This week it was Ironman 70.3 Luxembourg. As I mentioned in my last post, normally any Ironman or 70.3 event is a big one on my race calendar and has my full planning, attention to detail and all the palaver that comes with a big race. As this was inserted into the schedule as purely prep for Challenge Roth, however, it was somewhat overlooked. Given how I performed, maybe that’s the key to all my future racing!
To say I was untapered is putting it mildly. With the race (a little unusually in Sunday-centric triathlon circles) held on Saturday, Thursday saw me run 90 minutes of long intervals as well as a strength session; I didn’t actually train on Friday but did work all day and then drove 4 hours down to Luxembourg to just about make it to registration with 10 minutes to spare and then immediately rack my bike and put in my more or less empty bike and run bags. One big advantage of having done this a few times now is not panicking - the first few times, I was painstaking about prepping my bike before bike check-in and made sure my bags were packed to perfection… now, knowing it was a late start the next day and that I’d have loads of time to sort out my bike and bags, I just shoved it in to make do.