New Zealand or Bust

All my exercising must be goal-oriented. I’m not just going to get on a treadmill three times a week because it’s good for me. What a stupid reason to do anything. I’ve been trying to psyche myself up by setting small, nebulous goals like training my three mile run, or even a 10K. I see no point to this because it sounds easy. It’s like a sprint distance triathlon, I just don’t see the point of training for something I could just get up off the couch and do. There’s an expertise to it, sure, and it’s impressive when people can do them really fast and yet I can’t justify being a backpacking sprinter, but a backpacking ironman, that seems somehow more respectable.

So since my big camping trip, I have done nothing but walk down the hill to the Max for exercise. My wheel, which you may recall was defective, has still not been replaced by the manufacturer (thanks for all of your no help, River City Bikes), warranty or not. What was supposed to be 7-10 days has turned into three weeks and counting. If I were a doctor or Lance Armstrong, I’m sure they would have offered a new wheel off of one of their dozens of unsold bikes, but I’m not so they haven’t.

In the meantime, I contemplate my future triathlon career. I need an ironman or I don’t think I’ll ever exercise again. And I’m looking at going big. Since it has become virtually impossible to get into a U.S. located ironman-and apparently no one not from the “ironman company” (Silverman in Vegas sounds interesting though-http://www.silvermannv.com/) can or will put on a race that distance-I’m starting to look overseas. Because not only can you get into most of the overseas races, but you don’t have to register an entire year in advance and risk not getting in.

So I started looking around and saw Malaysia. We’ve been wanting to hit Southeast Asia on a vacation, and what better way to give the whole family what it wants than by me doing an ironman in an exotic locale. I was only able to find one non-ironman-company review of the race, which made it sound wretched. Plus it’s in Southern Malaysia, which seemed awfully far from Cambodia and Thailand, the countries we really want to visit.

Then I looked at New Zealand and at the moment, that’s the front runner. In any case, my new absurd goal is to do all the overseas ironman events, starting with New Zealand and then just moving to Australia, Malaysia (maybe they’ll get it together by then), France, Great Britain, Germany, etc.

So New Zealand, March 2010.

The three major complications to these events is the cost, travel time and time of year.
I’m looking at 3K just for myself to make this work-just to get there. Fortunately I’ve got most of my tri equipment already, but even so money seems to evaporate during even the most fiscally conservative tri season.

It’s tough enough to do an ironman without having sat on an airplane for 21 hours prior to a race. I was totally spent for a day after flying back from Key West, I can only imagine the recovery time after flying to Auckland. So I figure I’ll time it so we’re in New Zealand for about 5 days before the race. I will be somewhat acclimated and rested.

And of course finally, all my big training sessions will occur during the lousiest weather of the year here in Portland. I’m pretty sure a training ride up to Mt. Hood in January is out of the question. So I’m going to have to tough out some crummy long rides, which will require an investment in cold weather gear, which will add additional strain to the budget. On the bright side, just talking about this has got me ready to hit the pool and the gym with a purpose.