Road to Kona 2025
This may be a ‘once in a lifetime’ one…
Flowers for flow… always! A water lily from our pond, just popped out yesterday.
31 July 2025
It’s the end of July.
Training has resumed but I’m still not fully ‘rolling with it’ - I haven’t quite managed to find enough momentum yet. I’ve had a few of these ‘feel horrible’ sessions when you go hard for the first time in weeks only to feel gassed in seconds and nowhere near ‘fast enough’ to justify it... I know I just have to go through with them before they start feeling better so I keep doing this mechanically and without much judgement…
Swimming seems to be the one I dread and procrastinate the most at the moment, let alone with a swimskin in open water. What a delight to discover that I can be even slower in open water! although I do enjoy the freedom around the shoulders compared to the wetsuit, the sensation is very different so this will be an interesting one to develop for Kona.
Cycling for three hours seems heroic unless there are friends around…
Running is probably the most ‘welcome’ at the moment, just getting out of the door and run feels nice. The trails near me have been freshly cleaned providing the perfect surface for that ‘floaty’ feeling. I got myself a new pair of shoes for good measure too.
Work has also been a bit slow and with racing feeling quite far away at the moment, it’s the first time I’m actually feeling bored in a very long time… There is surely no shortage of things I need to do around the house but I’m just finding hard to get going with much at the moment!
So I thought it a good opportunity to start documenting this build to what is the dream of a World Championship in the full Ironman distance. Quite a mouthful!
Last time I did a series on a build it didn’t go very well but I’ll try to not be superstitious here!
So let me take you with me and see where we will go… The rough plan is as follows:
We’re spending the next four weeks training in the UK before we head to Greece for 10 days of what will hopefully be a heat block in preparation for the hot conditions in Kona. By the time we’re back we’ll have three weeks of peak training before we head across the globe for the race. And that’s the rough plan!
Today we start with some spicy intervals on the turbo, 3’ tempo into 1’ threshold, times…8. Some work!
In other news I had the amazing honour of being invited to a triathlon podcast from Greece which we recorded on Monday. It filled my heart to do it and had a great time recording! The hosts were amazing! At the same time I won’t hide that I’m doing my best to not play it all in head and worry about what will be left in the internet forever… I don’t think I’ll ever have the guts to watch or listen to it! I’ll leave it to those close to me to tell me what they think… I will make sure to share it here, so stay tuned (if you speak Greek!).
