Well. What's this all about then??
For those of you that don't know me, my name is Andrew Butler, I'm married to the wonderful Catherine Butler. We live in Chorley Lancashire with our dog, Corky and our Cat, George. I love football, Drinking and motorbikes and I ride a 2002 Honda Fireblade.
its fair to say this could all be a mid-life crisis. so lets start.
Here I am, almost 40 and about to start training for what will be the biggest challenge of my life.
Although I'm not yet signed up because entries are not open my plan is to take part in the 2010 Ironman UK triathlon. It will take place in my home town of Bolton on the 1st of August 2010.
And training starts this week.
To start with let me explain what Ironman is, just in case you don't know.
Its a long distance Triathlon. It starts at 6am, with a 2.4 mile swim in a lake, if you survive that you then get on a bike and pedal your way round a 112 mile ride...if..by some miracle you make it through that, you then have a full 26.2 mile marathon to run. with any luck, you do all this within 17 hours so your hopefully done by 11pm. WOW.....must be mad right?? probably!!
This all started early in 2009, when after spending a few years doing nothing i realised i really missed sport (having given up football 5 years ago due to a back injury) and my waist line was growing at a faster rate than the polar ice caps are melting.
I saw an Advert for the Liverpool triathlon and thought that might be exactly the sort of challenge i needed.
Despite the fact that i couldn't swim very well and was a useless runner (i figured i might do ok on the bike leg)i decided to enter, did a bit of training and completed the supersprint event. this is a 400m swim, a 10k bike ride followed by a 3k run (bit different from the Ironman eh?) which took me about an hour including the 4th discipline which is transition.
Anyway, i was hooked. and i immediately signed up to do the Tatton Park sprint (750m swim/20k bike/5k run) with a view to completing a few more races and moving up to Olympic distance (1500m/40k/10k) next year. all seems perfectly logical right??
well in between the two races a couple of things happened that gave me 'delusions of grandeur'.
The first one is that i went to watch the guys and girls taking part in IMUK 2009....what amazed me was that some of these people looked totally ordinary, all shapes and sizes..all sorts of ages...not the incredible elite athletes (there were some..elites dont get me wrong) i was expecting. and i started to harbour thoughts of having a go myself.
The other thing is i realised what a great and friendly sport triathlon is..and how its totally accessible to absolutely anybody. i made friends through forums and joined an on-line 'triathlon club' called 'bridgetown cona testa triathlon team' (www.bcttt.com) the clubs founder and 'supreme grand master' is a guy called Darren Roberts (conehead to his friends) who wrote a book called 'how triathlon ruined my life'.
i read this book during this period and it was inspiring....it made me actually believe ordinary people can take on the superhuman challenge of Ironman.
So the seed grew and grew and following my tatton park sprint triathlon and my half marathon triumph in the great Cumbrian run(i finished didn't i? its a triumph to me)
i decided i'm going to go for it.
I recently read a book by Don Fink called 'Be IronFit'....it has three training plans within it which are designed around fitting training in and around other things in your life. i will be following the intermediate plan from January 3rd (its a 30 week training plan) but in the meantime will be building my base fitness using the just finish plan up to Christmas...i'll go into training more as i'm doing it (if you're interested). I've also signed up for the reading half marathon, the blenheim triathlon (sprint) and the Liverpool triathlon (Olympic) to 'compete' in during my training.
my plans are to update the blog as often as i can to document my journey, I'm also going to be shamelessly asking for money...not for me...obviously for charity, after all something like this is a great opportunity to raise money for a worthy cause...although which worthy cause isn't quite decided yet so more on that later.
I really don't know how capable i am of finishing the Ironman challenge, but i have to try cause i know I'll regret it for the rest of my life if i don't.
at this point there are two phrases or quotes that i will be keeping with me, and using once the race is over, depending on which way it goes.
if i finish
'pain is temporary, Glory lasts forever'
If i dont make it
'Ironman can humble even the greatest athlete, the only failure is failure to Try'
wish me luck!!
