Coach’s Comments
Coomera Half in a couple of weeks and everybody is getting excited. We have lots of veteran Half Ironman competitors but a few are going to do their first. For the first timers and for those who may have done one, but not really put it together as well as they’d like, I’m going to lay out a plan. Use it as a guide, there are many right ways and many wrong ways, this is one of the right ways.
Start with carbo loading. For a race of this length …

Sherilee
As an Ironman coach many of the athletes who come through the door have not had a lot of background in any one sport. Sometimes they have no experience at the sports involved but they have this burning desire to test themselves.
Sherilee had completed another triathlon squad’s beginner course. She had done all she was going to do with the other group when she came along to one of my sessions. She was shy and overweight.
She was tall, around 178-180cm and over 100kg. She was unfit and tried to avoid attention.
One …

Mark
When I did my first Ironman, I did 13.50, I wasn’t happy, I didn’t feel like a winner at all. When Mark did his first Ironman in Taupo 2005, he did 13.50 and he was a winner.
See, in November 2003, Mark was out having a run one afternoon training for the Coomera Half Ironman. An idiot driving too fast around a corner, lost control of his commodore in the gravel and mounted the footpath. Driving Mark through a paling fence and running over him.
Mark was rushed to hospital having lost so …

Kieren
For ten years I had a small bike shop in Brisbane. It was a little “hole in the wall” type of shop where I went to recover from my training. When I started the shop, I had no competition in a five km radius. Over the years four other shops moved in on my territory. I was faced with the option of spending lots of money, moving into bigger premises or getting out and doing something else.
When I started the shop, I was a bike shop owner who did a …