IronMan St. George Expectations

As a kid my older brother and sister just above me in age were runners. Neither of them had the perfect build for it but they worked really hard and were good at it. My mom and dad ran for exercise and I was encouraged to run as a kid. My parents put me in a few 5k’s and 10k’s but I didn’t like running, in fact I had no desire to run, and I chose instead to play football. I loved Football and it became my singular focus, but I wasn’t that great at football. When I was 13-14 years old I decided that I needed to have really strong legs in order to get better so I started doing massive sets of squats2- 3 times per week. I would do 10 sets of 10 and then 5 sets of 5. In retrospect this was not the best protocol. I am lucky that I have good knees after putting myself through that (My Mom claims I would be taller if I hadn’t done it). Luckily my legs responded to this by getting strong, (I squatted 525 while in high school and eventually hit 705 in college). Football was everything to me and I was obsessed with the dream of making it in College and even the NFL. This dream drove and consumed me, and I loved the pursuit of it. I failed in my ultimate goal of playing in the NFL so my pursuit ended with the end of my college career. I took the singular focus that I had for football and pointed it towards my job until I did the St. George Marathon in 2008. I did OK finishing in 3 hours. I captured a little bit of the fire that I had as I had pursued my football dreams. I wanted to be really good at something athletic again, but I was too big to be a great runner being 200 pounds at the time. I looked at IronMan and thought “I might be good at that”. I thought, I can run but what about swimming and biking. I knew I could not swim but this was after the 08 Olympics with Michael Phelps and they talked about his size 14 feet and how they were his flippers. I thought well I have size 14 feet so if I learn how to swim I’ll be just like him. With biking I thought back to my days of squatting and even though my legs had atrophied, they were still big so I thought the strength would come back quickly. I started swimming and biking December of 08 and have loved the pursuit of becoming really good at IronMan racing. I love the training and tracking my progress towards becoming better. I hope to have a break-through performance on Saturday. I have high expectations for IronMan St. George, and I hope to meet those expectations.