Ste-Agathe, Quebec Canada Sportriple 32C / 90F Sunny

Total Time = 5h 48m 21s Overall Rank = 38/57 Age Group = 40-44 Age Group Rank = 5/7

A little bit of history…

Last March I turned 40. I tried to fight it, but no matter what I did the days kept on ticking by so I knew, that because of forces that were out of my control, I would turn 40. Friends told me that it would not hurt; it would be just another day. Lies, all lies!

My struggle against turning 40 started the previous October. One day I woke up and decided that although the inevitable could not be avoided, I would prove to myself that being 40 doesn’t mean that from that point on I might as well just sit home counting the days go by; that at 40 I could still be fit! That morning, having never jogged before in my life, I decided that I would run the Ottawa Marathon at the end of the following May. Hey, I’d done sports in the past; I figured that 8 months would be enough to train up to that distance…

So, within a week I found a training program on the net, bought running shoes, a HRM and was off training.

Now, for the last 20 years I’ve always though that jogging seemed about as interesting as watching paint dry and you know what; that’s how it turned out to be. Four to five times a week, I would put on my gear, get out of the house and do my run. Within minutes the though of aging would be replaced by “this is so freak’n booooring”! To make matters worst, most of my runs were done at night. You see, I still wanted to spend some time with my wife and almost 4-year-old son and do my part in maintaining the house. To do so, I would do my runs after my kid went to bed; the chores were finished and spent some time with my wife. So, my runs would rarely start before 8:30PM and sometimes as late as 10:00PM.

I can already hear you say: “why not just run in the morning”? Tried it, hated it even more! Are you nuts, get up early just to do something that I find absolutely mind numbing?

So the first month went by. Still hated running.

November came around with some shin splints. A few sessions at the massage therapist along with some instructions on how to stretch took care of that.

Things started to look up by December. Even though I still found jogging as much fun as melting ice with my armpits; it felt good once I got going (the running, not the ice melting…).

Winter went well; kept on following the program… Then sometimes in February I had an epiphany. To me, being able to complete a marathon meant that I wasn’t old; I could still play hard. But, and here is the epiphany: if a failed to do the marathon it would mean that yes, I was old. All of a sudden this marathon thing took on a whole other dimension…

Anyway, to make the rest of the story shorter and get to the half ironman, I ended up injuring myself during the final two long runs before the race and couldn’t do the marathon.

So, the moral of that story is that yes, I am getting old.

The story obviously doesn’t end here: all that running now had me somewhat addicted to exercise.

But what was there to do? I figured that I might as well bike… You see, I have this other age-related thing that goes along the line “I’ll be old the summer I can’t complete a 100k bike ride”. Do you think I’m age obsessed? Maybe a bit anal? So sure, the marathon didn’t go quite as planned but dammit I would be doing my ride!

So off biking I went.

Pretty soon a thought came to mind: I was biking, I knew I’d be running again eventually so hey, why not swim and do a half Ironman sometime during the summer? Seemed reasonable?

Three more months of training went by and finally, the day came.

Enter the Ste-Agathe half Ironman. This race I did complete and it was really, really satisfying.

By now it was no longer about the age thing; it was purely about seeing if I could rise to the challenge that I had given myself and complete a race. As I type this I realize that the thing that I feared last October wasn’t the loss of fitness or health; it was the erosion of will, drive and motivation. The commitment and effort that I put into this task proved to me that yes, I was still alive and not yet diminished by time.

So, finally, without any further delays or non-triathlon-related ramblings, is the race report…

Woke up at 4:30AM to get ready. Had some cold noodles with cold tomato sauce (no access to kitchen to heat things up as I was in a motel room with the family). It was like eating erasers. Bad start to the day but I felt good nonetheless: not nervous and well rested.

Mixed a big bottle of Perpetuem for use on the bike ride and a smaller one for the run. The big bottle had 8 scoops of the stuff for around 1000 calories and 12 endurolite tablets. The small bottle had 4 scoops for 500 calories and 6 endurolites.

Got to the site by 5:45, which gave me lots of time to get ready for the 8:00AM start.

1000 yards of jogging and 300m swim.