On the 26th July 2015 I had one of the days of my life.
As I have written about before and don't need to write about much more I competed in and completed The Outlaw Triathlon in Nottingham covering 2.4 miles of lake swimming, 112 miles of cycling and 26.2 miles of running.
It has been a long term ambition of mine since at least 2008 but one that I felt was way beyond my grasp, particularly over the winter of 2014 / 15. I have repeatedly spent winters trying to prepare myself for events and to get myself into better physical condition, grinding myself into the ground, injuring myself and making myself unwell in the pursuit of 'feeling better'.
Everything changed during a conversation that I had beside a lake in Rutland in Leicestershire at the end of August 2014. I had been coached in Triathlon previously but it had never quite worked out and at the Vitruvian Triathlon at the end of August 2014 I had a conversation with Simon Mccarthy. I have known Simon for a few years, in fact even raced against him in several races. Simon is a 50+ year old ex-Marine, ex-Policeman who has now retired and coaches in endurance. In the conversation besides the lake before the half iron man triathlon he laughed at how bad my swimming was and told me that he had started coaching one or two athletes at that stage. I asked him if he would be interested in coaching me and we arranged to meet the following week.
I was struck immediately by Simon's approach to training. He has a philosophy called 'the black hole' where he believes that many, or most amateur endurance athletes train too hard almost all of the time without a reasonable split between low level endurance training and intensity training. Simon's philosophy was 80 / 20, 80% low level endurance training and 20% intensity training. It was hard for me to get me head around but it sounded good.
I started being coached by Simon in October 2014. This new approach to training was very different to what I had done before, consisting of low level heart rate monitored sessions in running and cycling with some intensity sessions getting greater and greater the further I got into the year. Everything came unstuck though at the end of May 2015 when I was ill for almost a fortnight in the lead up to the Outlaw Half which was to be my big preparation race eight weeks before the full event. Until the morning of the race I wasn't going to race but the advice I got from Simon, to treat the race as a training session and to try to do it at the pace I would like to do an Iron man, was perfect and I was able to get through the race (although I felt slowly) and come out the other side. With eight weeks to go I came out of the other side of the Outlaw Half enthused and ready to put in the hardest training work I had ever done in Triathlon.
Simon's main attributes are the ability to stop you training before you get injured, stop you training before you get ill and very carefully monitor your training to get the best out of every single session regardless of whether you have two hours a week or twenty hours a week.
The six weeks from the end of May until the middle of July were incredible and I was able to turn up at the start of The Outlaw Triathlon confident in my ability to do quite well. What happened on that day I have written about before and I exceeded all possible personal expectations and had the day of my life; a real life affirming experience.
I honestly don't think that completing the race would have been possible without Simon's help let alone the performance I was able to to pull out for myself. Even my wife Alison was truly impressed with the way the training had gone and how it hadn't impacted dramatically on my life or affected our family dynamic. I have never been wrecked after training, I have never been like a zombie unable to speak, it has never ridiculously impinged on our normal activities.
It's one thing to understand that you have to put the hours in to be able to do an event like that, but it is another thing to make sure you get the best out of every single minute of every single hour that you put in. Simon knows how to do this, both instinctively and from all the experience he has gathered over the years so for anyone who is thinking about starting out in endurance training or has a large endurance event that they wish to prepare for, why wouldn't you be coached? You weren't born knowing how to do this and you don't get it from reading a magazine. For the price of about two bottles of wine a week you can have an expert in endurance coaching who can lead you through to your best possible performance and I can assure anyone that that is one of the most amazing things.
Thank you very much Simon Mccarthy!
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