I decided to start training back in April 2008 to get back in shape since I was about to turn 40. At first I started riding my bike a couple of days every week to try to get used to spending time on the saddle. I was struggling to ride 20 kilometers but I knew that if I kept at it I would eventually be able to ride longer. At that point I never knew how far I would ride later on or I think I would have stopped right there ;)
Not too long after I started riding a friend of mine, with whom I am working, told me that he was into bike too and that maybe we could go ride together. I told him yes, even if I had no idea how good he was. And not too long after we went for a ride together. I quickly realized that he had been riding a bike for way longer than me and that if I wanted to ride with him I would have to put some serious time into my training, and I did. After some times he told me that he was doing a duathlon as part of a relay with one of his friend and he talked me into doing it too. I figured that it would be cool to do some kind of race, not that I had any idea what a duathlon really was though. So I talked one of my good friends, who completed a marathon 5 years ago, to do the run portion for me while I would be doing the bike portion. The race was a duathlon plus, 5km run, 90km ride, 10km run. At that point I was barely able to complete 60 kilometers on the bike but I knew that I still had time to train and that I should be able to complete my part. I was sure I couldn’t compete but just completing 90km on a bike would already be something big for me.
Two weeks before our race there was another duathlon/triathlon not too far from here and we decided to do it as a practice, so we would at least have an idea of what it looks like beforehand. It was a sprint one, so nothing to worry about too much, at least that’s what I thought. The race was 2km run, 23km bike, 8km run. We completed it but all those hills around the lake made it a really hard race finally. While we were there I was watching all those people doing the triathlon and I was impressed by them. I was wondering how they could do a race where they had to be really good in three different sports.
Then the race day arrived, the day for which we had been preparing as good as we could for the last two months. The race went pretty good, I completed my bike portion in 3:01:01 for a 90km which gave me an average of almost 30km/h. I was really happy about it. After our race I stayed around to watch those people completing the half Ironman, the Ironman and the double Ironman. At that point I knew that one day I would complete a triathlon and eventually an Ironman.
