Sub-eleven hours at Ironman Lake Placid?
Let's dream a little.
I sent my coaches a one-year list that started with rebuilding a base and ended with becoming a competitive age-group triathlete.
The short goals were straightforward. Run faster. Improve my swim. Break twenty minutes in the 5K. Race well in Washington, DC.
Then the numbers got more ambitious.
Under nineteen in the 5K. Then under eighteen. A 10K under thirty-six minutes. A half marathon under ninety. A long open-water swim somewhere between five and ten kilometers.
And, possibly, an Ironman under eleven hours.
The travel calendar made the plan more interesting. Denver. Portland, Maine. DC. Virginia. A coast-to-coast bike trip across the Pyrenees. Some trips had bikes and mountains. Others meant running was the only available training.
The races were stacked close together too. NYC Triathlon, West Point, Tough Mudder with friends, Nation's Triathlon, and maybe a half Ironman in Miami if the training looked good enough.
I was not pretending all of it fit cleanly.
The list was a request for help deciding what mattered most, not permission to race hard every weekend.
The purpose of the email was to give the coaches the whole mess. Goals, races, vacations, and the events I was only considering. They could build a plan around the real calendar instead of an imaginary quiet life.
The list was aggressive because I was fired up again. A few years earlier I had finished Ironman Cozumel. Now I wanted to stop treating completion as the only result that mattered.
Dream first. Then put the workouts on the calendar.