I’m officially on the hook for competing in Iron April 2009. It’s an interesting event organized by a real Ironman, Kevin Haugh, that takes loads of folks who normally don’t triathalons and convinces them to do the distance of an Ironman over the course of the month of April. It’s an informal sort of competition where you’re motivated by the other folks who are also trying to accomplish the same thing. There’s not prize for being the first person to finish, other than knowing that you managed to complete Iron April. Each person has a page where they post their updates and progress. I’ll be posting little short blurbs here. In addition, sometime soon I’ll also create some sort of widget that I can use to post my overall progress on the sidebar of the blog.
I’m fairly certain that the running will be no problem. Most weeks I break 26.2 miles without the extra motivation. If I don’t hit 26.2 miles this month it will be because I’ve done something stupid and injured myself. Swimming just requires me to go to the pool a couple of times and get a few hours of swimming in, not a big deal when you’re on a university campus. The difficult thing will be biking. I’m going to start biking to and from school every day, which gives me about 4 miles along the bike trails. I’ll also have to do some longer bike routes on the weekend or on my off days from running.
In any case, it looks fun and is the first baby steps toward me eventually doing a real Ironman race.
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It took me 28 days, but I managed to finish Iron April on Tuesday, April 28th. Running was complete in about a week, but it took me a very long time to start swimming and riding my bike. I found that swimming could be done in three stints in the pool, each of which was about an hour. I’m a really slow swimmer. Biking could have been easily accomplished if I biked to work every day, but I didn’t. Instead I was left with needing nearly seventy miles and under a week left. Three long rides managed to knock of those miles.
I feel good, it was a good experience. I still don’t really like riding my bike. It could be the hills in Pittsburgh, it could be that my bike is too small for my 6′2″ frame, it could be that I just like running that much more. Will I train for an ironman? We’ll have to see. But for now, Iron April is done, and the Pittsburgh Marathon awaits.