Verslag Ironman Berry Schipper (31-08-2010)

Berry Schipper is in april j.l. bij Lars Karmelk komen trainen met als doel zo goed mogelijk finishen in de Holland triathlon van Almere. Vanwege de vele engelstaligen in zijn netwerk (hij woont in Cambodja) heeft hij het verslag in het Engels geschreven.
Vanwege de lengte van het verslag heb ik het in 3 delen opgeknipt.


Deel 1: Achtergrond

Crossing the line

If memory serves me right it was april 2009 when I saw an email from Phnom Penh based Laura Watson asking for a (new) biking/training partner to work towards an Iron Man. I had been training on and mostly off for 6 months or so, but as usual not very structured. I’ve been wanting to do an Iron Man for over 15 years, and when Jan-Bert Bos, Berndt van Eijkeren and myself did a so called Tri-together and I swam the IM-part in August 2000 I knew one day I had to be a part of this and do one on my own.
There was one big obstacle: my left knee. Even though (mostly) decently balanced over my 2.02 meter, my weight has been between 108 and 115kg over the past 15 years and 10+ years of basketball caused some damage on that knee. I could run 30 minutes 2-3 times a week, but that was it. So I focused on swimming. Again not too structured, but I found an interesting website www.swimplan.com and I followed some sort of schedule. Then I met an interesting (interesting as in completely nuts) Dutchy in Phnom Penh: Roger Henke. A long distance runner who practiced Chi-running. He showed me a complete new way of running. For details I gladly refer you to the many articles and You-Tube films on the internet and books that have been written about this, but it basically comes down to leaning forward from your ankles, let your weight (of which I have enough) pull you forward, take small, small steps and most important: land mid-foot, not on your heel.
I started to practice Chi-running early 2009 and I found myself running a lot easier and longer than ever before and… without any discomfort. I ran on treadmills only, cause I still didn’t want to take risks with my knee. I also biked in the gym, but after a few months I was getting bored and losing motivation: even for a narcissist like myself staring at yourself in the mirror for 6-8 hours a week while running or biking gets to be a drag.
So in april 2009 I committed myself to serious training, outdoors training even. This might sound a bit silly; when you want to do an Iron Man of course you have to train outdoors, but living in Phnom Penh that was not an easy step to take. The roads aren’t very safe and the temperature and humidity is killing. On my first ride, a whooping 50km, I believe it was 469 degrees with 2099.9% humidity and I was in serious pain, but I loved it.
Pretty soon an Irish ultra runner named Joe Collins had joined Laura and me on our way to IM and all of us were improving our fitness and toughness. But we also had our motivational setbacks at times. We tried to help each other through this in our different ‘styles’: Laura is the supporting kind, Joe will challenge you and I like to annoy people into working harder.

Our midterm goal in March 2010 was the 70.3 in Singapore, a half triathlon. About 6 weeks before the start of this I had a serious dip in motivation and skipped more than half of my planned training. That bit me in the ass during the race. I just didn’t had what it takes to finish a race like this in a decent way. I did finish, but 7hrs20 was a good wakeup call: I wasn’t fit enough. We were joined in Singapore by former PP resident Nick Cox and he was the first one ‘rude’ enough to tell me I wasn’t going to reach my goal of finishing a full IM only 5 months later. With my usual arrogance in these situations I wanted to dismiss this; what did he know about me and how deep I could dig in my self-proclaimed mental toughness? “Don’t tell me what I cannot do.” But I looked at Joe and he just nodded: Sorry buddy, but no way you’re going to cross that line if you keep horsing around like you do now.