Summary: My plan is to become an IRONMAN before November 2018. I will be describing my journey, as well as my day-to-day life as a management consultant on this platform.
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Yeah, so once I dreamt about becoming a millionaire before I turn 30. Unless I win the lottery, that’s not going to happen. And you know what? I’m ok with that. Money is definitely a good thing to have (what a deep insight), as it enables you to do a lot of things (even deeper insight). But it’s not a top priority for me (never really was) and getting another 0 on my bank account would not be as exciting as what my “before I turn 30”-goal morphed into.
And it turned into becoming an IRONMAN. I started running a lot this year – so far clocked 1,833 km and I’m still going strong to probably hit around 3000 km in 2016 – and got more and more into the “endurance” type of physical activity. Before that, I was an occasional gym-goer, but that didn’t really go well with my job as a management consultant – I travel a lot and guess what, to go to a gym there needs to be a gym close to the hotel / client’s site. Running, on the other hand, requires only a pair of shoes and some appropriate clothing and voila, I’m ready to rock’n’roll.
I’ve grown to like running (although getting out for a run is still quite a pain, but I’ll go into that in a different post) – I even got a great trainer who creates weekly training plans for me (run-passion.pl, for those of you who speak Polish), so all I have to do is to get myself out of the hotel / wherever I’m staying that day and tick off what my plan tells me. I know how many calories / g of nutrients I need everyday and am tracking my intake using the glorious MyFitnessPal (all about that in different posts soon). So overall I’ve become fitter than I used to be, I’ve got a lot of energy and am making training work with my consulting lifestyle.
My friend Artur (triszerpa.pl, another one for the Polish speakers), who is currently a passionate ultra-marathon runner specialising in mountain running, used to want to become an IRONMAN. I remember our first conversation about that – must’ve been 7-8 years ago! But since then he dropped this idea, as he fell in love with mountains and decided to focus on running in them. And since I’ve become more fond of the “endurance” type of exercising, I had this crazy idea of picking up Artur’s initial goal and putting a time limit on it to make it SMART. And this is what this site is all about.
My goal is as follows:
S – pretty specific, complete (/ survive) a full IRONMAN triathlon – that is 3.86 km of swimming (2.4 miles), 180.25 km of cycling (112 miles) and 42.2 km of running (26.2 miles) before I turn 30. I’m already tired from writing this
M – measurable as hell; but the most important measure for me will be not dying during the triathlon
A – is it achievable? Read this post if you want to know my approach: TGIF? No. Every day can be Friday. Bottom-line: I will make it work. It might be difficult to marry it up with my consulting lifestyle, it will hurt and there will be many times when I will have to fight with myself. But I really want to do it and I’ll find a way. Hopefully my health will allow me to do it!
R – it is relevant to me. This is the time to do it – I don’t have kids yet, my health is ok (although I will have to watch out for my left knee, which I had two surgeries on a few years back) and it is a challenge. And I love challenges – without them, my life would be pretty boring 🙂
T – it is definitely a time-bound goal. The deadline is November 2018. In 2017 I want to complete a half-IRONMAN and then focus on getting my body ready for the full distance while competing in shorter triathlons / half marathons / full marathons (having set the deadline, though, if injuries arise and my body starts to suffer too much with a potential for a long-term detrimental effect, I will be following my trainer’s advice regarding the timeline)
You might be wondering why I feel the need to share my journey with the whole world. Well, I hope that you’ll find something interesting for yourself among my posts. I will be writing about training and nutrition, about what hurts, why it’s hurting and how I’m coping with it. I will be posting about my observations from my work as a management consultant, which will be relevant to your working life, but also to everyday interactions beyond your workplace. Finally, I will be sharing my thoughts with you on life in general, derived from observations / conversations / books / videos / all of the possible sources of knowledge, as well as writing about stuff that did not fit into the other categories, but I felt the urge to express. Therefore at the end of the day, I hope that everyone will find something for themselves on this page.
For the ones with little time, every post will start with a summary. Frequency of posts – we’ll see. Feedback – required and much appreciated! So do drop me a line (w@ironconsultant.com), follow me on Twitter (@IRONCONSULT) and on Facebook.
Let’s get this started!
IRONCONSULTANT 