T–248 WEEKS

Well, this is annoying.

A week ago I finished my first seven-week training block feeling really good about how things were going.

I’d trained consistently. I’d listened when my body wanted easier days. And then I surprised myself on test day with a much stronger hour on the rowing machine than I expected.

It felt like a really good start.

And then my back went.

There wasn’t some dramatic training accident. No giant lift. No moment where I immediately knew I’d hurt myself.

My back just became increasingly sore and tight until normal things like getting out of bed became difficult enough that I was using my arms to help myself up.

So instead of starting Block Two and continuing to build, I stopped.

For now, I’m walking.

That’s disappointing.

There’s a particular frustration in having something interrupt you just when you feel like you’re gaining momentum. Part of me wants to get back to where I was as quickly as possible.

But that would also seem to miss one of the lessons from Block One.

I wrote last week that training by feel isn’t always go easy and it isn’t always go hard. It’s paying enough attention to know which one today is asking for.

Well, apparently today is asking for very easy.

Maybe for a while.

And perhaps this setback is telling me something else too.

My aerobic fitness improved nicely during Block One. But if my back and knee are going to be the things that repeatedly interrupt training, then simply building more endurance isn’t necessarily what I need most right now.

So I’m thinking about changing Block Two.

Instead of another seven weeks primarily focused on increasing aerobic volume, I may spend it building the machinery that has to support all that future endurance: my back, core, hips and knees.

Keep a couple of aerobic sessions. Keep a longer hike when my body is ready for it.

But use much more of the block to get stronger.

That wasn’t the plan.

Which, increasingly, seems like part of the point of By Feel.

I’ve got years to build endurance. There is absolutely no prize for reaching a certain number of weekly training hours this fall.

The better outcome would be to arrive at next year—and eventually much longer training—with a body that’s better prepared to handle it.

So yes, this is a setback.

Particularly after such an encouraging first block.

But it’s also information.

And if I actually listen to that information and change what I do next, perhaps this setback will end up helping me more than another seven weeks of simply following the original plan would have.

For now, though, I’m walking.

Slowly.

Has an injury or setback ever caused you to change your approach in a way that ultimately made you better?

Feel good.

Block one is done.

Seven weeks. Six weeks of training, one testing/recovery week, and my first 60-minute test—all by feel, without looking at data during the workouts.

Yeah, I probably got a little fitter.

However, that isn’t the thing I’m happiest about.

I think the biggest success of these first seven weeks was that I actually listened.

Some days my body said go easy, so I went easy.

A few workouts got shortened. Some were slower than what I would have previously strived for in this feeling process. When my back was bothering me, I paid attention to it. When my knee started complaining, I changed what I was doing rather than trying to prove I could train through it.

None of those decisions felt particularly impressive.

That may be the point. I think going by feel allowed me to stay consistent while feeling good about going easy on certain workouts. Combined with the stronger workouts, that actually produces a better end result.

Test day.

That was the other side of listening.

I covered the monitor and rowed for an hour. No pace. No heart rate. Nothing telling me whether I was going too fast or too slow.

Beforehand, I predicted I’d average 2:34/500m.

I actually averaged 2:27.3.

That surprised me.

Not because 2:27.3 is some extraordinary rowing performance. It isn’t.

What interested me was that, without the number in front of me, I had found an effort considerably faster than the one my brain had decided I was probably capable of.

My body knew something I didn’t.

And that seems worth paying attention to.

Over these seven weeks, listening to my body sometimes told me to slow down, sometimes to stop, and on test day apparently told me I could go quite a bit harder than I thought.

That feels like progress.

I’m still at the very beginning. The training volumes are modest. One good hour on a rowing machine doesn’t tell me much about the kind of endurance I’ll need years from now.

And I certainly haven’t cracked some secret training formula after seven weeks.

But I think I’ve learned something about what I want By Feel to mean.

It isn’t always go easy.

It isn’t always go hard.

It’s paying enough attention to know which one today is asking for.

Then trusting it.

Block Two starts next.

When you really listen to your body, is it more likely to tell you to slow down—or surprise you with how much you can do?

Feel good.

Test day is coming.

For this first year, I’m organizing my training into seven-week blocks. Six weeks of training, followed by a lighter seventh week that ends with a test.

For now, that test is simple: one hour on the rowing machine.

No looking at pace. No heart rate. No numbers telling me to speed up or slow down.

Just row for an hour as well as I can.

By feel.

There are a few reasons I like this structure.

The obvious one is that the test gives me a marker. Do the same thing every seven weeks and, over time, I should get a pretty good idea of whether my fitness is actually improving.

But I’m becoming just as interested in what happens before I see the result.

Training without seeing the numbers forces me to pay attention.

How hard am I breathing? How do my legs feel? Is this effort sustainable? Is that little ache something to ignore or something telling me to back off? Do I have more to give?

I’m trying to get better at hearing those signals rather than having a number make the decisions for me.

And every once in a while, my body surprises me.

A workout feels comfortably strong, I finish, look at the monitor—and discover I was going considerably faster than I thought.

I love that.

Test day takes the same idea and raises the stakes a little.

I have to choose an effort in the opening minutes that I think I can sustain for an hour. I have to decide whether to push harder later. And I have to make all of those decisions without knowing whether I’m rowing 2:25 or 2:40.

That’s not just a fitness test.

It’s practice.

Because eventually I want to race the same way.

I don’t want race day to be the first time I ask my body, What can you do today? I want years of experience answering that question.

Of course, let’s maintain some perspective here.

One hour on a rowing machine is far, far, far from the duration of fitness I’ll eventually need for an Ironman.

This is the beginning of the beginning.

But that’s another reason I like these tests. I don’t need Ironman fitness today. I need to find out whether the fitness I have today is becoming better than the fitness I had seven weeks ago.

So, what do I think will happen?

My prediction:

2:34/500m

ChatGPT, which has been helping me keep my training log, is more bullish:

2:31/500m

Here’s what it has to work with.

Over the last six weeks, my rowing has gradually moved forward:

Aug 1 — 60 min, Middle 30 min: 2:30/500m

Aug 15 — 60 min, Overall: 2:43.3,Middle 30 min: 2:39

Aug 22 — 60 min, Overall: 2:39, Middle 40 min: 2:29

Aug 27 — 30 min, Middle 10 min: 2:27

Aug 29 — 45 min, Middle 15 min: 2:24.5

There have been plenty of deliberately easy rows mixed in too. But those harder sections are why ChatGPT thinks I might be underestimating myself.

But the interesting part isn’t whether I’m right or ChatGPT is right.

It’s whether my body is right.

Can I sit down, ignore the monitor, listen to what I’m feeling and find something close to the best hour I’m capable of that day?

I’ll find out when I finally look at the screen.

What’s your prediction: faster or slower than 2:34?

Feel good.

No I don’t really need five years.

There. That was a short post.

But seriously, five years is obviously a ridiculously long time to train for one race. And that’s exactly the point.

I don’t want to spend five years training for an Ironman.

I want to spend five years getting really fit and maintaining that lifestyle.

Most of my fitness goals in the past have followed a pretty familiar pattern. Pick an event. Find a training plan. Build the mileage. Do the event. Feel great about it.

And then…now what?

This time I want to try something different.

Instead of starting with the requirements of a race and working backward, I want to start with where I am today and just keep building.

Slowly.

I don’t need to be able to ride 100 miles anytime soon. I don’t need to run a marathon next year. I certainly don’t need to spend my weekends doing six-hour training days because somewhere in the distance there’s an Ironman.

What I need right now is to get a little fitter.

Then a little fitter than that.

And hopefully enjoy doing it.

Five years gives me room for that.

It also gives me room for other things.

First, I want to build enough hiking fitness to backpack from Yosemite to Tahoe with my son. After that, a half Ironman sounds interesting. Then I’d love to be fit enough for a long bike tour through Europe with my daughter.

None of those are detours from the Ironman plan.

They are the plan.

Each gives me something interesting to do. Each asks something different of my body. And each should leave me a little more prepared for whatever comes next.

There is another reason I like five years.

It takes away the hurry.

If I’m tired, I can go easy. If something hurts, I can back off. If life gets busy, training can fit around it. Missing a workout doesn’t threaten some perfectly constructed 16-week progression.

I’ve got 251 weeks.

I can probably afford a bad Tuesday.

And maybe that’s where this gets interesting for By Feel.

Traditional training plans have to prescribe something: run this far, ride at this power, hold this pace.

I’m trying to see how much of that prescription I actually need.

Can I gradually become much fitter simply by being consistent, paying attention, sometimes pushing myself, sometimes backing off—and letting the next challenge tell me when it’s time to do more?

Eventually the Ironman will get close enough that I’ll need to train specifically for it.

But that’s years away.

For now, I have somewhere I want to go without needing to be in a hurry to get there.

And I kind of like that.

Have you ever gotten better at something by giving yourself more time instead of pushing harder?

Feel good.

My first post was called Why Ironman? Reading it again, I think I got a little too caught up in the Ironman typical hype.

The spectacle. The ridiculous distance. The finish line waiting five years from now.

There’s certainly something about the enormity of Ironman that draws me in. But it’s not really why I’m doing this.

What I actually want is much simpler.

I want to be strong, healthy and fit enough that the everyday physical parts of life don’t feel like limitations.

If my kids want to play tennis, I want to play tennis. Soccer? I’m in. A long hike, a bike ride, a day spent doing something active—I don’t want to have to wonder whether I’m fit enough to do it. I can do those things today and I want to make sure I always can.

And then there are the not-so-everyday things.

I’ve always wanted to backpack from Yosemite to Tahoe. I want to take a long bike trip through Europe. I want to keep finding adventures that sound exciting before I start wondering whether they sound too hard.

But there’s something else I’m chasing too.

I’ve felt it before.

I remember the feeling after my first sprint triathlon. The high after a half marathon. Those periods when training is going well and you don’t just know you’re fit because a watch tells you so—you feel fit.

There’s a happiness in that for me.

And that’s probably the part I didn’t explain very well in my first post.

I don’t want to spend the next five years forcing myself through workouts because a training plan says I need to hold a certain pace, hit a certain number, or suffer enough to earn some distant finish line.

I want to feel good while I’m doing this.

Not every minute, obviously. Some workouts will suck. Some days I’ll be tired. Sometimes getting fitter requires doing things that aren’t particularly comfortable.

But I want the overall experience of training to add something to my life rather than consume it.

That’s where By Feel really comes in.

I want to see what happens if I let my body help determine how I train. Go harder when harder feels right. Back off when it doesn’t. Pay attention to energy, breathing, fatigue, discomfort—and also to something training plans don’t measure very well: am I enjoying this?

I’ll still collect the numbers. I’ll still look at them afterward. I’m curious about what they’ll tell me.

I just don’t want them deciding what a good workout felt like.

So what am I training for?

Yes, there’s an Ironman way out there.

But I’m really training to play tennis with my kids. To hike from Yosemite to Tahoe. To experience that wonderful feeling of being really fit again. To be ready when somebody suggests doing something interesting. And yeah, experience the finish line of an Ironman. Epic.

And to enjoy a whole lot of ordinary days along the way.

What does being fit actually allow you to do that matters to you?

Feel good.

Like many, I’ve been infatuated with Ironman ever since watching coverage of the Ironman World Championships long ago. Running marathons and doing shorter triathlons made me feel even more connected to it. So did visits to Kona.

There’s just something wonderfully outlandish about the whole thing: swim 2.4 miles, bike 112, then run a marathon.

It’s huge. A little ridiculous, really.

And that’s part of why I find it inspiring.

But that’s not really the goal.

I’ve loved training for shorter triathlons—the variety, the camaraderie, having something out there that I was working toward. Looking back, most of my biggest fitness accomplishments have had a goal attached to them.

Apparently, “I’d like to be fit” isn’t quite enough to get me off the couch. I started training for my first marathon from zero miles a week. Now that got me off the couch.

There is also a special feeling these goal have given me in the past. The incredible runners high after my first half marathon, and the elation after my first sprint Tri.

Give me something slightly unreasonable to aim at, though, and things get more interesting.

For years, an Ironman wasn’t realistic. Work, family, time, and life generally had other ideas. Now the timing feels right.

So I’ve given myself five years to do interesting things…on the way.

That’s far longer than anyone needs to train for an Ironman. But I don’t want five years of progressively longer bike rides. I want to have other adventures along the way and gradually build the kind of fitness where Ironman doesn’t feel like something I’ve crammed into a training plan.

I’ve long dreamed of backpacking from Yosemite to Tahoe with my son, so I’ll aim for that first. Then a local half Ironman. Then a European bike tour with my daughter.

Conveniently, a few bucket-list adventures fit pretty nicely into a long-term Ironman build.

There will certainly be setbacks. And eventually there will be 140.6 miles waiting at the end.

Will crossing that finish line have some enormous meaning?

Maybe. But that’s actually not why I’m doing it.

I want to feel very fit. I want to do something that’s been on the list for years. And I want to be a role model for my kids.

I’ve learned that having a big, slightly outlandish goal can get me moving toward things that matter to me.

So I guess for me Ironman really isn’t a finish line - it’s a target to enable a whole journey.

What big goal has gotten you to do something you probably wouldn’t have done without it?

Feel good.