Lessons Learned While Doing An Indoor Ironman

Each year, our local community center hosts an Indoor Ironman in February.  It's perfect timing, really.  It's cold, winter is getting long, our new year's resolutions to get in shape may be fading from our memories, and the month breaks down into 4 perfect weekly segments.  I've known about this event for a couple of years, but never committed to actually getting it done.  This year, four of us decided to give it a "tri."

A full distance 140.6 Ironman is made up of 2.4 miles of swimming, 112 miles of biking, and 26.2 miles of running.  Some people, who may or may not be human, complete these distances in a single day.  Being completely human, Connie, Shelley, Jenny, and I  agreed to split that into a 28 day event.  We paid our $20 fee, got our pass to use the community center for the month, our log book to track our progress, and created our plans.  First, we broke the distances into 4 weekly segments.  Each week, we needed to swim about 1,055 yards, bike 28 miles, and run about 6.5 miles.  In order to have a day off each week, we could then split each of those in half & have about an hour of exercise 6 days a week. Totally doable.

I am happy to report that each one of us completed that Ironman.  At the end, I did the math:  140.6 miles over 28 days (if you get rid of that pesky .6) turns out to be 5 miles of exercise each and every day. Wow! We learned a few things along the way, too:  Exercise is more fun with a friend (especially if it is exercise you don't love, like swimming for me), big goals are easier when you break them in to small goals, writing down your exercise is great for personal accountability & is also very motivating.  We also learned that it isn't always easy to fit the sessions in when you're confined to specific times (like lap-swim times). Life gets busy & it takes commitment to get the miles in, but it's worth it. Once you've decided to exercise 6 days a week for a month to meet your goal, it becomes easier to get regular exercise in when the Ironman is done (and it helps that the weather starts to warm up, too).  We also discovered aches & pains and allergies.  We learned that sometimes the t-shirt you get at the end isn't as great as the sense of accomplishment.  We learned that we are (Indoor) Ironmans...Ironmen...Ironwomen.... We did it!