Chris recently did the unthinkable and race not one, but two full distance races two weeks apart after a four-year break from the distance. Better yet, he did it on minimal training while raising two kids and painting his house.
Here's a snippet of his thoughts of making the decision to race his first race:
I was very surprised that a new Midwest Ironman race had somehow gotten under my radar. As I poked around the website, I liked what I saw and started forming the seeds of a rather crazy idea.
It seemed ill-advised to do an Ironman crash course training block and then taper all within two months (not to mention a tough half two weeks before). I talked it over with my wife and pointed out that all my IM training would be compressed into two months and would primarily consist of only six key long workouts: 3 long rides and 3 long runs.And then thoughts on parlaying the effort into a second full race:
Racing two ironman races, two weeks apart, after a 4 year hiatus from long course racing was a huge gamble. This was not some haphazard, macho, lookee-what-I-can-do endeavor, though. Instead, it was a series of carefully calculated risks. The first gamble was that I felt I was in far better shape than my performance at the Michigan Titanium showed. Cedar Point was a slightly easier course and race conditions would almost surely be better than the heat I had to deal with in Grand Rapids. If things went right I thought I could race faster than 2 weeks earlier and potentially set a lifetime best.
Read about how each race turned out: Michigan Titanium & Rev3 Cedar Point
