Chasing Kona

by Rob Cummins

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  Chapter 12

  A coach and belief

  I shouldn't have any reason to think I can qualify for the Ironman World Championships in Kona. It's reserved for the top two to three per cent of the world’s fastest fittest Ironman triathletes in the world. With the exception of a couple of very small local events I don't win races. I don't even win my age group and in the bigger races I come nowhere.

  In March of 2010 I didn't let any of that get in the way of asking Ais if she thought that qualifying for Kona was a realistic target for me and she in turn didn't let any of it get in the way of telling me she thought I could. If she had said ‘Rob you're dreaming, cop yourself on’, I would have moved on and it would have remained nothing more than a daydream to entertain me during my training rides and runs.

  Ais believed I could get to Kona long before I did, and more importantly she believed it long before I had done anything that would normally lead someone to that conclusion. So in the absence of actually believing in myself I just trusted in her belief in me. In March we both entered Ironman UK, which was on in July. That gave us about five months training before the race. I had been off the bike and out of the pool for about a year, while concentrating on the new business. We were running fit but that’s a very different thing to being ready to complete, never mind race an Ironman. It would be a fairly big request for someone who was already a fast triathlete aiming to get back into shape. For me, as a back of the pack triathlete to get to a level where I would be in the top seven or eight of my age group and inside the top fifty overall in a race with over 2000 participants was almost a ridiculous target.

  The biggest part of making the decision to try to qualify was Aisling's belief that I could do it. Looking at the numbers it was a completely irrational idea, if not a fantasy. In my first Ironman I finished in the bottom quarter of the field, taking almost twelve-and-a-half hours, coming 240th in my age group and 951st overall. That put me almost three hours and over 900 places away from qualifying, according to last year’s IMUK results.

  My second attempt in Ironman Switzerland – after a big increase in training – moved me up a grand total of 51 places overall. Qualifying would therefore only require an improvement of about 860 places, not to mention having to go an hour faster on a much harder, slower course. Ironman UK is renowned as being one of the hardest and hilliest Ironman races in Europe and it's a much slower course than my last race in Zurich where I had barely broken eleven hours. This one needed to have a nine at the start of the finishing time and I was also going to have to make that improvement in only five months.

  I tried telling myself that I wasn't that far off the qualifying standard if you looked at the individual sports. The reality though was that I was a long way short when you had to put them together on race day – a very long way off.

  Swim: Just over an hour.

  Bike: About 5.5 hours at an average speed of 32-33kph.

  Run: I would then need a 3:20 marathon.

  Add in two transitions and it all added up to just under ten hours. Like I said, I wasn't that far off doing them individually as fast as I would need to qualify, but doing any of them at the required speed would have me at my limit. I kept telling myself that putting them together should be achievable and I just needed to find the ‘magic bullet’ that would push me onto the next level.

  By way of background, let me tell you a little bit about Aisling. Actually by the end of this book I'll have told you quite a bit about her as she has again and again been a hugely pivotal and influential part of my story. Anyway, there are, to my mind, two types of people. There’s the type who when you entrust them with something such as an idea or a dream you might have they may scoff, or maybe while seeming to agree that it’s a good idea they go on to point out all of the reasons why someone like you couldn't or shouldn't do something. The other type of person is the one who listens to your idea and tells you to go for it. They encourage you and make you believe that even if it's going to be a stretch for you that you should try anyway. They start to suggest ideas, places to start or ways to do it. That second type of person describes my Aisling. The other important thing to point out about Ais is that if she thinks it's a bad idea or a pipe dream she will usually tell me, quite quickly.

  So Ais believed in me and I trusted her. That was enough to start with, but we didn't really have a next step. The problem was neither of us knew what that next action should be. Obviously I needed to swim, bike and run but there was more to it that that. How much should I swim and how far and what type of sessions? Open water or pool? Coached or club or group or solo? All of the same questions and more applied to the bike and funnily enough to the run. Then there was the question of how to mix the sessions. How many hard ones? Should I train hard twice one day then easy the next day? Or maybe train hard for two or three days, followed by a couple of easy ones? How many hours a week would I need to train? Ten, fifteen, twenty or thirty? We had no idea. There were many more questions than answers.

  So I took the obvious next step and I had a word with Google and came back with 27,000,000 answers, most of which contradicted each other. ‘I qualified on an average of six hours training a week,’ claimed one search result. ‘The average Kona qualifier trains eighteen to twenty hours a week, but thirty-plus hour weeks aren't unheard of,’ said another.

  My favourite was this one, from one of the most useful resources I've found on Ironman training. It’s a website called www.endurancecorner.com and the article is written by one of their contributors and coaches, a triathlete himself, called Alan Couzens.

  According to VO2max data from the Cooper institute, Kona qualifiers are in the top 0.5%-.0025% of the population when it comes to fitness. In other words, if you’re a young (college age guy) and we randomly sampled 200 folks from your dorm, you would consistently be the fittest. Taking this a little further, if you’re a 40-something guy living in a pretty good-sized town of 40,000 people, you’re the fittest guy in town! This kind of stat doesn’t happen without living a little differently to those 39,999 folks who have more ‘normal’ fitness.

  Jesus,that's a tall order, not to mention a fairly wide range of answers to the original question! I had narrowed the required training down to somewhere between six and thirty hours a week. And then I only needed to become the fittest person I know.

  Ais being the clever half of the equation decided the thing to do was to find someone who knew the answers and could teach us what we needed to know, or better yet, to coach me. We knew of someone that fitted the bill. He was a very experienced triathlete who had raced as a high level professional and was now coaching. I had known him for a couple of years and he's what I think of as a very ‘instinctual’ type of coach. He hadn't just learned it all in a classroom or from a textbook. I'd seen him make observations on athletes’ form and technique after watching them run for a couple of hundred metres. He had a very good trained eye and a really good understanding of training and technique. More importantly, he knew if it was something that should be fixed or left alone. If it was something that needed to be changed he knew what drills or exercises were needed to do that too. We'd seen him have very good success with a number of athletes and we both thought he was the one to ask. So we asked him and he promptly said it wasn't possible!

  Maybe if I did two years of serious training, but probably even then he didn't think five months was realistic. That only slowed us for a second before changing approach and asking if he knew how to coach someone who had the ability to get to Kona. He said ‘yes’, of course he knew how to do that. We asked him to disregard what he thought about my ability or chances and coach me as he would someone whom he believed could do it. He thought about it briefly before agreeing. I think he thought we were both either stupid or crazy, but he decided that he'd take me on.

  I'd learned something about belief from Aisling. If you just start to take the same steps that someone who can already do what you want to achieve, you can get there despite
not really believing at the start. Belief often follows action. It doesn’t matter whether you believe in the possibility at the beginning or not. You just need to start.

  I'd learned this lesson from Ais the previous year when I was less than a month away from my first ultramarathon. I was really struggling with doubts whether I could do it or not. It was a sixty-nine-kilometre race in France (Ais of course being a much more experienced ultrarunner kept calling it only a ‘short ultra’, which wasn't helping with my self esteem) I was worried. Driving home from another race one evening I sort of let slip that I was more than a little concerned.

  What if I don't finish? What if I can't finish? What if...? I blubbered uncontrollably. Now that I’d started I didn’t seem to be able to control my stupid mouth. Ais cut across me in mid- sentence. ‘What if you had to get out of the car right now and make your own way home? What then? Would you just sit at the side of the road and stop and feel sorry for yourself?’

  It wasn't a threat, just her pragmatic way of teaching me something. At least I don't think it was a threat because we were about forty-five kilometres from home at that point and it would have been a long way to go in the dark. ‘Well, no,’ I said. ‘I'd start running.’

  ‘And if you couldn't run anymore?’, she asked. ‘What then? Would you stop and give up?’

  ‘No, at that stage I guess I'd walk till I could run again.’

  ‘But you'd make it home?’

  ‘Yeah, of course,’ I answered and then the penny dropped.

  ‘Well that’s what you do in the race. You just keep moving until you get to the end.’

  It was really only after that short conversation that I started to believe I could do it. But I'd taken the decision to enter and do the race months ago, long before I believed I could do it. I'd started taking steps towards the goal. We now had most of the ingredients needed to give me the best chance to succeed. All that was left was to start taking the steps. Time was ticking. It was now just over four months to go.

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  Chapter 13

  Simple, not easy

  The coach got stuck in straight away and didn't hold back. He was either going to beat me into submission and break me in the process or get me into good enough shape to qualify. He was running a training camp the following weekend and suggested that if myself and Ais could get the time off from the shop we should come along. We did and it started the biggest nine days of training I'd ever done, clocking up almost thirty-three hours, including a sprint triathlon. The sprint race was on day eight of that first nine-day block. I should have been exhausted, especially as I cycled over an hour to get to it, but instead I finished third overall and won my age group. It was my best finish ever and my first age group win. With almost thirty hours training in my legs, I was sure I’d come nowhere and only be doing the race as a training exercise.

  To show how different that nine-day training block was from anything I'd done before and to put it into context, my previous three-and-a-half weeks training hours looked like this:

  Before the coach

  March 2011

  Week 1

  Total hours 4:50

  Swim 2:35 6400m 4 sessions

  Bike 1:30 32k 1 session

  Run 45 minutes 8.5k 1 session

  Week 2

  Total hours 9:40

  Swim 2:35 7800m 3 sessions

  Bike 4:55 160k 2 sessions

  Run 2:10 23.5k 2 sessions

  Week 3

  Total hours 11:45

  Swim :30 1100m 1 session

  Bike 10:00 268k 4 sessions

  Run 1:15 15.5k 3 sessions

  Week 4

  Total hours 16:30

  Swim 1:00 2300m 1 session

  Bike 11:20 281k 4 sessions

  Run 4:10 49.5k 4 sessions

  I started working with the coach in week 5. The first session he gave me was on Saturday, which was when we were on his training camp. As a result most of this weeks’ hours were in the last two days of the week. Of the 19h25mins training done that week Saturday and Sunday totalled 12h30.

  After the coach started

  Week 5

  Total hours 19:25

  Swim 4:50 9700m 6 sessions

  Bike 8:40 230k 3 sessions

  Run 5:55 62k 5 sessions

  Week 6

  Total hours 20:30

  Swim 4:00 11100m 5 sessions

  Bike 11:10 323k 6 sessions

  Run 5:20 61k 5 sessions

  Up to the end of week 6 totalled the biggest training load I'd ever done by a long way. Nine days, 33 hours and I had my best race result on day eight of this block. I was stunned. I thought I had discovered the ‘magic bullet’ we are all searching for and it was so simple – just train lots. But simple does not mean easy. In fact I was to learn that sometimes simple is very, very hard.

  At around the same time we were approached by a newspaper wanting to write a feature about Aisling the success of the new business and how she still managed to fit in her training and run at an elite level. When Ais asked about whether I would be needed for the interview the answer made it clear in a polite sort of way that an ordinary back of the pack triathlete who ran a triathlon shop was not newsworthy so I wasn't required.

  I said nothing and just smiled. Inside I stewed and thought of the journalist, ‘I'll show you’. At the same time we had been working with one of the biggest Irish outdoors sports magazines. I helped with content for product testing and reviews and we had become good friends with the editor. I suggested to Ais a while after her newspaper interview that maybe there might be interest in a series of articles in the Outsider magazine following my progress trying to qualify for Kona. She thought it was a good idea, so we approached Vanessa the editor who was very supportive and despite the seemingly impossible task I'd set myself, she decided to run with it. So now not only was I taking on a major challenge that no one except Aisling believed I could do, but I was going to announce my intention in a national publication. I figured that in the worst-case scenario we would get some good publicity for the shop. It's amazing how motivating that series of articles became over the next couple of months when I didn't feel like training. There were a lot of days that the fear of public humiliation was more than enough to get my runners or bike shoes on and to get moving.

  April was really my first full month of proper training working with the new coach, and I totalled over ninety hours. This was probably a 300 per cent increase over any month I'd done before. I averaged over twenty hours most weeks with the longest being over twenty-five hours. It remained one of my most intense months from a training point of view. The other numbers for the month were:

  April 2011

  Total Training hours 91:10

  Swim 18:25 35600m 14 sessions

  Bike 52:00 1359km 19 sessions

  Run 20:45 226km 16 sessions

  May started out in a similar vein with another twenty-hour week, before dropping drastically to seven hours in week 2. This wasn't completely as planned. It was just that I was exhausted from the lprevious six weeks and couldn't keep hitting the sessions. The coach didn't seem to be surprised by this. In fact he was probably more surprised that I had lasted as long as I had before going into meltdown. He adjusted the programme, taking all of the hard and long sessions out for the week and dropping most bike and runs, but left in all the swims, actually adding in a couple of extras. With the exception of one three-kilometre swim they were all very short. By keeping in the frequency it helped me continue to work on my weakest area, my swimming technique, without the physical load of hard sessions.

  The easy week had the desired effect and I started to recover, but instead of getting back to the training plan after that, work and life interfered. I missed sessions and the ones I did were cut short. I ended up with only three hours training from Monday to Saturday. The following day, Sunday we were starting an eight-day bike sportive event which was to be a key block in my training.

  Consistency is one of the most im
portant aspects of Ironman training and for a long time it was an area with which I struggled. Either because I overdid it in training and wasn't fully recovered for the next session or I got busy at work and instead of reducing my training volume I stopped altogether. Getting to Kona doesn't require superhuman talent. It only requires that you train a lot of hours consistently for a very long period of time. It’s a very simple concept that’s very hard to implement. We not only had to push up to but often to exceed my limits in trying to stretch my ability far enough. At the same time we had to make sure we didn't go so far that I couldn't continue training.

  It’s all about the big picture. It matters much less what specific session you do on any given day in the pool, whether it is hard or easy, fast or slow. What mattered more was that I was there every Monday and Wednesday and Thursday and Friday. What also mattered was being able to fit in an average of three or four hours of training a day, six days a week, every week for probably ten months in a year. It all came down to how much I wanted it. My Dad calls it ‘having a fire in your belly’. Ais says it’s about desire, of wanting and needing something so badly that you will do whatever it takes to achieve it. How badly do you want it, how hard are you willing to work to get there and how many ‘sacrifices’ are you willing to make along the way?