Keep Calm... Yeah Right!

Tuesday, the Challenge Penticton Facebook  peeps posted this:

It's great right? I mean this is my strategy - except perhaps for the keeping calm part. And I feel like I'm training like mad but really, compared to who? I have no idea how many hours anyone else is putting in. And not only that but last week's 20 hour milestone included 4 yoga classes including a couple of Yin/Restorative classes. A good addition to my game plan but perhaps a stretch to call it "training"! Yin classes are really just long-held stretches and Restorative is lying around on cushions remembering to breathe! So this prompted a moment of worry where I wondered... am I on the Kindergarten training plan for an ironman?

When Challenge Penticton posted this, they did so with the panic-inducing words "214 days to race morning!"  I promptly shared it on my Facebook page with the words "OMG. 214 days?". A friend and fellow ironman virgin and Challenge registrant replied with "Meh. 214 days is a long time."

Au contraire, my friend, au contraire! I felt it was my responsibility to point out the obvious flaw in his carefree, non-neurotic reply. 

• That's only 30 weeks. If you swim, bike, run 3x/week, that's only 90 sessions per discipline. Now let's break down the bike since that's where you'll spend most of the race... 

• You're going to be inside on the trainer until may because of the weather... that leaves you 51 rides outside.

• You'll probably miss/shorten another 30% due to rain. Now you're down to 35 rides.

• You'll miss 20% of those just because you don't feel like riding, bringing you down to 28 rides. 

• Count on half a dozen rides to be spoiled by flats and you're down to 22 rides.

• When summer hits and the weather is good, drinking picks up and you'll miss half a dozen due to hangovers. Now you're at 14 rides.

• You go on vacation for 2 weeks.... 8 rides left.

• Maybe you do a couple of races so now you're down to 6 training rides.

• It's Vancouver and everyone wants to visit so you miss a week because you're hosting guests. That means in the next 214 days, you have just 3 good training rides outside!!! 

Clearly what's called for here is a different approach:

Happy training! 212 days...