m2sport

Rich Strauss is an excellent coach and teacher. After the race on Sunday we had a talk about the path ultra-distance athletes take. From entering your first Ironman to qualifying for Ironman Hawaii. He has coached 100’s if not 1000’s of Ironman athletes so he see lots of patterns. The following is an excerpt from an email he sent to all of his athletes. It sums it up pretty well. I’ve completed 3 Ironman events, so you can see where I’m at below.

First Race: don’t know what to expect, a good bit of fear and intimidation, leading to a healthy respect for the distance. Focus on execution and “the experience” rather than performance. LOTS of pre-race nerves, as everything is completely new to you.

Second Race: immediately after the first race, you begin thinking of all the things you could have done better in training and racing to go faster. Your head moves to the right, from “experience” to “performance,” but you still know enough to know you don’t know enough to think you can “race” the thing. Actually, hanging around me for the past year has likely kept you focused on execution instead of performance and racing. You know what to expect on race day and therefore have less fear. You’re still nervous, however. (more…)

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A great day in Lake Placid on Sunday. Cloudy & cool for the swim and bike with a little bit of sun for the run. I love those conditions, and I had a great day because of them.

I couldn’t be happier with my result. I started the day with a poor swim (1:09), but it didn’t really bother me. However, being 768th out of the water created more work. Now I had to navigate through all that bike traffic. Whereas if I would have swam an hour, I wouldn’t have had to work so hard to ride around people. 5 hours and 20 minutes later I was off the bike in 85th place. Nothing like a fast bike to put you in contention for an Ironman Hawaii slot. (more…)
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Mert and I worked on some T-shirts earlier this summer for my trip to Ironman USA in Lake Placid. We based it off an article Rich Strauss wrote about how to race an Iron distance event.

The purpose of the swim is to get you on the bike.
The purpose of the bike is to eat for the run.

The purpose of the first run lap is to put money in the bank to pay the monkey that will jump on your back the second lap. The Second Lap Monkey. He is very a big monkey.

If this is your first Ironman, you have probably felt in your training everything that you will feel on race day, except the Second Lap Monkey. You can’t train for that.

The Second Lap Monkey carries a big stick, and its name is Pain.

Love it, hate it, get angry at it. Breathe it with every breath, feel it with every step and use it. It lets you know you are still alive, more alive than most people will ever be in their whole lives. The clock keeps on ticking and everything bad must eventually come to an end.

All you have to do is keep running in a straight line until someone tells you to stop.

Check out the back of the shirt.

Let me know if anyone wants to buy a T-shirt. We have about 10 left.