Race reports · 2024 · by Jay
Going the full distance
We ran a marathon before we ever entered a triathlon, and for three years a full Ironman was the thing we were most intimidated by. How a hurricane changed that, what the decision cost, and what the week around 140.6 is made of.
Our friend John put it better than we ever have: an Ironman is a bike race with a swim warmup and a run cooldown. After two of them that is still the most accurate sentence we know about the distance, because the bike is where the day gets decided and the other two legs are where you find out what the bike cost you.
This is the page about the decision rather than the race. The races have their own pages, IRONMAN Texas in April 2025 and IRONMAN California that October, with the official results on them. What we want to get right here is how the decision actually happened, because it didn't happen the way the finisher photos make it look.
We never planned on it
We didn't start racing with a full Ironman in mind, and for the first several years we had no intention of ever doing one. The whole thing started with a marathon. Michelle put the Honolulu Marathon on Jay's fiftieth birthday in December 2021, and we spent 2022 learning how to run far enough to finish it. There was no triathlon in the plan at that point. It was a run, on a date, for a birthday.
The triathlons came after the marathon, not before it. The marathon made a long day feel survivable, so in 2023 we went back to the Olympic-distance race we'd done badly in 2014 and raced it properly, and that June Jay did a 70.3 in the lava at Honu. In August he rode 112 miles around the island, and in September we both swam the 2.4-mile Roughwater, so by the end of 2023 we had done every leg of an Ironman as its own race, months apart. We ran the marathon again that December with a whole readiness series behind it. That sounds like a plan when you write it down, but it wasn't one. Each race was just the next thing that scared us a little, and the full distance was never on the list. We were awed by it, and honestly we were intimidated by the thought of even considering it. The marathon on its own was hard enough, and after riding around the island Jay couldn't imagine getting off that bike and running one.
What changed
What changed was a hurricane. In September 2024 we were in South Carolina, trained and ready for the Augusta 70.3, when Hurricane Helene came through two days before the race and tore up Georgia and the Carolinas, and IRONMAN canceled it. When they offered us our options, one was to come back to Augusta the next year, and the others were spots at IRONMAN California and IRONMAN Arizona. That was the first time either of us had seriously considered a full, and it was only because somebody had put it in front of us as a choice.
Even then we didn't jump at it. We deferred to the 2025 Augusta and agonized over the full for several weeks. We were in the best shape of our lives, Michelle had her first 70.3 behind her, and the thought wouldn't go away, but it was still the scariest thing either of us could imagine putting on a calendar. In October we finally signed up for IRONMAN Texas, six months out, on April 26, 2025. The rest of that story is on the 2024 season page.
What it costs at fifty
The full distance is a season with a bedtime attached, and we wrote that side of it down. Every long-course season since has cost the same things, which are earlier bedtimes, fewer evenings out, and a social calendar that got thin for a few months and stayed that way. The long rides start at 5 a.m. because of the heat and usually eat most of a Saturday, the long runs eat most of a Sunday, and the trainers in the room off the bedroom take the weekday hours that used to belong to something else. We've mostly stopped remembering what that was.
The training itself turned out to be more manageable than we'd feared. We'd heard about people doing eight-hour Saturdays and six-hour Sundays, and ours was closer to a full Ironman a week in pieces: about 4,000 meters of swimming, 120 miles on the bike, and 25 to 28 miles of running, with the longest single day in the whole build around five hours. Some weeks that volume was threshold work and some weeks it was easy endurance miles, depending on the phase, but the total didn't change much.
It's a heat problem because the training has to happen in Honolulu, where every long session is a heat session and the recovery takes longer than the pace suggests. It's a marriage problem because two people in one house can't both be in a full-distance build unless whose day is it is doing real work every single weekend. And it's a calendar problem because the season is long, the rest of life doesn't slow down for it, and the plan is in pencil whether we like it or not.
The week around it
The swim start and the finish chute are what get filmed. The week around them is a bike box, a spreadsheet, a grocery list of food that's already been tested in the heat, and a lot of standing in lines. We wrote it all down in Race week is a logistics problem, because nobody had written it down for people our age when we needed it.
If you're thinking about it
We'd tell anybody who asked to do what we did, which is to not start here, and Start here has the whole order with dates. Run a marathon by itself, with no swim and no bike in front of it, and find out what mile 22 feels like when that's the only thing you did that day. Then do an Olympic, and then a 70.3 on a course that scares you a little. Ride the bike distance alone and swim the swim distance alone, so you know what each of them costs before you stack them on the same day.
Then, if you still want it, go the full distance. You might find you never want it, which was us for three years, and that's a fine place to stay. If you do go, the long ride is at 5 a.m. on Saturday, and it'll be dark when you leave the house.