Vicarious ironman

Today I was meant to have my cycle training lessons as provided by Brent Council - they who can no longer afford libraries, rubbish collection and heath care. It was a four hour session where I guess I would ride through cones.

Then I was meant to visit an old friend, the indefatigable David Bousfield, who has cycled substantial amounts of Brasil and India.

Instead I ended up in A and E in chronic pain and a healthy dose of some internal bleeding. Nice.

So I lived through my coach, the inspiring and amazing Jonathon Acott who was doing Ironman Nice for team Livestrong, being a two times cancer survivor himself. Jonathan made Ironman look easy. With the Ironman live system you can track a runner's split times - and if you are lucky see them on tv. For the swim split, I was at hospital but fellow Ironman Lanzarote aspirant Sharky sent the time through. Fist in air, albeit feebly.

For the bike, Sharky again sent the first split and then I was told to go home and rest, which meant peering at the laptop from the horizontal position. Last bike split done - air in fist again - this time clutching antibiotics. That meant Jonathan was home - pretty much. Ironman Nice is a bit nasty in that in addition to the swim bike run cut offs they have cut offs all along the route through the bike and the run. So if you've got only one hour left to finish but you're 10km away from the marathon end, they don't let you finish. So French.

Anyway Jonathan started the run and a bunch of friends and strangers on twitter started getting suspensitis. Halfway through, then 15km, then 11km to go until there was 5+ kms to go. I've never hit the refresh button so many times.

And there it was Jonathon Acott, you are an ironman!
Here's the statsporn:

Overall time 15:03:21 

Overall position 1911 

Swim 01:21:06 
Swim position 360 1725 - nope don't know what that means
T1 00:10:01 
Bike 07:42:51 
Bike position 410 2064 
T2 00:09:22 
Run 05:39:59 
Run position 367 1890


I didn't get to turn the pedals myself this weekend but I feel very privileged to have such a great coach - who has taken me from being a breaststroker who couldn't swim 4 lengths of crawl to being a steady 750m open water swimmer in six lessons. If you want a great coach you can get him through twitter.