helped me a lot. Our instructor is the assistant coach of the swim team here so her workouts, drills, and critiquing really help me to improve on my form. The other PE class that I was able to add is a jogging course taught be the cross country head coach so his training advice is also very valuable in addition to the fact that being in the class gets me some run workouts in during my school day.

These first three weeks have seen me swimming in the pool nearly every day and boy what a difference that has made! My swimming background is very limited. Going swimming to me always meant heading down to lake and snorkeling or just goofing around. The Ironman swim has always mentally been the most intimidating of the three legs for me. My first day in the intermediate swim class this semester required us to do a pretest consisting of a 650m timed swim. I think I went about 2 laps freestyle before having to roll over and backstroke it the rest of way. Near the end of that swim I was clinging onto the floating lane markers and puking in my mouth trying to make it to the required 650 meters. One full week later I did an 800m continuous freestyle swim and at the 650m mark I had already shaved six and a half minutes off of my first day of class. Friday I did a swim workout that totaled 3200m and I wasn’t even feeling as much tightness in the shoulders as I had expected. My confidence is growing immensely and now the most intimidating part of the Ironman swim is no longer the distance, but rather the start, especially after watching these videos (1,2) with all of those bodies crashing into the water and clawing out to the first turn. I may need to integrate some of this guy's tactics into my training.

(here's Friday's test ride...I added a thermal shirt and extra pair of gloves for Saturday)

The weather was decent for few weeks so I decided to get some outdoor rides in on my bike. The first one was just a short 15 miles to make sure everything was working and that my gear would be warm enough because the following day was the weekly triathlon club outdoor ride/run brick. We left at 9am and the temperature outside of my car read 15 degrees. I had 3 pairs of gloves on for crying out loud! We did a 27 mile ride that morning and it was awesome. COLD, but awesome. I rode with the lead pack of guys and they push it hard the entire way. Even with my shoe cover booties, my feet froze and didn’t unthaw until about a mile and a half into our run. I do like running in this cold weather and my highlight run from this last week was a 10 mile run along the Provo river trail that saw all the vegetation absolutely covered in frost and very picturesque.

Well thanks for checking in on the blog. I will try to stay current with updating at the end of every week so they should be a little shorter in the future. 21 weeks and counting!!!

Week 1: S: 2.63 mi; B: spinning; R: 7 mi
Week 2: S: 4.81 mi; B: 41 mi + spinning; R: 12 mi
Week 3: S: 5.25 mi; B: spinning; R: 16 mi