Karen and Kate's journey to Ironman and beyond

Someone has recently tried to convince me that there is something of merit about participating in ball sports.  The opinion was that it is possible with a bit of hard work for anyone, even me, to be taught the art of being cruel to poor defenseless spherical objects. Something I am sorry but I have to dispute. One reason I do long slow endurance sports is because I don't have to think or act fast, well, most of the time.  Of course there are exceptions, for example when you are about to leave the vertical plane on a bike, or make inconvenient contact with an unexpectedly placed tree branch, fellow athlete or large hole in the ground. Most of the time however, as a sloooow distance athlete you can take a less aggressive approach to decision making.  You can pause, think a bit, pass on instructions in a leisurely fashion from an endorphin stupefied brain to the rest of the body, then like a great and stately ocean liner, gradually come to a halt. As an endurance runner I ...

What an amazing day Saturday was for the Rotorua Half Ironman.  The weather forecast was a bit dodgy, showers and some wind predicted.  It turned out to be perfect conditions however, to the point where sunburn was more of a problem than the wet and cold. So Kate had said lets do the early start option.  This was an 5.45 am start being offered to those who had a history of taking more than 7 hours to complete the course.  A smart idea to cut down the mop up of stragglers coming through the bush hours after the event has been wound up, but also it was pointed out that it can be lonely on the trail still finishing off your 21 km if nearly everyone else has gone home. I for one did not regret getting going that 45 minutes earlier one bit, in fact it was a fabulous change which I hope they repeat. So we had a 4 am breakfast, put the bikes in Kate's car, and headed off into what still seemed very much like night.  It was so dark Kate was driving along and she sai...

Another unexpected trip to Wellington, fortunately, taper week, no worries (well, I'm not worried) about doing very little.  I did get out for a run however, and got pleasantly directionally challenged among all of those back streets. It was raining.  I now see why there are so many pedestrian crossing signals at all the intersections, they are to hang onto in the wind to stop foolish runners getting blown into the traffic. Over 6 km, I felt a bit odd pounding up and down city streets dodging in and out of the serious-suited-ones.  Perhaps they felt even more odd when confronted with a large self propelling object in fluorescent green ducking and diving in their midst. Anyway, Rotorua half IM is now just two sleeps away.  Kate has convinced me (well, she has the vehicle), that we need to do the early start which the organisers are kindly offering this year to anyone expecting to do over 7 hours.  The idea is that we don't get lonely out in the bush by oursel...

It is a whole week since we cycled around that big hole in the ground a wee way down country again, that was time number eight.  I remember the first time, we thought a 60 km ride was enough training, that the measly little hills out the back of Whitford were real hills and that hanging onto a convenient powerpole or fencepost was the accepted way to stop to get cleats out of pedals. We did however learn the errors of that sort of thinking with a 10+ hour effort on the road that year, probably the big surprise is that we kept going back every November. Things have come a long way, some rides are easier than others, well, actually they are all hard, some have just been harder than others.  This one for me was strangely eough a good one, it was windy, cold, and rained on and off, but I didn't have that "oh I wish this was over" feeling starting at the foot of the first hill and keeping going till the end.  Why, who knows?  Why does one event work better than another ...