2.4-mile (3.86 km) swim, a 112-mile (180.25 km) bicycle ride and a marathon 26.22-mile (42.20 km) run. Ironman Canada returns to Penticton in 2020, and I got caught up in the hype. I signed up for Ironman Canada 2020. I always knew I wanted to do a full Ironman, but it sure wasn’t happening in Whistler for me.
I hired a coach in September. Other than the obvious goal of finishing, I would love to have a respectable swim time, a strong bike, and then just jog/walk the run. Everything was going along really well. I was getting a bit of swimming in and even started looking forward to my open water sessions. I was spending time on the bike as well as a treadmill. All of it ground to a halt when my mom got sick in October, and then training stopped altogether.
There’s this huge movement at the moment with regard to self-care and making sure you take care of yourself before assisting others. I really tried to follow the philosophy of putting your own oxygen mask on first. I was sticking to some of my workouts, and then I gradually reduced my workouts to simple runs at 30 minutes in duration. I found that I was much kinder when I did that. But when the going got really tough, and my mom got sick, I just couldn’t justify to myself getting away to work out anymore. Thankfully I had the full support of my coach, and we decided to go on a pause. She said I had plenty of time. And looking back now, maybe my opinion will change when I’m 120km into the bike segment at Ironman on August 30th, but I look back now and I wouldn’t have done anything differently. Putting on my own oxygen mask wasn’t strictly working out, and it looked like other things too… like sleeping in and having a quiet cup of coffee.
This post was sitting in the drafts, and I realized that I never finished writing it! However, it makes sense to be writing it now in the new year. Because of everything that had happened in our lives. And because there was an option do to a payment plan for my registration, so I took it (it didn’t appear to me that there were additional fees or penalties to do that) and ended up paying for the race over 3 payments. And it was only on January 1st that I received the familiar registration confirmation email from Active. That was my visual cue.
Well, I’m ready. I’m excited that I committed myself to this journey of becoming an Ironman finisher in 2020!
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