Ironman Tidbits

While I was up in Lake Placid for the race a couple of weeks ago, a newsletter they handed out was discussing the dedication and training required of Ironman triathletes. It referenced a study performed by the WTC (World Triathlon Corporation). The study "showed that the average Ironman triathlete spends 18-24 hours training for Ironman Hawaii. A typical week includes seven miles of swimming, 225 miles of biking, and 48 miles of running." My friends and I were all in disbelief. The "average" athlete? For a "typical week"? We're not even sure if we did that level of intensity during our toughest training week.

From my last Ironman go around, Coach Ed calculated we swam 170 miles, biked 4,250 miles, and ran 1,225 miles total over the course of our training. Hmm. I'm not sure what his start and finish dates were from those numbers and they were likely determined from our training schedules. As a result, I've elected to post a table off to the side of my blog to keep track of the mileage to date. And once I become a little more proficient at HTML programming, I'd like to add a second table showing my amount of nutrition to date (i.e., gallons of Accelerade sports drink, number of gels...)

I had once read in an article in the local Bellingham, WA sports magazine (where my mom lives) that Bellingham boasted the most Ironman finishers per capita than any other city in the U.S. Interesting. I decided to compare numbers against Arlington, VA, where I live. I counted the number of Ironman finishers (repeat finishers only count once), based on the results listed in NAS, which keeps track of all North American Ironman races (to include Canada, but not Hawaii). I also only based my calculations on the hometown listed in the results themselves. In other words, I know of a couple of other Ironman finishers who live in Arlington but their hometown was listed elsewhere in the results, so they were not counted, as potentially the same situation exists for Bellingham. Anyway, I found that 0.06% of Bellingham's population are Ironman finishers, whereas 0.04% of Arlington's are. Higher, yes, but based on the article, I would have thought that Bellingham's numbers were higher than that. It did appear, though, that Bellingham had far more repeat finishers (again, finishers were only counted once) than Arlington.

Read about Ironman history at http://www.ironman.com/mediacenter/history/ironman-triathlon-world-championship

Any other tidbits? Please feel free to post your comments.