Iron Man
1 Sep 2021
Recently Ben Green, Project Manager from VESL NW competed in Ironman. He gave us an insight into this gruelling competition.
Ironman is a long-distance triathlon consisting of a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride and a marathon 26.22-mile run, with roughly 2000 competitors attending. The race typically starts at 07:00am and has the following cut off times that must be bettered or met in order to continue: Swim – 2hr 20min, Bike – 8hr 10min, Run 6hr 30min, in total you have 17hrs to finish.
“In 2018 I made the decision to participate in this event and was scheduled to compete in 2020, however due to COVID this race was cancelled and all competitors automatically deferred to 2021. It was a huge relief to get confirmation the 2021 race would be going ahead after committing so much time and effort into training!
On race day the atmosphere was buzzing and the support given to the competitors was incredible. The swim was by far the discipline I was least looking forward to. It was a case of get in the water, find a rhythm and get through it! The bike route was fairly technical with lots of tight turns and very hilly with over 3200m of climbing. The weather turned at the halfway mark with torrential rain for a couple of hours making things very difficult. My legs felt surprisingly fresh going into the marathon but things started to slow. With about 10k to go I needed to run/walk the rest of the way. I finally crossed the line after 12:45:47 (Swim: 01:14:17, Bike: 06:51:24, 04:22:05). I will never forget the feeling of heading down the finishers shoot with the crowd cheering and the race commentator calling out “Ben Green, you are an Ironman” over the loud speakers. This was by far one of the hardest days of my life but also one of the most rewarding, I think it goes a long way in proving that anything’s possible providing your willing to commit to it.”
Well done Ben, you should be very proud of yourself.