My 6-Month Journey from no cardio to my first Ironman 70.3

Backstory

So there I was, sitting in my apartment on a cold, dark Saturday in March. It was March 4th, 2023 to be exact. This was the day I made the decision to sign up for Ironman 70.3 Jones Beach in Long Island. For those unfamiliar with this race, it is a triathlon consisting of a 1.2-mile swim in open water, a 56-mile bike ride, and a 13.1-mile run (half-marathon), with the total distance amounting to 70.3 miles. For many people, this sounds a little crazy, and it sure did for myself when volunteering myself to endure the process of such an intense race.

For the record, I had no prior experience in triathlons. I had some experience with running, as I completed a half-marathon back in 2021 but it had been a while since I ran consistently. I had no formal experience with cycling, I had ridden bikes leisurely as a kid but that was the extent of my biking history. Then there was swimming. Believe it or not, I did not know how to swim at all when I entered my credit card details on Active.com to purchase my spot in Long Island. I mean I could keep myself above water but I never had any training on any kind of proper swimming technique.

So what made decide to challenge myself to such a feat?

Well I felt a little lost to be completely honest. My overall fitness was probably the worst it had been in a long time, and I just didn’t feel very motivated to workout like I had at times in the past.

For about a year leading up to this point, I had not regularly done any cardio. My main goal was to build muscle, get stronger and look better. In doing so, I thought running would kill all my progress in the gym so I avoided it. For some time I looked really good and felt stronger than I had ever been, however, doing no structured cardio for almost an entire year destroyed my cardiovascular fitness, and I was at a point where I felt it was necessary I start moving more. But the problem was I needed something to motivate me.

That’s when I remembered what I told myself a few months prior when I was hiking in Zion National Park in Utah: I want to do an Ironman one day. I made this mental note after seeing hundreds of people wearing shirts that wrote “Ironman 70.3 North American Championships St. George”. St. George, Utah had just hosted a large Ironman event and many of the participants were there in Zion doing at the same time I was. I relished over how fit they were and it made me curious about the event.

So when I was looking for an avenue of motivation, I was brought back to the Ironman Triathlon, and I decided it was something I wanted to pursue.

Now to the training.

Training

It was around late March / early April when I began training for the race, and I began with just running. Running just 2 miles was a lot more difficult than it should have been for me. I began running short distances frequently throughout the week; 1–3 miles, 4–5x a week. This was simply to establish consistency and get some fitness back. I was running slow, not even worrying about pace, still lifting frequently, about 4–5 days a week.

Meanwhile, I began swimming in a lap pool. A friend of mine who was a swimmer took me to the pool once and gave me some very helpful tips, and a solid base to work off of, but that was the extent of any formal training I had. I was swimming freestyle. My next mission was to get to the pool once or twice a week and just keep practicing. I was terrible. For the first couple weeks, I could only make it about 2 laps down and back before coming up above water gasping for air. Breathing felt like an impossible task, but I knew that the more I worked at it, my body would adapt and learn.

Similar to running, I learned that slowing down my strokes in the pool allowed me to control my breathing much better, and this was a breakthrough point for me as a swimmer. All of a sudden I went from tapping out at 2 laps to going for 10, 15, 20+ minutes at a time with no breaks. This occurred gradually over the proceeding months.

My first bike ride was in early May. My friend and I rode for 1.5 hours at her pace, which was much faster than mine if I were to have gone solo. I managed to keep up, even though I slowly drifted further behind for the first 45 minutes out on the path we were on, and did the same on the way back. I couldn’t believe how difficult this bike ride was. Prior to this day, I had not biked more than maybe 10 miles, and that was at a leisurely pace. Like I said earlier, running was the only part of the race I had any experience in. At this point, it was about 4 and a half months from race day, and I had a lot of work to do.

For the next month, I trained everyday. I can’t remember if I even took one day off during this period, and not this is not something I would necessarily recommend, especially to a beginner in the sport. My motivation was very high though, we were entering into summertime, it was warm and sunny, and I just wanted to be outside and train.

On May 28th, I completed my first brick session. A brick session is when you do two of the three events in one workout, as a way to build fitness and get used to transitioning between events. The brick session that day was a 1hr & 40min bike ride, followed by a 50 minute run. This was a workout my friend had prescribed to her via her coach, and I decided to tag along. I was intimidated before, as I didn’t know how my body was going to hold up with so much volume. 5 miles of running would be longer than anything I had done so far, not to mention it would be after a bike ride. I made sure to carb up the day before and was well-hydrated heading into the workout.

After being at the bike path for about 3 hours, the workout was over, and I smashed it. My maintained a 15mph pace on the bike without much fatigue (unlike the first time lol). I took my run very slow at about 10:15 min/mi pace. My energy was through the roof after, and this was the most confident I had felt so far through the training.

At this point I was beginning to find structure to my training. I would typically do a long bike ride once a week on Friday mornings. I’d swim on Monday or Tuesday for 45 minutes to an hour. I would do a long run on Wednesdays, and a speed workout on Saturdays. Occasionally, I would do an extra shorter bike or swim throughout the week, and maybe a short, easy run. I was still lifting about 4 days a week until late-June.

I love lifting, and I am a huge proponent of it even for endurance athletes, however, once I tailored back my lifting to just 2 low-intensity full body workouts a week, my endurance began to accelerate faster. I was now much better recovered, as my muscles weren’t sore going into triathlon workouts.

Training continued to progress overall through July, with longer runs, more efficient swimming, and longer and faster bike rides. I did run into a new roadblock around this time though. On my bike rides, I began hitting a wall around 27 / 28 miles. From the first 18-mile ride I did, I kept increasing the distance by 2–3 miles each week. Once I got up to 27 miles one week, and then 28 the next, I was bonking for the last few miles. My energy was massively depleted, and I even felt excessively fatigued for the remainder of the day. I remember thinking to myself: “this is only half the distance I need to do on race day, how the hell am I going to make it if I’m hitting a wall this early?”

This is the point where I got my nutrition and hydration on track. If you ever read about how to train for endurance training, there will be a section on nutrition. I knew it was important, but I didn’t really understand the dynamics and implementation of it until it was the thing limiting me from progressing.

On the next bike ride I did, I brought multiple packets of electrolyte / carb drink mix, and energy gels from Maurten. I drank about 18oz of water with the drink mix right before beginning the ride, and had two more bottles with it prepped for the ride, plus an energy gel halfway through. The difference that these supplements made were amazing. I biked 35 miles that day and felt great. My legs were a little fatigued at the end, but my energy for the rest of the day was completely fine. No outrageous hunger like I had experienced in the past.

My training continued to progress over the next couple of months leading up to the race. I was nailing longer distances, and fueling myself better. My longest bike ride ended up being a 50-mile ride about 3 and a half weeks before the race. This was actually a brick session as I did a 1-mile run after to test out running in my newly-purchased tri-suit. My longest run came about a week later, hitting 10 miles at 9:34 pace. And for my biggest swim workout, I completed the full 1.2 miles (2100yds) in about 45 minutes in a lap pool. I did do open water swimming three times during the summer as well — which I would have loved to do more of, but logistically it can be tough to find a good spot for it.

Taper

Tapering was a term I had heard before but didn’t really know what it meant or how to execute it until about two weeks prior to the race. After doing research online and talking to a couple friends who have ran marathons, I developed an unwritten plan for my race taper. The purpose of a taper is to reduce training volume and intensity in order to allow your body to recover and be fresh come race day. It’s not uncommon for this 1 to 2 week period to cause tiredness and low energy, and I sure experienced that. Despite being excited for the race, I felt pretty shitty a week before the race. I drastically reduced my training after repeatedly doing long runs, bike rides, and swims for the last few months with no major breaks, and so my body was recovering, but I also felt tired and a bit unmotivated to carry on. I wanted to train and “get after it”, but I knew I needed to keep it light for these last two weeks.

The race was taking place on a Saturday. For the week leading up, I rested on Sunday and Monday, did a light 30-minute swim on Tuesday, rested Wednesday, did a 10-mile bike ride, followed by a 1-mile run on Thursday. On Friday, I took part in a half-mile pre-race swim in Zack’s Bay, off of Jones Beach, LI, where the race would take place.

I had a lot of pasta two nights prior, and a big sushi dinner the night before the race. My glycogen stores were topped off and I was ready to go. I definitely felt a little heavy from so many stored carbs and water in my body, but I knew that feeling would be necessary to make sure I was well-fueled.

Race Day

So the day was finally here. My plan was to wake up at 5am, leave our hotel by 5:30 in order to get to Jones Beach by 6am. The race didn’t begin until 7am, so I figured I would have a nice buffer just in case traffic is bad. Well, I underestimated the traffic being bad. We passed exit after exit that was blocked off, forcing us to drive miles farther just to make our way back around to the drop-off zone. Initially, our ETA was pushed back to 6:15, then 6:25, then 6:35, and I slowly got more nervous that I wasn’t going to even make it to the race in time.

How embarrassing would that be? Going through months of strenuous training, spending precious time and money on nutrition, gear, and not to mention the hefty race fee, all to say I was late and couldn’t complete it.

Well for whatever reason, the Ironman gods were on my side that morning, as we were literally the very last car to be allowed into the exit to park in the main lot by the start. My race day jitters quickly shifted from completing the race to if I was even going to participate. The volunteers had traffic cones in their hands as we were scooting by them, and they placed them right behind our car blocking off the exit. If we were just 1 car behind, we would have had to drive down the road to the next lot, which would be so far from the start that I would not have even made it on time.

With the parking situation out of the way, now it was time to race. I set my gear bag down by my bike in the transition area and sprinted to the start line on the beach at Zack’s Bay. I got there right around 6:55, quite the close call.

I’ll never forget the anticipation that to built up immensely before jumping in the water. Probably 20 to 25 minutes went by before I got into the water, as they were allowing three people in every 5–10 seconds or so. It was still dark out, about 40 degrees outside, and I’m in nothing but a sleeveless tri-suit. All I remember hearing was the repetitious noise of the start timer and the hard splashing of waves in the background.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention that there was a tropical storm moving through Long Island at the time of the race. The storm had been moving up the coast days prior and timed itself perfectly to meet us on the morning of the race. There was a light rain at the time and consistent gusts of wind, making the start of this race all more epic.

Once I made my way onto the sand near the start line, I saw my family and friends there watching me, cheering me on. Shoutout to everyone who got up that early and stood out in such terrible weather to watch me that day, I was so grateful in that moment.

Due to the extreme weather conditions, the swim distance was cut down from 1.2 miles to 0.5 miles. The waves were so strong the farther you went out, it was deemed unsafe to swim in. Since I had done the pre-race swim the day prior, it seemed a lot more familiar to me. I felt comfortable in the water, I simply focused on maintaining the technique I’ve been practicing, and continued to move forward. The waves were pretty intense, it seemed like every 3 or 4 breaths the water smacked me in the face to let me know I was in for it. At one point I began drifting off course and I remember one of the crew members shouting at me to go left. I managed to steer myself back to the main pack of swimmers and finished out in a total time of 19 minutes and two seconds.

An underrated hard part of this race was running barefoot on rocky pavement from the shore over to the transition area. It only took about 2 or 3 minutes, but my god was that uncomfortable.

Anyways, I put on my socks and shoes, got my quarter zip on in an effort to stay warm, slapped on my helmet and biking glasses, and I was off on the bike.

The bike course consisted of two out-and-backs up Long Island and then back toward Jones Beach. Going North, the wind made me significantly slower. I felt like I was barely moving despite pedaling hard. As I made my way farther North, the wind became more subtle. Heading back South was a pleasant relief however, with the wind aiding me forward. I stopped to pee twice during the ride, took my time knowing I had to pace myself for the race. The 56-mile distance was more than I had ever done, plus I still had the half-marathon afterward. So I didn’t mind taking my time at the aid stations. I grabbed Gatorade, and either a gel or a half banana for some whole food (I consumed 6 gels throughout the race, and my stomach felt it).

I completed the bike in 3:41:05. Even though time wasn’t too much of a goal, I wasn’t super happy with my time on the bike. I could tell I was drifting toward the back of the pack of racers, but the run was up next, which was was my strongest of the three events.

I went out hot on the run, completing the first two miles at 7:48, and 7:57 pace, feeling great. My watch had died a long time ago so I didn’t even know what pace I was running at, so I was just doing what felt good. Up until about mile 6, I still felt pretty good, slowed down a bit but was keeping up fine.

The back half of the run is where I really began to respect the distance of this race. My quads and hamstrings were very fatigued at this point, and my total energy was diminishing. This is also around the time when I felt a pull in my hamstring. Of course, one of the most common injuries in any sport is a pulled hamstring, and I thought I was the next victim. I had felt that a couple months prior in training but it had gone away up until this point. Nothing was really damaged, but I could tell that if I landed my foot too hard on the ground it could pull more to a point where I may have to stop. So I shortened my stride and kept my feet closer to the ground (something I have been working on lately) and the feeling of pulling started to go away.

From this point on, about 6.5 miles left to go, it was all mental. It felt like an eternity, and frankly, it was. My last four miles averaged round 11:30 pace. I just focused on slowly moving forward, making sure my hamstring felt okay, and not stopping. That’s what I did, and after six and a half hours of racing, I finally saw the finish line. My total time was 6:33:35.

Post Race

This 6-month journey was one of the best experiences of my life, and one of my proudest achievements. Race day itself was one for the books, but it is really the whole process from the day I signed up to crossing the finish line that I will remember forever. I relished it so much so that I signed up for a full Ironman next September, Ironman Maryland 2024. While prepping for this race, I will continue to document my experience through writing.

One more takeaway from this story is to not be afraid to pursue something that scares you. There were a number of times that I questioned whether I would finish this race or not, but that’s what made it all worth the time and effort in the end. I am without a doubt more confident in my own abilities now, not just in fitness, but in all areas of life even.

Thanks for reading.