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You really must go to www.ironmanbobby.com and watch the video interview of me where I talk about training, racing, life, love, regret, hate pain, dispair and coffee; since its a video pod cast you can even look at me, and its ok to stare, even though it makes me uncomfortable I like that. A lot. Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

 

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The fellas 4 hours into a 6 hour day in the rain. All smiles, well atleast until the mountains came Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

“I was a long time coming, I will be a long time gone. You only got your whole life to do something, and that’s not very long.” Ani Difranco

Prep for Ironman 70.3 Worlds is going ok. Up and down. To make sure there was lots of ups and downs my coach Jim Ortel decided we should hook up with Block Island Sport Shop young gun David in his town of New Paltz and do some training. I needed the motivation that company can bring and also heard awesome stuff about that town from my cycling coach at Columbia Happy Freeman who was a pro roadie and lived there. Plus its home to famed S.O.S. and American Zoflinger both of which are famous for there hardness.
I got into town a little late but went from car to bike pretty fast. I was solo as the group was meeting up that night. I did a nice 3 hour ride with several smaller climbs the 2 times over Mt. Mohonk a 1000 footer. I bricked it with 60 minutes of hilly running. The fast car to bike and bike to run left my car looking like a bomb of training gear when off. I love running in new killer places because its the best way to see a place. New Paltz is my kind of town with hippy coffee house, art, grub, and an serious outdoor culture based around climbing and the famed “Gunks”.Day 2 was “the big day” with 100 miler over the American Zof course, the S.O.S. course and some other sick parts of this area. To add the the mental toughness training it was 40 and raining. To make sure everyone was miserable the 3 of us took constaint digs at each other. David started it will constaint accelerations when I would need to put out 500+ watts to not get dropped. Unwise for a guy about to do his first century, but watching people learn the hard way passes the time. That said I spent 2 hours getting dropped as David has big talent and a lot of time to develope it. He is, in short, the real deal if he wants it. Oh and he named his cat Awesome. That so rules.
The big climbs came 100k in and I dropped my pals, on both of the 1000 footers.
Ahhhh payback. I typically don’t do that but 1) I need to hard intervals and 2)after spending much of the first 100k getting dropped my ego was a little bruised. We all feasted on fruit, salad and veggie pasta post ride which was awesome. Eating well is so good for training, recovery and being able to hit it.

The next morning the forcast went from bad to worst. Cold and serious rain and wind. Pre dawn we did hill repeats running. Awesomely in New Paltz running up 1 hill takes 45+ minutes so up and down is a nice long run. The plan was to ride again but with the weather I decided to bail for nyc, a swim, a doggie and a gf and to work. When I got home the dog tried to convince me that robbers came and ransacked the place, but I remained unconvinced as most robbers don’t shread doggie chew toys.

I wanted to point out some market ideas I gots. I am, dispite my politics, kinda good market analist and I have been wanting to go Bloomberg for a long time on this blog and share with you what I share with other peeps trying to flip a coin in this bizness. Let me say at the outset, this may be boring to you. As an athlete you pay the bills for all of us and like a guest at Disney you have the right to not care how the rides work and just enjoy show. But you may also find this intersting.

SPONSORSHIP: Tri sponsorship dollars seem bigger then ever. Not from outside industry heavy hitter like say Budwieser or Ford but from industry companies or companies look to get into tri, like shoe and cycling companies that never had a market share. Puma is a great example. But so are several wheel companies and over the last 5 years every bike maker has put out a tri bike it seems. Why? Tri is exploiding, with 150000 and up 50000 in the last few years it booming. And dispite most of the punk-ass poor CREW the average income is 150k yearly. The 150 double is very atractive to companies. 150k people x 150k dollars = companies wanting it. What’s interesting is how they are coming in. Following other adverstiving trends they are going grass roots. Blogs, teams, athletes, podcasters. They have found that people are cheap and powerful for getting word out. While tradtional media continues to lose. Its a good time to be fast or famous in the sport. Some of the more clever marketing ideas are funding teams. Gu did this and charges athletes to be on it thus funding there own advertising. Like all markets, labor is always slower to catch up, it will be interesting to see if this kind of model can last when athletes learn there own marketablity.

PROs The ACC who are the pros so-called reps to the USAT are up to a lot. This is the first year the new strict requalfing rule goes into effect. There are 356 pros right now. Estimates are as many as half will be gone. Even so 356 out of 150000 seems kinda small. So half of tiny is still tiny. Truth is life for pros in terms of racing hasn’t changed much in 10 years. Few races with money and the ones with money are still more or less small purses and that doesn’t seem to be changing. Which I find interesting because for very little money race directors can make a ton of hype. Plus it seems that the number of races are now higher then the people who want to do them. Halfs are the most over saturated with one nearly every weekend in many areas. I think tuffman is a good example of how to make hype. For a few grand they helped make theselves one of the bigger race for the NYC area for that time frame. Looking at the online numbers that ironman.com does with live race coverage I think tri as a pro sport is sellable. Rev3 also really capitalized on both pros and race coverage proving” if you build it, they will come.”

IRONMAN vs THE WORLD and REV3 Ironman isn’t selling out as quickly as it once did. There own growth and other top race companies seem to be stemming the demand a bit. Ironman is still strong, the strongest by a lot, but there are enough bits at this huge gorilla to make it itch. The first mistake Ironman did was buying NAS. NAS put on IMLP,FL,CdA, AZ and Canada. They built the brand on “athletes for athletes” and over the top service. When your in the fun biz you can’t seem corperate or greedy. Ironman has a spirit to it, that transcends money and NAS got that. Its zen, but to make money you have to act as if you don’t care about it. The WTC who runs ironman don’t have that rep with the athletes. Rev3 does. Well funded, they “get-it” and are growing. Set-up Inc also had a 500 person ironman race. Quelle Roth is growing over in europe into spain and france too. Add a weak economy in general and you see chips in the ironman market share. Ironman is still ironman, but with the cutting of the prize purses and deluting of the name its heading in the wrong direction. Rumors of moving the world championships out of kona and they are for the first time in 2 decades only a few misteps from being able to be beatable. What is even more interesting is that there seem to many upstarts to stamp out like they did when the dropped ironman FL on top of the same distance race around the same time, The Great Floridian. I wouldn’t sell WTC stock just yet however as ironman is still ironman and still does a great job with their races. I was very impressed how much they improved RI for example showing they are humble enough to change adapt and listen.
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Awww my girl friend is saying nice things about me at http://liveandeatbetter.com on her blog.

“If your not afraid of getting hurt then I am not afraid of how much I will hurt you.” Manson

Well its been a grand experient. What happens if I just keep going. Go from ironman back to training. I learned a ton about balancing recovery and training. How to stay loose and fit while still getting enough rest to feel like I am climbing out of a hole. Since I haven’t really every tried this before I have come up with a few lessons learned.

1) How tired you go in with will dictate how hard it is to come out. I race a ton this year and its making it much much harder to recover. Next year me and my coach Jim Ortel have decided to really limit my racing. Its aweseome to travel the world racing for free but I am kinda like a kid in a candy store wanting to do every race on the planet. I have Annachrist syndrome! The fact that I have been going 13 months now also isn’t helping.

2) I use to “treat” myself after ironman. That is I ate crap, and got fat. Worse, I also deprived my body the key foods they needed to recover. This was the first ironman that didn’t come with a cold and being on my ass for a week sick. Huge thanks to Christine at www.liveandeatbetter.com for her special post ironman food ideas.

3) Being active is better then total rest. I use to do nothing post ironman. This is more or less fine if your season is done, but this year I stayed active. I DID NOT TRAIN! Huge difference here. I went hiking, I rode my mt bike, I commuted by bike, I surfed, I did easy light “fun runs” but I hardly did any real training. This aided my recovery while keeping weight off yet wasn’t taxing. 6 weeks of that and I was way better off then prior post ironmans.

4) I raced 5 weeks out. This was a mistake in some ways. Had a great time and it keeped me focused on my recovery but really I needed to start up again with zone 2, base efforts for a few weeks not an all out attack. This set me back a bit. Had I not raced so much already this year it might have been fine, but since it was my 6th half and 20th+ race including and ironman (not to mention two brutal 21 day camps) I am cooked.

5) Sleep is free medicine. Nothing beats lots and lots and lots of sleep. Thanks for that Ankur.

(Pic: coraline’s block island friends posing for a pic)