Many of you have probably been wondering about the meaning behind the title of this blog: “Project 570”.  This stands for my goal time of 9.5 hours, or 570 minutes.   

Wisconsin Race Report

As a quick aside, a summary of last year’s race will hopefully provide some useful context to the thought process behind this goal.  Having accumulated valuable race experience from Chicago and Lake Placid, IM Wisconsin was my first concerted attempt at a Kona qualification.  The timing was fortuitous, as this was my last year in the 25-29 age group, after which qualifying times tend to drop drastically, primarily driven by an influx of retired pros into the age group circuit (the difference between the 25-29 and 30-34 age group winners this year was over 35 minutes!).  My goal heading into the race was to break 10 hours, based on research which indicated that the 25-29 age group had historically been allocated 3 Kona slots and the average time to podium had been around that mark. 

Things got off to a rocky start on the swim, as high winds and choppy water conditions created separation between the strong swimmers and the mere mortals.  Due to inadequate preparation for such conditions, I exited the water with a 20 minute deficit to the race leaders, having clocked a disappointing time of 1:17:56, substantially slower than the previous year.  Nevertheless, improvements to sustainable power in the saddle over the past season paid significant dividends on the bike course.  A breakout performance on what is considered one of the toughest bike courses in the Ironman circuit was enough to propel me from 43^rd to 8^th place over the course of 5:22:11 and begin the marathon with fresher than expected legs.  Prior to the race, I had made the request to my family, who had graciously come to show their support, to not inform me of my splits relative to the competition.  Nevertheless, with 6 miles left in the marathon, I discovered that they had decided to break that promise when my father sprinted alongside shouting that #3 was only 2 minutes ahead and was losing ground at a rate of 20 seconds per mile.  As physically exhausted (and I will admit – annoyed!) as I was at that moment, I fully credit this call for providing me with the extra push to the finish line, clocking the fastest run in my AG of 3:09:54, which was enough to snag the podium by a mere six seconds and break 10 hours by four.  A summary of these results can be found below. 

Kona Goals:

With this context in place: my 9:30 goal represents a 30 minute / 5% reduction vs. last year.  While Kona is not traditionally regarded a race that is conducive to setting PBs, I believe that my limited background in the sport means that I have not traveled too far down the diminishing return curve and that there remains room for incremental improvements.  As many of you know from your own endeavors, goal setting can be a tricky business, as one needs to walk the tightrope between leaving money on the table effort-wise and setting a bar that ends up being a crushing burden.  This is particularly the case for Ironman races due to the presence of so many outside factors, including but not limited to adverse weather conditions, mechanical failures, and training / racing accidents.  As such, this 9.5 hour goal is by no means ironclad and will be subject to the circumstances leading up to and during the race.  Regardless of whether Madame Pele decides to help me or humble me, this goal has been carefully pegged at a minimum to provide a benchmark to strive towards and to provide a sense of accountability throughout the training process. 

A breakdown of this goal is summarized below.  Note: A more comprehensive overview of various training metrics, benchmarks, and acronyms will be provided in a subsequent post. 

• Swim: A material amount of the improvement over last year’s time has been attributed to the swim.  My post-race analysis attributed my underperformance to two factors: (i) a breakdown of swim technique leading up to the race due to a faster-than-optimal ramp in volume, and (ii) inadequate preparation for choppy conditions, which resulted in a total swim distance of nearly 5,000m instead of the official 3,900m (check out the jagged line in the below GPS track)!  The good news is that both of these issues are low hanging fruit and are being addressed by working with a swim coach to develop my stroke and actively seeking windy days out in the open water come spring/summer.  While I am currently capable of 1:30/100m in the pool (approximately a 1 hour ironman swim), given the potential for very choppy conditions and the fact that Kona prohibits the use of wetsuits, I have conservatively set a goal pace at 1:40/100m, or a goal time of 1:05.

• Bike: Last year’s breakout bike performance was achieved by training my functional threshold power (“FTP”, or maximum power sustainable over an hour) to 290 watts, a substantial 30 watt / 12% gain over the prior year.  While subject to the law of diminishing returns, I believe that a modest bump to 300 watts (3.5% gain) should be reasonably achievable over the following year on a similar volume of training.  Crunching these numbers through BestBikeSplit’s online algorithm yields a predicted time of 4:46, driven partially by the FTP increase but mostly due to the fact that Wisconsin is generally regarded to be a more technical and hilly course.  However, given the notoriously hot and windy conditions of the Kona bike course (gusts have been recorded north of 60mph), this estimate has been trimmed back to a goal time of a nice and round 5:00, representing a PB time reduction of 22 minutes. 

• Run: The marathon has historically been my strongest of the three disciplines, and given my limited background in the sport, likely still has room for incremental improvements.  Again keeping in mind the law of diminishing returns, breaking 3 hours seems comfortably achievable in race conditions similar to Wisconsin and a similar volume of training.  This would equate to a bump in pacing from 7:19/mi to 6:52/mi.  However, the heat and humidity in Kona (particularly in the infamous energy lab) will likely be a significant performance limiter, so I have trimmed these numbers back to 7:30/mi, resulting in a goal time of 3:15, approximately 5 minutes slower than last year
• T1/T2: these are difficult to predict and are dependent on the setup of the transition area, so for the sake of conservatism, have assumed the same times as last year.

Inspiring Ironman Stories

To be clear, these goals are by no means fast or particularly noteworthy.  By comparison, in what has generally been described as the perfectly executed race this past October, Jan Frodeno (aka “Frodo/Frodissimo”) broke the Kona course record with a blistering time of 7:51:13.  What made this performance even more special was that Jan had spent most of the year recovering from a sacral fracture. 

On the women’s side, few athletes have dominated the sport as much as Daniela Ryf (aka the “Swiss Miss” or the “Angry Bird”), who has won four out of the last five Kona races.  Perhaps her most impressive performance was in 2018, when after being stung by jellyfish in the swim and losing almost 10 minutes to the race leaders, she ended up storming the field and breaking both the bike course and overall course record with a time of 8:26:18. 

That is not to say that fast times are the only measure of success in Kona.  Perhaps one of the most iconic moments in Ironman history was the famous “crawl” of Julie Moss.  23 years old at the time and competing as part of her exercise physiology thesis, Julie found herself leading the 1982 edition of the race.  Due to dehydration and fatigue accumulated over the course of the day, she collapsed a mere fifteen feet away from the finish line.  Watching victory slip away as Kathleen McCartney ran past her, Julie inched toward the finish line on her hands and knees in an inspiring display of grit.  Her struggle to finish the race was broadcast around the world and is not only considered one of the key factors that drove participation in the races’ early days, but is also memorialized in Section 6.01 of the race rules: “Athletes may run, walk, or crawl”. 

Or take Sister Madonna Buder (aka the “Iron Nun”), who completed her first Ironman at age 55 and 45 races later holds the record as the oldest woman to ever finish an Ironman distance event at the age of 82.  Her story is featured in the below inspirational (and hilarious) 2016 Nike ad. 

Or Jon “Blazeman” Blais.  Diagnosed in 2005 with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (“ALS”), a terminal disease with no current cure that slowly leads to full paralysis, Jon was given two years to live.  As a lifelong multi-sport athlete however, Blais determined that he would race at Kona that year, declaring “I’m going to finish under my own power or they’re going to have to roll me across the finish line.”  Despite already having lost some control of his body, he did just that, rolling across the finish line not long before the midnight cutoff in a defiant stand against the hand he had been dealt.  Jon passed away in 2007.  Athletes continue to honor him to this day at the finish line with the “Blazeman roll”.

These are but a handful of the many inspiring stories that have arisen from the Ironman circuit.  Every November, as part of its Emmy-award winning coverage of the year’s race, NBC takes the time to showcase the unique and oftentimes tear-jerking journeys of individual athletes who have overcome great adversity to toe the start line.  Stories such as these capture the true spirit of Ironman, celebrating what the human mind and body are capable of no matter the circumstances thrown against them. 

In my next post, I will provide a high-level overview of the training plan that I have laid out in preparation for next year’s race.

#dacakeisalie

Hey folks, to channel my inner millennial, I have decided to create this blog to document my experiences and thoughts on my preparation for the Ironman World Championship being held in Kona, Hawaii next year (October 10, 2020).  The objectives of this blog are threefold:

• First and foremost, my hope is that this medium would allow me to more comprehensively share my journey with family, friends, and colleagues; something that I have found difficult to adequately capture in single conversations.
• Secondly, my hope is that this blog can provide a source of information for those of you who may be interested in trying out the sport.  I will caveat this by mentioning that I am by no means an expert in this field and represent a sample size of one.  At the very least, these posts should provide insight on what worked for me and/or highlight mistakes that I have made that others can avoid. To the extent that I make any incorrect statements, please feel free to let me know in the comments section.   
• Should I fail in the above two objectives, at a bare minimum, this blog would hopefully serve to capture a snapshot of myself today, providing all of us an opportunity to look back many years hence and marvel and laugh at how one’s values can change over time. 

Personal Introduction:

While this blog is primarily intended for family and friends, for those of you who have been referred to or happened upon it, a brief introduction is in order:

My name is Preston Han and I stumbled upon the sport of triathlon back in 2016, having watched two college friends participate in the New York Triathlon that year.  The immense focus that they dedicated to their training and multidisciplinary aspect of the sport immediately piqued my curiosity, and having purchased a bike the previous year as an added incentive to get back in shape and having previously run on a purely casual basis, I realized that I “only” needed to pick up swimming in order to get in on the action as well. 

While I had played varsity-level squash in high school and college (with little to no distinction), my background in endurance sports was limited, consisting of swim lessons in elementary school and a brief stint at cross country running in middle school.  As such, my first steps into the sport were humble to say the least; being only able to swim a single pool length (25m) at a time, ride for an hour (~20mi), and run a mile or two at a pedestrian 9 min/mi pace.  A detailed overview of the methods and strategy behind the progression since then will be covered in a subsequent post. 

My first race experience was the 2017 Transamerica Chicago Triathlon, a crowd-favorite Olympic-distance event which spans across the tourist highlights of the Windy City and served as both a fun and gentle introduction into the nuances of the sport.  Having thoroughly caught the bug, I decided to make the big step up from Olympic to long-course distance and competed at Ironman Lake Placid in 2018, followed by Ironman Wisconsin in 2019, at which I had the immense privilege of qualifying for the 2020 Kona World Championship.  The results of these three races are summarized in the table below. 

Triathlon for Dummies!

For those of you less familiar with the sport, a triathlon is a multisport race, most commonly consisting of swim, bike, and run segments in that order.  A transition area is set up where athletes change gear for different segments of the race. The transition from swim to bike is referred to as T1 and that between the bike and run is referred to as T2. The athlete’s overall time for the race includes time spent in T1 and T2.  The need to compete across three sports adds an additional layer of complexity for athletes not only in terms of training time management, but also due to the fact that the physical requirements for each activity oftentimes conflict with each other (e.g. the upper-body musculature required for swimming acts as non-functioning dead-weight for cycling and the lower-body rigidity / “snap” required for running generates greater drag in swimming).

The following ad produced by Cervelo, although shameless marketing, provides a great overview of the activities and ethos that a triathlete undertakes:

Triathlons can occur over a wide variety of distances, a summary for the most common of which can be found below. 

Shorter distance formats like the Sprint / Supersprint provide a great opportunity to try out the sport which is less daunting for first-timers.  That is not to say that participation in these shorter formats is any less difficult or impressive.  In the same way that an 18 minute 5K is as impressive as a sub-3 hour marathon, in the words of the famous cyclist Greg Lemond: “It never gets easier, you just go faster!”  As the name suggests, the Olympic distance is the format utilized at the summer Olympics, having been introduced relatively recently at Sydney in 2000. 

What is Ironman / Kona?  A swimmer, cyclist, and runner walked into a bar…

While not the first format to be introduced, given its role in bringing the sport of triathlon into the mainstream, a strong argument can be made that the Ironman distance has the most heritage.  The brainchild of John and Judy Collins, the first Ironman race was organized in 1978 in Oahu, Hawaii to settle a bar-room debate on which type of athlete: swimmer, cyclist, or runner, was the most fit.  This new event combined the courses of three preexisting races: the Waikiki Roughwater Swim, the Around Oahu bike race, and the Honolulu Marathon, setting the precedent distances for subsequent Ironman races. 

While the first race involved 15 athletes, participation exploded to such an extent that by 1980 the race was moved to its present (and more remote) location in Kona, Hawaii, and by 1983, a qualification system was introduced; turning the Kona Ironman into the Ironman World Championship.  Today there are over 40 Ironman and 120 Half Ironman branded races held throughout the world each year. 

As of 2019, out of the nearly 100,000 athletes that compete around the world each year, approximately 2,500 get the opportunity to race at Kona.  Generally speaking, qualification for Kona can be achieved via the following methods:

• Standard qualification: Each of the ~40 full distance and a handful of half distance races around the world offer a number of Kona qualification slots, which are then divided up according to the size of each age group.  Athletes then compete for these slots which are awarded based on placement within one’s age group.  Ironman also allocates a number of slots for disabled athlete divisions. 
• Lottery: Athletes that have completed a minimum of 12 full-distance Ironman races, have raced in the past year, and have never competed in Kona are entered into an annual lottery for a chance to participate.
• Donation: Through programs such as the Ironman Foundation or the Executive Program, folks that donate enough are granted entry.  Opening bids typically start at $25k and are rumored to settle in the six figures.

Given the long history of the race and the extreme difficulty of securing a slot, Kona has established itself as the “holy grail” amongst triathletes and a bucket-list goal that some can spend decades pursuing.  Prior to Ironman Wisconsin, many of you may have heard me joke of my “Kona by Age 50” initiative, the tongue-in-cheek rationale being that by age 50, one should have qualified because the competition has gotten slower, by sheer luck through the lottery, or have accumulated enough piggy bank money to buy in. 

In my next post, I will provide an overview of my personal goals for the race as well as some inspiring stories over the years from the Ironman circuit. 

#dacakeisalie