25 days to Kona....uh, wait- How about 15 days Knucklehead!!

A couple of days ago I posted on Facebook that I had 25 days to go until Kona. Someone dropped me a note on my FB wall and said, "uh dude, its only 15 days away! Now of course I know I am headed over there next week, but this entire build toward Hawaii has been constructed around my little ticker on my computer that tells me how many days I have left. Somehow, the date on the ticker is wrong! Beauty. Classic Scott Jones maneuver. Set up a time line for success and be off by 11 days:) Ain't the first time I have pulled crap like that.

Since my last post, I have had my challenges in my training. I travelled to Penticton to watch 4 of my athletes race Ironman Canada and, also, to train. Out of laziness, I relied on a buddy of mine to loan me his bike so that I wouldn't have to spend the exorbitant fees airlines are charging athletes to bring their bikes with them. I won't rant about this, I will just state my own opinion on charging an athlete $175 bike fee- that it is sick and wrong and they should be killed for coming up with such a ridiculous fee for athletes to travel on the airline. I wouldn't say boo if they charged for golf clubs! Fat white guys get all the breaks in this country. I'm done with it, I won't talk about it again.
So I got up to Penticton and got in a good swim. The next day I was going to ride the course on my buddies' bike. I will spare you the details, but I was out there for over 8 hours with 6 flat tires on the day and descended down off Yellow Lake Pass in the pitch black dark. For those who know that course, it is a perilous descent where most hit speeds of 50 mph without pedaling a stroke. I got stuck up there with a dead cellphone and no choice but to get back to Penticton and descended off that mountain scared out of my wits. I lived, but I will never put myself in that situation again. I was fortunate in that once I descended down off the mountain and got back on the main highway, a Canadian saint by the name of Carrie Graham, stopped and asked me if I would like a ride back into town. I didn't let her finish the question before I was loading my bike on her bike rack on the back of her SUV! So I made a bad decision to not call the baby ugly early in the day when it was questionable if I could finish the course in time after I got all those flat tires. I was fortunate in that I didn't end up paying a greater penalty for a bad decision.

I was hoping to race a couple of weeks ago at the Harvest Moon Half Ironman and got off to a good start. I got out of the water with the leaders in site. I ran out of the water at 25 minutes flat and then ran up to come across the chip line in 26:10. I felt solid in the water and it was good to race in the rubber again. I got on the bike and was riding well, looking at a lot of watts while riding very comfortably. I hit some sort of pothole and snap! I broke one of my bar extensions on my tri bars. I rode along with it hanging down 90 degrees from where it should be and I just pounded away on my bull horns and thought I could at least get in some good work and see some watts to use as caps for power numbers in Kona. Unfortunately, over the next 50 minutes the allen screws that hold the bar extension on the bar worked their way out and the bar extension separated from the base bar altogether. The bike was then not safe to ride and I had to DNF. It was the first DNF of my tri career. I have raced 50-70 races or so (I tried to count and gave up) over the years and I have finished a few really ugly, but I have always finished. It hurt me in my heart to drop out. Early in my life, I quit a few things. I quit 7th grade football. Later, I quit high school- by far my greatest failure in life. I was able to recover from that through a lot of really hard work in my life, but I still think about it everyday. I made a promise to myself that I would never quit anything again. I hate quitting. I hate the thought, I hate the concept. I remember someone early in my navy career saying "quitters never win, winners never quit". I live by that ethos, so even though I had a mechanical that prevented me from continuing, I still had to work through it. It bothered me for about a week or so, but my consistent training helped me in just moving by it.

So with those two obstacles over the past few weeks, things haven't been perfect in my training, but I have to say with all honesty, my training on the whole has been fantastic. I am in the best shape of my life. I am leaner, at 156lbs, then I have been since I was younger than 22 years old. My watts have never been higher, my swim intervals are starting to really come around and my running is showing great numbers. I just started riding power about a month ago. My normalized power in 2006 in Kona was 242 watts. In my build on my intervals prior to that race I rarely sustained over 300 watts. I would be in the high 200's but not much more than that. Yesterday on my last long ride, I would sit on as much as 345 watts on the intervals with 280 being the floor. I needed to surge up a hill to go by someone yesterday on a steady climb and I was able to command 440 watts and hold it until I was past the other rider. I have just never seen numbers like that. On the swims, I am not accustomed to swimming meters everyday, but now that I am training at Flatirons, I am swimming nothing but meters. For me in the past, to hold sub 1:25's was a good thing. Thursday, Brandon and I were swimming some hard 100's and I hit 1:17 and held the rest below 1:20 while at altitude at the end of a long week. I don't know what this really means other than I, at 44 years old, am going faster in my training than I have ever gone. Lastly, for me, it comes down to running. In 2006, I laid down a solid 4:53 bike only to run a lumbering, lethargic 3:37 and nix probably one of my only opportunities to ever break 9:30 in Kona. I have worked very hard on my running the last year or so. Last Sunday on my 19 miler I was able to hold sub 7:40's for the second hour in my 2:25 run. I put in 20 minutes of 7:00-7:15 from miles 15-18 miles of my run which gives me confidence as I get ready to race my first ironman in 3 years.

As I finish my last hard block of training today with a 2 hour run and a recovery swim, I have to confess that I could not be more proud of my training this summer. I started this 100 something day journey to Kona (who knows the exact number of days-remember, I am the guy who can't even get his computer to count it right for me:). I started in earnest for this race on June 14th. I weighed 176lbs the day I graduated from NWC and moved west. I only had about 8 swims in my body at that point with none of them over 2k. I have amassed a summer of really hard, solid, consistent training. My weight, the power numbers, swim numbers and Garmin don't lie, baby. I have done the work. The only thing I have not done is race this distance in a few years and that is where the questions arise. I am so used to having tested my fitness over 6-8 races over a season to know where I am as I fly to Kona. I am going over there this year in the dark, so that is where I guess the questions come in. Can I go fast over the course of a whole day? Will I stand up under the pressure of the brutality of the conditions on the Big Island? Will my body tolerate such a violent abuse of my musculoskeletal, adrenal and aerobic systems? Kona is a course that humbles even the very best athletes in the world to a walk, crawl or the dreaded DNF.

I guess all these questions are why we work so hard to qualify for this race, eh? It is a privilege to race in Kona. I am looking forward to that challenge. For me, I come to the race 80 percent complete. I am ecstatic with what I have been able to do with my fitness over the summer and feel confident I will have some good stuff on the Island. Now I just need to go finish this off and secure the other 20 percent to make this journey over 2009 complete. For me, that would be to bear down and summon my best when it is called for in just a few days. I am digging the journey for sure and feel so blessed that I am healthy and well enough to engage in something so special.

Jonser