Being an Ironman is pretty awesome, but it comes with a downside...
When I first started working as a trainer, I had no idea how truly weak I was. The first time I tried to bench press, I thought 90 lbs was going to crush me! I could barely do it. Another trainer looked me and started laughing. If you know me, I don't like being laughed at, especially for being weak! He pulled me aside and told me that as a trainer, I should be able to bench press my body weight at least 10 times without struggling. Well, when I'm given a challenge, I ALWAYS accept it! For the next 3 months I worked my ASS off strength training! Within 3 months, not only was I throwing up 135 lbs like it was nothing, I had increased my 1 rep max to 185 lbs! I had FINALLY started developing a chest and arms! I had grown about 4 inches between my chest and arms! I felt awesome about my body! For the first time in my life I felt STRONG!!!
Unfortately, I had registered for a marathon many months earlier and it was finally time for me to run it. Once again I felt weak. My marathon time had increased by 30 minutes. Ugh. I had to stop running in order to gain the size I wanted. Working out is such a double edged sword! I'm not going to write that it's impossible to be a super fast marathon runner but also have super huge muscles. It's just march harder. The amount of calories you burn training for a marathon is ridiculous so the amount you have to eat to maintain the muscle weight is a lot. At one point I was eating well over 4,000 calories a day. You'd be surprised how hard it is to eat 4,000 HEALTHY calories! Yeah, eating 4,000 calories worth of junk is easy but that's not what I want to do.
Anyway, I continued lifting after the marathon but started re-introducing running back into my routine. I didn't lose any weight but I stopped gaining. Oh well, I really liked how I looked at that point so I was okay with it. But now let's fast foward 6 months to my decision to sign up for an Ironman. Looking back, I truly had no idea what the hell I was thinking. I just thought it'd be cool to challenge myself. I had no idea what kind of training I was gonna need to do!
After the first few months I started realizing that I had to focus more on swimming, biking, and running, than on maintaining my upper body strength. So I pretty much stopped strength training except once a week. While my swimming and biking got A LOT stronger, my ability to lift heavy got weaker and weaker. I felt it but at the time I really didn't care. I just wanted to become an Ironman so badly! I finally reached my goal last weekend. Yay, right? Well, yes, YAY! I'm beyond proud of myself for everything I accomplished, but now it's time to step back and re-evaluate my fitness goals. I wanted to see exactly how far I had fallen so today I got back on the bench press just to see where I was at. It wasn't pretty. Started with 90 lbs. Not too bad. Did 10 reps pretty easy. Through on 20 more lbs. 115, NOPE!! Could barely throw up 6 reps before I felt like I was being crushed! NOT OKAY!!!
So, after testing my strength, I walked downstairs, bought 20 training sessions (I still had 4 sessions left from before the Ironman) and starting Tomorrow I plan to start lifting 4x a week for the next 6 weeks and hopefully I'll be able to get back up to benching my body weight 10x. My ultimate goal is to get back up to benching 155 lbs 10x plus gain about 5-10 lbs of muscle but that'll probably happen over 12-16 weeks.
So to sum up, being an Ironman is AWESOME! Being weak SUCKS! Thanks for reading :)
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