MULTISPORT
Meanwhile , under the ruse of “ getting me to speed up ,” my daughters had hatched a plan to torture me with forced viewings of the My Little Pony movie and Justin Bieber music videos . Fortunately , they forgot about this evil plot in all the excitement of the day . My youngest did , however , ask whether I could read her a chapter of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince . I said that I was willing to give it a go , warned the live stream about spoiler alerts , and then set about reading a chapter . I did struggle to keep my cadence up whilst reading , but Potter kept me distracted as I tackled the last quarter of the ride .
Deliberately lagging behind so as not to hear my daughter ’ s taunts of “ I ’ m faster than The Running Mann !”
Getting Ready to Run
Although I did start to get a little uncomfortable towards the end of the ride , it was far less painful than I was expecting – perhaps the long hours of sitting and writing blog articles is the best way to get buns of steel before an Ironman . Still , my legs started to run out of steam over the last 15km and I worked hard to keep the average pace above 30km / h . In an effort to emulate the champagne-sipping Champs-Élysées final stage in the Tour de France , I had promised myself the reward of a beer towards the end of the ride . I scoffed a final ham roll and enjoyed that beer immensely !
I enjoyed the bike a lot more than I thought I would , and the final time of 5:20 was a lot quicker than I had estimated . In fact , the day was going far better than I could ever have hoped for , so maybe this Home Ironman challenge wasn ’ t going to be so tough after all ? I duly got busy ironing my second shirt of the day during transition two . It happened to be the shirt from the Ottosdal Nite Marathon – which would prove to be prophetic . However , right now the day was still young , and I fancied my chances of finishing in the daylight .
A well-earned lockdown beer at the end of the bike leg
“ At least now I know what I ’ m doing ” was the thought that went through my mind whilst I changed into my running kit , plastered my nipples and swallowed the one energy gel that formed part of my race nutrition plan . The Facebook live stream only lasts eight hours , so I ’ d killed it once the T2 shirt had been ironed . After some technical difficulties , we got the stream going again for the run , and my legs looked forward to the freedom of the open driveway .
As I was winding up the cycle , messages started coming through along the lines of “ Just the easy part to come .” Somehow , I knew that this would not be case . Marathon running is hard , and I knew what I was in for , already expecting those 324 laps up and down the driveway to be physical and mental torture . I also felt a bit of performance anxiety … What if I got this far only to suffer the ironic ignominy of the marathon tripping me up ? I ’ d been warned about the difficulty of running directly after getting off the bike , but mitigated this risk with a 20-minute transition . Thankfully , I was already well into my stride by the time I had reached the gate on the first lap , and the first 5km were fantastic .
Mathematical Incongruency
It had stopped raining , but I could hear the lightning alarms sounding from the golf course in the distance and knew it was just a matter of time before the weather made another onslaught . My plan was to run in roughly 5km segments until the half marathon mark , taking a short nutrition break after each ‘ parkrun .’ This meant I ’ d break the back of the run without too much time-wasting and stuffing around , and could then alleviate the inevitable fatigue with some walking , braaiing and beer-drinking on the back half of the run . that the phone GPS was much more accurate than the watch GPS on short , twisty laps . The watch gives you a ‘ distance discount ’ of between 20-30 %, but that said , I think the phone still cheats one out of mileage as well , but the loss is significantly less . Anyway , the counting worked pretty well , since fatigue forgetfulness meant I always deferred to the lowest lap count when I was unsure , resulting in it actually being 25 to 30 laps between distance checks .
I was now taking significantly more strain on the laps , but looked forward to seeing my distance counter over the 14km mark . Imagine the horror when I switched my phone screen back on and saw that the distance counter had not moved from 11.5km . A great deal of the run is a blur , but that specific moment is frozen in time and still sends a chill down my spine just thinking about it .
Losing at least 2.6km ( and probably well over 3km ) resulted in a minor mental meltdown . I am not sure whether my body could have handled two additional kilometres , but my brain definitely could not . Luckily I was too tired to slam my phone into the ground , and was still lucid enough to make the sensible call to run until my phone showed 40 kilometres . Whilst this would not make for as nice a screen grab after the event , it would ensure that I definitely covered the full marathon distance .
The rain started bucketing down again , but I ignored the elements and pushed out a 6km segment to take the distance past the 11km mark . I rewarded myself with a decent break , enjoying a well-balanced diet of Coke , jelly beans , Doritos , Marie biscuits and potatoes . I was starting to feel my stamina dipping , but life was still good .
During a normal road marathon , you can zone out and knock off a couple of kilometres no matter how tired you are . There is no such luxury when running driveway loops . Therefore , I had been countering the monotony by counting off 20 laps ( approximately 2.6km ) in between looking at the distance on my phone . ( I found
A brief period of sunshine during the run leg
31