I started proper on 12 June 2009. Craig started me on simple routines. Slow jogs. Short runs. Nothing intensive. WHY? The whole idea about training for an Ironman is not trashing the body, beat it to its pulp and leave nothing for the next day or week, or worse, for the rest of your life. The body needs time to garner mileage from the swims, bike sessions and run legs (pun intended). And all these cant be done in a week, in a month or even a year.
Recall, we were NOT born to walk immediately out of the womb. And if we practice this same ideology to training for the Ironman, we will be safe from injuries. Well, look at us any ordinary adult now - we are able to walk and run without having to injure ourselves is it not true? UNLESS we put additional stress on them - like putting on weight or running excessively and unintelligently. What makes us think that we can do a fast marathon in half a year or even one year, when we took half a year as babies to learn to WALK proficiently without any major mishaps? And how long more to coordinate a run with no falls?
What is the point in flogging yourself and leave nothing for the next day, or next few days? Ironman is about endurance. Not a sprint to the finish. Well, at least not for most Ironman participants, and definitely for myself. I have to build enough for the body to keep on going.
In fact, this is so applicable to anybody's life. Many a times, we get so impatient that we want instant food. Instant noodles, fast food, fast speed internet, fast cars, fast women, quick cash, 2-ring customer service standards and what have you . The immediacy time frame is so much part and parcel of our life that we are constantly being bombarded silly that we have become so immune to the ill effects thereafter.
Allow me to illustrate:
1) slow driver - honk and stick out middle finger and worse, overtake in a reckless manner to show off how fast my car can go
2) slow cyclist - I can make a right turn faster than the cyclist going straight, so I turn, forgetting that the cyclist could be going at 38kph and not some market bound old man
3) my results are not good enough - I want it to improve by the next test so I engage a private tutor. If tutor fails to improve my results by next test, YOU ARE FIRED as Donald Trump will say in The Apprentice
...
Frankly, I can go on. And I am pretty sure we all know this. That there is NO instant cure. There is NO instant remedy for a world economy that has gone the wrong way. There is NO instant cure for a political system in a flailing country. And sad to say, Barack Obama may also be thought to be doing the wrong things because he had failed to bring relief to the country after ONE year in office. The instant gratification is a deep social disease that only ourselves can cure. But how? By just coming to terms that there cannot be a simple cure! There is just NO instant relief.
In my MBA course which I completed many years ago, we studied how companies made strategies for the company's growth and how the whole business network are all interlinked. And that it takes time for results to be shown. Chaos theory also just about explains the intimacy of the relationships of all things in the world - that a change in an event, will create a hailstorm elsewhere. This intimacy in the integration of affairs is simply too complex for simple solutions.
Perhaps we should all just remind ourselves the baseline, that fast food is unhealthy.
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