Kona Wannabe's

I have followed this year's Ironman Korea with interest for 3 reasons.
Number one, international sports model Grace McClure was competing and I was interested to see if she had the brawn to match her beauty. Turns out she did. She had a solid race, ending 12th among the woman, in 11:36:55. That's excellent!

Number two, morbid curiosity. I wanted to see how two other guys who I can best describe as rivals would do in this race. On two occasions the Korea Ironman turned on me like a snake, just as I was coming into peak condition. And after these guys saw me in a half Ironman, doing well (but, they snickered, we're sure we can do better)they duplicated everything I was doing, from training rides, to races, to clothing, to the dream of going to Kona (where the World Ironman Championships are held). They also made it very obvious that they were going to beat me. That's fine, I enjoy competition. It will be interesting if we find the same Ironman race and are all perfectly prepared for it, it will be interesting to see the result.

An American guy who also bought into the Kona Dream posted 1 or 2 months of enthusiastic workouts on Beginner Triathlete, and in the Long Term Goals column, John wrote, in big purple writing, KONA KONA KONA KONA. JD did a good job to enter and actually complete the race. But 15:26:21 is not close to the ballpark of qualifying for Kona, it's closer to the cut off (at 17:00).

Ironman is a great leveller. You can talk the talk, even try to walk the walk, but if there is a little error in your preparation, in your thinking, in what you're doing, in manifests big time in the Ironman. Ironman reveals your personal reality to the world, and importantly, to yourself.
But whether you have a good race or not, anyone who finishes, is a winner. In completing this gruelling event, the self knowledge expands, and a humility sets in which is worth more than any victory, Hawaii slot or personal best time. Finishing an Ironman is simply being the best person you can be, in a sense, being the strong, tough, hardened person, that we all can be. Not tough as in military tough. Tough in the resilient strength. Healthy tough. And centred, and alive, and awake; appreciative of our bodies and how we operate in this big old world.

I'd like to know what happened to South African Glen Gore, who won the swim, but dropped out on the bike at about 3 and a half hours, which is just about exactly where I dropped out in 2002 (at 100km on the bike, suffering from a bleeding, burst eardrum and the exhaustion of flu that wouldn't let me go).

Bernard and Andrew spent around 9 months training in New Zealand, doing over 200km training rides and basically getting into peak shape for Korea. I mentioned to a friend of mine that I thought, despite all this preparation, they'd have a poor shot at doing well in Korea, because firstly they were making a transition from mid-winter training to Koreas extremely tough, hot humid summer.

And secondly, they came here to start English teaching jobs. The Ironman is at the end of August and they both arrived in June, which left 2 whole months of training left to fill. July would have been better, staying in Jeju for a week before the race in August would have been ideal. You can't change countries, and expect to be able to train when you don't know where the routes, or gyms, or pools are, and you also have to transition into a job. If either of these guys had pulled this off, I would have called it a miracle; a Lance Armstrong order of magnitude miracle.

Even if they had pulled off a second decent Ironman, qualifying would mean flying to Hawaii and having to do a third, in one year. Quite a dumb plan for your first year of Ironman, but possibly a brave one.

And I thought I may have been wrong. The film In Good Company illustrates very well how an old hand gets shown up by the young up and coming boss, who fires the older man's colleagues, tries to change the way things had been running successfully for 20 years. So at one point the older Quaid says to his daughter, "I need to change." We need to be constantly adaptable to be successful. But youthful vigor is no substitute for wisdom and rationality, and it's the brash upstart that needs to be the most flexible and the most awake. Sheer enthusiasm without a succinct strategy is not enough, sad to say. And in the end, the young boss loses his job and the older man is in a position to offer him a job, this time in the appropriate real world.

As I say, I made have been wrong in my assessment. But I wasn't. Andrew and Bernard came in together well outside the target time for the last slots to Hawaii (about 10:20-10:30), and a few minutes ahead of Grace McClure. They were in 103rd and 104th positions respectively, which means a Kona slot is not hanging in the balance.
Their times show that they probably lost a lot of fitness over the last few weeks, and swam too hard, then suffered on the bike and run. Their times are virtually identical (Bernard's swim transition is probably an error). In my last Ironman I did a 6 hour cycle on 2 months preparation, on a windy, hot and hilly course, so a 5:45 on 6-9 months preparation is below par. There is only 1 minute difference in their bikes times (over 180km) so I wonder whether they drafted each other on the bike again, like they did in Tongyeong?

11:19:13 Hutchings Andrew Rodney S:0:53:42 0:07:32 C:5:46:22 0:04:15 R:4:39:09

11:19:13 Adams Bernard John S:0:53:25 0:14:13 C:5:45:20 0:03:25 R:4:40:28

Third Reason I watched this race was to consider the results, and the weather, and assess whether I'd made the right decision to avoid this race in future. If things don't work out twice in a row in the same event, I think you're a stickler for punishment by attempting it a third time. Something like Ironman anyway.
When I was in Jeju last year, I thought it is an incredibly risky setup having a race like this in the corridor of Typhoons, and run at the height of Typhoon seasons. There's enough risk as it is to train for the Ironman without having acts of God out there wreaking havoc, and blowing away all those months of hard work and toil under the sun.
So I've scatched the Korea Ironman off my event list, permanently. I enjoyed the South African event, but even there it can get very very windy if the weather turns on you.
Choosing the right Ironman venue is important. Choosing the same one over and over is not the bnest way to prove persistance in the face of adversity.
There are other things that require persistance, as Edison demonstrated with his 1000+ attempts at getting the right filament for the lightbulb, and KFC's Colonel Sanders and Walt Disney with their hundreds of pitches and visits to various banks.
My version of the lightbulb is submitting manuscripts and articles.

I will make my next attempt at a Kona slot, in the March 2006 Ironman in South Africa.
I should say now though, that expenses may preclude me from even going to the world champiinship, even if I do qualify. For me, qualification is the goal. My strategy, put simply, is to begin serious training in November, when I arrive in South Africa and the beginning of summer there.