Hi everyone! I came across someone that I found to be inspirational and really made me think about the power of habits and of God. I hope you gain something that spurs you on in your own life when you read his story. Enjoy!
A full Ironman triathlon race is a daunting task that covers 140.6 miles in total. When broken down into its components it is a 2.4 mile swim, a 112 mile bike, and a marathon (26.2 mile) run at the end. I have never had the desire to push myself to that extreme and I am not so sure about the swimming part. Now, I don’t mean to brag, but I did graduate from guppy status when I took swimming lessons many years ago as a teenager. Before you are too impressed, let me also inform you that “guppy” status is essentially the level 3-year-old children enter the pool at the YMCA. I never progressed much farther than that and I am not sure an Ironman race would allow for their participants to have on water wings, a life jacket, and a noodle during the swim portion. If they change the rules let me know.
On bettertriathlete.com (ref. 1) they gave a general breakdown of how fast different categories of people would complete the full Ironman race. Depending on the course conditions, top tier professional athletes range between 8-9 hours, top people in their age groups range between 9-12 hours, and for others that trained (but were not able to dedicate the time to train as if the race was a part-time job) average between 13 and 15 hours. Can we pause to think about that? The breakdown for a male Ironman professional is 52 minutes to swim 2.4 miles, 4hours and 35 minutes to bike 112 miles (02:16 minutes/mile pace or a speed of 26.4 miles per hour), and 3 hours and 4 minutes to run a full marathon (07:01 minutes/mile pace… and that is after all of that swimming and biking). As someone who used to be an avid runner, this boggles my mind.
Built within the Ironman are cut-off times that occur for the safety of the participants. If you do not finish a particular section of the course within the allotted cut-off time, your race is over. For the marathon portion of the Ironman, which is the last stage and therefore also the finish line cut-off time, it is 17 hours after the start of the race.
So why bring this up? Because there is a very inspiring story about someone that I read about and I wanted to share it with you today. I believe it will move you.