Ironman Sweden Training and Race Report

Don't ever let anybody tell you that you can't! You are much more capable than you may think… if you are realistic, work hard and have a bit of patience, then good things will come to you...#findyourgreatness

Ironman training isn't easy. Combining swimming, biking and running with a full time job and a family takes a lot of dedication from the athlete and tolerance from your loved ones. This year has been no different. In order to keep my family balance in check I have been very selfish and it was a rare occasion for me to train with others, it just doesn’t work, waiting around for people and finding a suitable time for all parties is difficult and often results in the loss of precious time I could spend with my kids. I usually train very early in the morning and since I work shifts I do the bulk of my training during weekdays, preferably when my daughters are at school/nursery, or still in bed. Long distance running and triathlon is what I love and I’m willing to make sacrifices to keep my passion going.

To make this blog more readable, I'm going to break it down into sections:

Swim - swimming has never been my forte, I don’t remember how I learned the front crawl as a kid, I never attended swimming classes when I was young and I'm not passionate about swimming, although I do enjoy swimming in open water these days. To make the most of my limited time this year and make it more interesting, I have decided to follow a pattern in my swim training which went like this: technique drills swim, speed intervals/time trials swim and long swims. Most weeks I could manage 3 swims, sometimes 2 and on the rare occasion 4. I also decided to read a bit more on the subject and got a copy of Swim Smooth, which is the methodology used by British Triathlon as well as my Tri Club, a really great read. The combination of the reading plus my swim training pattern gave me a new focus on what I do in the water and I looked forward to swim sessions more than in the past. For Ironman Sweden this year I opted to start with the slightly faster group so that I could draft other athletes. A tactic I believe has helped to achieve my swim time of 1h17. Despite the swim being held in the Baltic Sea, the water felt warm and before I realised it I was in T1.

Bike - I feel that the bike section offers the best dividends in terms of your finishing time in an Ironman. I'm not the best cyclist out there and this year my plan was to heavily invest my time in cycling in the hope of a breakthrough. Looking through my weekly training schedules this past week I can see I consistently spent 10 to 12 hours a week cycling. Training doesn’t have to be complicated and most weeks the training sessions were the same, what changed was the amount of time I cycled, the number of intervals I did, or the recovery period given in between sets. I have to thank my friends Harvey and Paul who gave invaluable advice and tips on bike training during this time. I am a big fan of power meters for triathlon racing and training and to monitor my progress I routinely tested my functional threshold power (FTP). My wattage steadily improved over the weeks and months, my time trials were also very consistent and riding at Ironman wattage seemed comfortable during my long rides as I got closer to race day. In comparison to last year, (when I did my first Ironman in Austria) I started Ironman Sweden this year with a significant increase in my power budget. Progress had been made and I had high hopes for this race.

My strategy for the bike race was as follows: to pedal smoothly with high cadence, without spikes in power and spend as much time as I could close to my self-selected power output budget. Well, it's easier said than done and in practice I opted to do this at 1hour-laps, whereby after each hour I'd press lap on my bike computer and spend a couple of minutes stretching my back and eating before I was ready to concentrate again. I managed 4 x 1 hour laps doing this and for the remainder of the bike portion I got out of the aero position more often as my back had started to ache. Looking through my bike data at the time, I saw my normalized power (NP) was exactly my budget of watts for the day and my average cadence was also high as I'd planned. Despite my sore back I was confident I was in for a good marathon. Cycling has definitely grown on me in the last few years and despite making progress this season I think there is a lot more I can improve and this excites me. My bike split was 5:52 in Sweden. During the bike portion I consumed just over 100 calories per hour, I used Generation UCAN, Nakd bars, water and salt sticks. T2 here we come.

Running - Since completing the Thames Path 100 miles ultra earlier this year, my running has gone from strength to strength. Yet, whenever I felt a niggle coming or excessive fatigue, running would be the first one to be dropped in training. For Ironman Sweden I did a mixture of hill training intervals, long runs and long runs with Ironman pace, miles reps as the race approached and brick sessions.

For nearly a year now I have been using the Maffetone method and training with a heart rate monitor, I have made great progress in terms of pace at a given heart rate since, for Ironman Sweden I had decided to run at a pace that coincided with roughly the top of my aerobic ability according to Dr. Maffetone, as this felt fast yet comfortable. When I left T2 I set into a pace of 8min/mile, I set my watch to beep every mile and I consistently got in the range of 7:55/8.10s. My back felt great and I was in high spirits with favourable weather conditions for running. It was great seeing my family every time I got back to the centre of Kalmar on each of the laps of the run course. By the time I got to mile 17 I felt cramps starting in both my calves, I had been consuming electrolytes and salt sticks throughout the race so my initial thought was that fatigue and overworked muscles just weren't capable to keep up that sort of pace. Cramps came and went until mile 22 and I managed to clock 8.40s miles during that time. The last four miles were tough as the cramps became more permanent. It's funny to remember, but it was very difficult to try making calculations, especially when I was in pain, it just doesn’t work, but all I thought was that if I could tick each mile at sub 9min/mile I would reach my dream goal of sub 11. I remember ticking 8:45s each mile and starting to dream of the finish line. I normally enjoy picking up the pace in the run up to the finish line but in Sweden I just couldn’t. I had given my all in that marathon. The last few hundred meters were emotional; you do feel like a rock star finishing an Ironman with the crowds and the red carpet. There it was, I was an Ironman again. I was super pleased with my marathon time of 3:38, only a few years ago I would dream of running a solo marathon at this speed, never mind after swimming 3.8k and cycling 180k beforehand. Nutrition wise, I consumed just under 100 calories per hour during the marathon, a mixture of Generation UCAN, High5 Isogels and a bit of flat coke, as well as water and salt sticks.

Nutrition - the last few months I’ve been writing all these long blogs on metabolic efficiency (ME) and its benefits and during a big race like this I just wasn’t going to mess up my race nutrition. Overall I consumed less than 100 calories per hour during Ironman Sweden, yet I didn’t bonk / hit the wall, or suffer from any GI discomfort and I saved precious time by not stopping/slowing down in the majority of the aid stations. When you race and eat, both your muscles and digestive system are competing for oxygen-rich blood, so if you can tap into your own fat stores by working on your metabolic efficiency you will spare that blood for your working muscles, it’s that simple yet so elegant. Metabolic efficiency works without a doubt. Did I do the traditional carbload 3 days before the race? Nope, the only thing I did was to eat some good sources of carbohydrates (a bit of sweet potato, UCAN and couscous ) the day before the race to simply restore my carbohydrate stores.

Overall I finished Ironman Kalmar in Sweden in 10:57. An Ironman Personal Best for me and mission accomplished, all on less than 100 calories per hour. 2014 has been perfect so far and I have one more goal later in Oct when I'll be competing in the Winter 100, a 100 miles ultra along the Ridgeway and Thames Path. I am really looking forward to it!

IRONMAN VS. 100-mile ULTRA - A few of you have asked me what is harder, an Ironman triathlon or a 100-mile ultramarathon. Well, if you train hard for the demands of your race and then race at your potential, then they will both be hard and test you to your limits. Every race is hard if you give all you have got. There are no easy options. J

My tops tips for a wannabe Ironman

Sleep, sleep and sleep: unless you are a professional athlete, you won’t have the time to sit around and rest after training sessions, so the bulk of your recovery will be done when you sleep. Your favourite football team is no longer important when you badly want to achieve your goals. Switch the telly off and zzzzzzzz!

Be selfish with your training time. Training with friends is great but you normally end up going too fast or too slow defeating the purpose of your training. Unless you are in charge of the session leave group sessions for the off-season.

Listen to your body - no training plan overrides how you feel. Training with niggles and excessive fatigue could lead to full blown injuries. Remember, resting is key part of your training and getting stronger. #trainsmart

And last but not least, get yourself metabolic efficient! No brainer!

My journey through Metabolic Efficiency

The last time I wrote a blog on metabolic efficiency (ME), I gave the readers a couple of ideas on what a ME meal could look like. This time I’m going a step further and I’m going to show you a typical 3-day food and exercise diary while I’m training for Ironman Sweden. But before I do, let me tell how ME came to into my life.

When I started racing back in 2008 I was using sugary sports nutrition such as gels and sports drinks and I started worrying about what their consumption would do to my teeth and as a precaution I started brushing as soon as I got home from a race or a training session.  But like most athletes I had been brainwashed that as an athlete I had to consume these sugary products as well as a lots of carbohydrates to give me a chance of finishing these endurance races. 

By the summer of 2012, I suddenly found myself with more than the state of my teeth to worry about.  I started to wake up at night a lot to visit the toilet for a pee and at work I constantly had the same problem.  I booked an appointment with my GP who suggested a couple of blood tests and unsurprisingly I was diagnosed as pre-diabetic. My family has a history of Type II Diabetes of the young (MODY diabetes), despite us all being generally slim in stature. I hoped that I was the lucky one who had escaped this fate, but my genes ruled out on top. 

A bit later that summer I was racing a local half ironman triathlon and Harvey whom I knew from Twitter was coming all the way from Georgia, USA to visit his family and do that race too. I offered to drive him along the bike course a couple of days before and we talked a lot about everything to do with triathlon as we checked the course. I asked him what gels he was taking during the race and he said none, he said consumed a lot less calories when racing and he was using a product called Generation UCAN. My first thought was ‘Is this guy for real?’ ‘Is he not worried about bonking? I remember Harvey telling me after the race that he consumed under 400 calories during the race without carb-loading, while I had consumed nearly 700 calories as well as carb-loading for 3 days beforehand!

Well, Harvey went back to Georgia and left me very curious about his race nutrition. I emailed him a few days later and he explained ME to me and pointed me towards Bob Seebohar’s book ‘Nutrition Periodization for Athletes’. Everything made perfect sense to me but I decided to not make any drastic changes to how I ate until after the season finished. During this period I exchanged meal ideas with Harvey and asked him for tips. Once the season ended, I jumped right into eating in the metabolic efficient way. I contacted Bob Seebohar via email and he critiqued my food and exercise diary for 3 days, providing some excellent revisions and answering several queries and doubts I had.

ME has been a game changer for me and I will never look back. The following year I raced Ironman Austria taking in about 160 calories per hour, which in comparison to the 300/500 that is usually recommended is a huge reduction. Although changing my diet has not reversed my pre-diabetic state, I do sleep better, I no longer wake up at night to use the toilet or feel desperate at work to use the bathroom. For most of my training sessions I now only consume water, which is saving my wallet and my teeth. I no longer feel lethargic after longer sessions and I don’t suffer from GI distress whilst racing. Eating the ME way keeps my energy levels stable and my cravings for sugary foods are a distant memory.

This season is going really well and I have no doubt that becoming more metabolically efficient has been an important factor. I raced the Thames Path 100 miles ultra and felt great on less calories and I’m sure it won’t be a problem at Ironman Sweden in less three weeks. I have recently had Dina Griffin, a dietician from Bob Seebohar’s team, analyse my food and exercise diary again to make sure I’m not making too many mistakes, and we also discussed my nutrition strategy for Sweden. I am very happy to know that I’m on the right track following Dina’s feedback. People are always curious to know what I eat so I’m going to post what my diet looks like and how it fits in with my training. But first a recap of what is ME.  ME is a concept developed by Bob Seebohar, whereby you manipulate your daily nutrition in order to maintain blood sugar levels and keep insulin spikes to a minimum, by doing this over a period of time you will adapt your body to be able to use more of its own fat stores and as a result you’ll require less calories during racing and training, as well as experience all the other benefits I mentioned previously. And the way to do that is more or less like this… 

1.       Eat when you feel hungry, rather than at set times

2.       Make sure to eat a good source of protein and fat at every meal/snack

3.       Add  a good source of fibre to your meal/snack

Below is my 3 day food and exercise diary during Build phase for Ironman Sweden:

Day 1 –

5:45 wake up - Cup of coffee with a dash of milk and double cream

6:20 1500m easy swim with technique drills in 35min followed by 20min strengthening exercises. Nothing consumed

8:00 Breakfast: 4 tablespoons of my seeds and nuts 'muesli' recipe (brazils, almonds, shredded coconut, walnuts, pumpkin & sunflower seeds, pine nuts and dried cherries) with full fat Greek yogurt mixed with protein powder and fresh blueberries, raspberries and strawberries plus a cup of coffee with some milk and double cream. Off to work.

11:45 Feeling hungry - Leftover roast side of salmon and salad with snaps peas, red onion, mixed leaves, feta cheese, griddled peaches, olive oil and seasoned with salt and pepper.  Drink of water.

15:20 Feeling a bit hungry so had a slice of a flour & sugar free banana loaf and a cup of coffee with milk plus a dash of double cream.

17:30 Turbo session 1h30min, set of 6x7min at FTP with 3min recovery. Water only consumed.

1920: Dinner Chicken tagine with tomatoes, onions, ginger, and apricots served with cauliflower rice, grated cheese and broccoli. Mug of vanilla chai tea and 3 squares of 85% dark chocolate.

20:45 Sleep.

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Day 2 -

4:30 Wake up. Small slice of my sugar free/flour free banana loaf with a spoon of Greek yogurt  and berries and a coffee.

5am 16 miles run (to work) with 4x2miles at IM pace. 2h20 total. Nothing consumed.

7:30 breakfast Seeds & Nuts 'muesli' as the day before with Greek yogurt mixed with protein powder, some pieces of avocado, strawberries and a peach. Water and a cup of coffee with a dash of milk and cream. Multivitamin taken.

11.15 Feeling hungry. 4x mini Almond flour/Protein pancake (recipe to follow soon) with tuna/mayo mixture and a slice of cheese with some cherry tomatoes and a cup of coffee with milk and a dash of cream.

14:20 Feeling a bit hungry. 2x mini Almond flour pancake sandwich with sugar free peanut butter and raspberries as filling and drank some water.

15:15 Swim, 40min with 1900m time trial. Nothing consumed.

16:15 Some Greek yogurt mixed with protein powder and berries and a small handful of almonds + plus a cup of vanilla chai tea.

17:50 20min of conditioning exercises while dinner is cooking.

18:30 Dinner. Turkey steaks in an almond flour crust with roast salad (aubergine, red peppers, black olives and onion with olive oil) and roasted cauliflower and steamed brocolli with a bit of mayonnaise. A peach and a nectarine for dessert.

2200 Sleep.

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Day 3

5am Wake up

5:20 Breakfast of bacon, eggs, avocado pieces, artichoke, sundried tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, cucumber, walnut and a peach seasoned with salt and pepper and olive oil, plus a cup of coffee.

6am Off to work.

8am Coffee with a dash of milk and cream.

11am Feeling slightly hungry. Leftover turkey steaks in almond flour crust with roast aubergine, red peppers, olives and onion salad and some cherry tomatoes. Cup of coffee with milk and dash of cream.

15:00 Feeling peckish. Seeds and nuts 'muesli' with a bit of greek yogurt mixed with protein powder and blueberries and a glass of water.

17:00 90minutes turbo session with 4x12min at high end of Sweet Spot Power (93%). Nothing consumed.

1845 Dinner was rump steak with a salad of radishes, tomatoes, cucumber, mixed leaves, crumbled Stilton cheese, nectarines and walnut dressed with extra virgin olive oil. Half glass of red wine. Dessert was a cup of vanilla chai tea and 2 squares of 85% dark chocolate.

20:45 Sleep.    

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Remember that this is not the only way to achieve metabolic efficiency and it’s not perfect. Because I’m pre diabetic I choose to stay in the low end of carbohydrate consumption, the key is to find the optimal level of carbohydrates that supports your individual needs and the period of the season that you are at. This particular week when Dina analysed my food and exercise diary I trained for over 16 hours with 4 bike rides, 3 runs, 3 swims and a bit of conditioning and strengthening work, I can confirm that I only used sports nutrition (UCAN Generation) during my long brick workout where I rode my bike for over five hours followed by a 1h20 run, for that particular workout I consumed 270 calories in total, during the other workouts of the week I either consumed water or nothing.

FAQ and Comments:

‘Is it the Paleo diet or Atkins?’ No, it’s not a diet at all; it’s just a way of putting a meal or snack together even though my diet may look a bit like that at times. Bob Seebohar described it recently as a ‘lifelong journey of blood sugar control and [as way of] forming a healthy relationship with food’.

‘Is it going to make me faster?’ Not per se, appropriate training stress coupled with recovery will help you adapt and make you faster if that is what you want. Saying that, my personal experience of  eating meals low in simple sugars allow me to sleep better at night which in turn allow my body to recover properly from hard workouts. As well as that you are less likely to suffer from GI distress when racing which could save you lots of time! I often hear this from Ironman athletes: ‘I was close to finish my Ironman in subXX hours but I had to spend 15min in the toilet because I ate a dodgy gel’.

‘Maybe if you had consumed more calories you would have been faster’.  People that say this miss the point completely; you can adapt your body to use more of its own fat stores simply by manipulating your meals the metabolic efficient way, eating more calories during racing in form of carbohydrates could potentially make it worse.

‘I only do short distances, ME only works for ultrarunners and Ironman’:  If you can use more of your own fat stores in training and racing for any distance then it is an advantage, I really hate when I see athletes drinking sugary drinks or gels for 10k road races, you really don’t need it.

‘But I’d miss cakes, ice creams, chocolate, alcohol…’: Bob Seebohar recommends ‘missing the target’ 10% of the time to make sure it’s sustainable, so don’t worry, I do have my treats too, my wife is a terrific baker so I can’t say no to all the stuff she prepares in our kitchen. What I can say is that my cravings for sugar have greatly reduced. This is having a good relationship with food, enjoy your treats guilt-free and move on.

‘Can I loss weight on ME?’: First of all you should rephrase this, you should aim to lose excess body fat but retain muscle. Weight loss is a hot topic and it hasn’t been a goal of mine for a while, my weight fluctuates very little these days. If you would like to lose excess body fat then the combination of fat, protein and fibre in your meals will help you feel full for longer which in turn will make it easier to create a daily calorie deficit without going hungry. Be careful if you are a triathlete, losing weight may make you a faster runner but you might lose power on the bike and your finishing times won’t change much. If your goal is to lose weight then maybe you should try this during the off-season.

MY TOP TIPS

• Go and grab yourself a copy of Seebohar’s ‘Nutrition Periodization Athletes’ and download the 2^nd edition of Metabolic Efficiency Training.

• Treat ‘healthy tips’ from the TV and newspapers with an air of scepticism.

• Try Generation UCAN, a sports drink not made with simple sugars which will allow your body to use more of its own fat stores when racing and training. UCAN and metabolic efficiency make a great partnership. Now available in the UK from here. Ps I am in no way affiliated to this company, I just REALLY like their products.

• Don’t be afraid to eat fat, simple sugars is what you need to worry about. Did you know that Sweden is the first country to recommend to its citizens a diet that is higher in fat and lower in simple sugars, as a way of combating the obesity epidemic? Let’s hope that other countries will soon follow suit. (Throw away your food pyramid!)

• Keep away from highly processed oils like corn, sunflower, vegetable and rapeseed oil. I use olive oil, coconut oil, butter and butter ghee.

My 100 mile Ultramarathon debut - The Thames Path 100

In 2007 I visited a running shop to purchase my first pair of running shoes. The guy that helped me asked whether I was doing any races and I said no, I simply wanted to run to lose a bit of weight. To make conversation I asked whether he was into racing and he mentioned he was an ultrarunner. That was the first time I had heard the word and I asked him to explain. I left the shop totally amazed that there were people out there prepared to run more than a marathon.

Fast forward to May 2014 and here was I in Richmond, starting my first 100-miles ultramarathon, The Thames Path 100, a point to point race from London to Oxford.

At the end of every season I always ask myself, what can I do differently this year to help me achieve my goals and last year I found myself asking myself the same question. I have had this book which I won in a raffle sitting on the shelf for over a year ‘The Big book of Endurance Training and Racing’ by Dr Phil Maffetone, so two weeks without training I had plenty of time to read. Dr Maffetone during his time as a coach developed a formula to help athletes develop their aerobic system by training with a heart rate monitor; he called it the 180-formula. In simple terms, you only need to do some simple calculations and find out your personal heart rate range to exercise at and develop your aerobic system and improve your ability to burn fat as fuel. The book itself is fantastic, it also talks about the importance of management of overall life stress and how that affects you aerobic development, the problem of chronic inflammation, our addiction to sugar, etc. It’s a great book and I highly recommend it.

The Maffetone Method as it is known, made a lot of sense to me when I read it so I decided to give it a go. What Dr. Maffetone doesn’t have in his book are training schedules, as it is up to the individual athlete to decide and with a bit of imagination I came up with my own training plan for the Thames Path 100 using Dr Maffetone’s ideas. In the first few weeks the Maffetone method really hurts your pride, the reason being that to maintain your heart rate within the range you find using his formula, is generally very slow and in my case was 90 secs/mile slower than my usual long run pace. I took that as a challenge and decided to stick with it. Below is the plan I came up with using the Maffetone method:

Most weeks were very similar for me, generally three bike rides, three runs and two to three swims and bit of strength and conditioning work, volume slightly increased each week with every fourth week being a recovery week when volume was reduced. I believe that training doesn’t have to be complicated; it’s the consistency of training each week that will get you places.

I would say that I completed 90% of that schedule. I listened to my body and added extra recovery or shortened sessions if I felt the need. In the blue area where bike sessions are missing is where it coincided with the start of Ironman Sweden Base training (my next challenge) and where I started to add more cycling volume and more power based training specific for Ironman like FTP intervals and Sweet spot sessions, the long rides got steadily longer too.

Returning to Maffetone, my frustration with running slow soon disappeared, my paces in training got faster until it reached my usual levels, albeit this time with a much lower heart rate. 

For those of you who have read my previous blog posts will know how much I go on about the ‘metabolic efficient’ way of eating, if you haven’t heard about it then you should read this post. It’s so simple, basically you manipulate your daily nutrition by combining fat, protein and a source of fibre into every single meal and over time your body will adapt and become more efficient at burning fat. I have been eating in this manner for the last eighteen months with great success and plan to carry on eating like this (whether I’m an athlete or not) for the rest of my life. Some of you may already know that you can get lab tested to find out precisely what percentage of fat/carbs you are burning at different running paces and wattage on your bike. Since I haven’t had the luxury of getting myself metabolic efficient tested yet I did some ‘testing of the waters’ in training during some of my long runs and rides. To give you an idea I only used sport nutrition products for bike rides that were longer than 3h30min and runs that were longer than 3 hours. In training I managed to run well for nearly 30miles with no food at all except water and electrolytes. And during my 50mile run recce of the Thames Path I consumed precisely 150cal per hour during the 9 hours it took me.

Going into Thames Path 100 I knew I was a fat burning machine aka metabolically efficient and my aerobic system was well developed. Running at the 10min/mile I intended to start the race at would be way below the top of my aerobic range. Yet it’s a long way and a distance I hadn’t covered yet so I treated it with great respect.

The race – obviously a race that long has become a bit blurry in my memory, but we were lucky that the weather was great, sunny but not too hot and no rain forecast. I had recced the night portions of the race and was confident I was not going to get lost this time.  The first 51 miles went without a stress; I made it to Henley at mile 51 in 9h38. My race strategy was to keep moving, whether it was running or walking I just wanted to move.  I more or less ran to each aid station, quickly got the food I wanted to eat, filled up my bottle and carried on walking and eating, then started running steadily again. 

It soon got dark after the halfway point and I started to really enjoy the night sections and quickly moved through those aid stations, always catching people up and being complimented on how fresh I looked, I just grew in confidence.  After leaving the mile 77 aid station I had my first low point of the race, my neck was very sore and my legs felt heavy, from what I remember it was a section with lots of long and wet grass that made running very tiring and taxing. It seemed to take ages to get to the station at mile 85. Until that point in the race I hadn’t touched caffeine and thought it was what I needed.  At the aid station at 85 miles I asked for a cup tea, I drank that and ate a peanut butter sandwich and scoffed some coffee beans covered in dark chocolate. It didn’t take long and I was running again and well. Every now and then I would spot a head torch in the distance and that just spurred me on to gain another position. I felt like I was absolutely flying during the last 15 miles, with enough drink and food on me I didn’t even stop at aid stations at miles 91 ant 95. I absolutely loved every step I took during those last 15miles. I didn’t realise it at the time but those last 15miles were my fastest! My goal coming into this challenge was to finish within the 28hrs cut-off and hopefully under 24hrs. I reached Oxford and before I knew it I was entering the recreation field where the finish line was, I must have had the biggest grin on my face.  The marshalls confirmed I had finished in 20h07min and made it into the top 20. I’m so proud of that, this is beyond my wildest dreams.

Rodrigo Freeman M

03:53:50 10:37/mi rank: 137

07:02:35 11:07/mi rank: 99

09:37:50 11:19/mi rank: 80

13:04:36 11:42/mi rank: 44

17:29:08 12:20/mi rank: 36

20:07:24 12:04/mi rank: 20

I was unaware at the time but I love how I steadily improved my ranking with each aid station. 

Referring back to metabolic efficiency, American Dietician Bob Seebohar who developed this concept has the 2^nd edition of his book available from here, and soon to be launched as an e-book I highly recommend reading this alongside Dr Maffetone’s book.

So, what’s next for me?  As I said earlier,  I have Ironman Sweden in August, so I’ll be focusing on biking this summer and then in October I’m doing the Winter 100 miler here in the UK to finish off my season….after that….maybe talking to my lawyer…as my wife will surely have filed for divorce by then.