Skip to main content

Ironman UK 2012 - Friday

I thought I'd blog the experience of doing an Ironman event, as it has commanded a lot of my time and attention in the last few months, and I really wanted to capture my thoughts and feelings as the big day approaches.  For those not in the know, Ironman UK is a long distance triathlon - 3.8km swim, 180 km bike, an then a marathon run, which is held yearly in Bolton, NW England.

I travelled up today, a long but uneventful drive in the faithful Peugeot 308, and I've managed to get all the logistics sorted : register for the event, find and check in at the hotel, and attend the mandatory race briefing.   The briefing was basically a talk thru of the rules, course and overall event plan, and the audience was about 600 wasted-looking athletes.  I guess we've been doing some training!  I was chatting to a nice guy from just down the road (Altrincham) who, like me, just wants to hear those words "You are an Ironman!"

Looks like we'll be getting dry weather on race day (Sunday), with a bit of a breeze.   Definitely going to be a day for the considered and generous application of sunblock in both T1 and T2, so I am glad I have two sets of the stuff - T1 and T2 are in two different places!

I am planning to hit the pasta party in about 30 minutes, cram a lot of food down my face, chat to a few other competitors.    Will blog a bit more later!

The Next day ...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ironman UK 2012 - Friday evening and Saturday

During Friday afternoon I laid out all my kit in the hotel room, and bagged. Sad to say I even rehearsed the changes, just to make sure I had the right stuff in the right bags. Then I bagged up Red and Blue bags and put them to one site. Friday night was pretty grim – a tip to others : if you are planning to stay in the Holiday Inn, book very early and demand a room on the third / fourth floor or higher, because otherwise you'll lose even more sleep from the wedding parties (they can run two at a time) which occur, noisily, on the ground floor till 1 am. I managed a few dozes till the partying stopped around 1 am and then Saturday was set-up day : a first look at the lake, and T1 and T2. But first I went down to check out the Ironkids event in the town centre  This was basically a run event for 6 yro and up kids who had a blast running around the last km of the run route and under the Ironman Finish banner. Fun to see them and hear the parents and friends cheer...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ironman UK 2012, one week on..

Driving back to Shepperton - mid Monday, school holidays - was pretty uneventful, except for a stop for food at Warwick services, where me and Olly met up with a few IMUK competitors “refuelling” in Burger King. Nice to bump into the couple who crossed the line together the previous evening, and a guy in a woolly hat who I'd chatted to in the hotel car park. We got back mid afternoon, and being the sort of guy who likes to get things squared away, I spent a relaxing our getting kit put away, my foul-smelling wetsuit rinsed, and over-ripe bananas consigned to recycling. Then a relaxing evening, before back to work Tuesday. My physical state over the next few days was quite interesting. I'd got some sunburn on my right shoulder (missed that bit in T2), and my quads were sore off and on over the next few days, but to my surprise, my feet were in excellent shape : no blistered or chaffing. Coming downstairs Tuesday morning was harder than it had been Monday, and I re...
Post a Comment
Read more

Keep people on the wagon to make social software stick

Aside from the buzz and enthusiasm of social software deployments, there's sometimes a back-story.  I've been wondering about how well organsations deploying social software plan catch to on-boarded users before they fall back to old habits. Here's the scenario that I am thinking of. When we deploy business change technologies, we tend to measure on-boarding as a one-off activity (we measure stuff like that partly because it's easy to measure, which is a bit of an anti-pattern in itself).  So, once a user has been trained, posted, edited a profile, added people to a network, we cross them off a list.  However, this fails to recognise what, from my experience, is the strong influence of learned-behaviour of the non-social user, and how these users' inertia can reset interactions to levels of lower social value. The reasons we fall back to old ways and habits are many: The derived social value of an interaction obeys the "Convoy" principle The answer ...
Post a Comment
Read more