DAY 10 – The big one

I turn 40 today and wanted to celebrate by setting myself a personal challenge to more or less go all day long to see if I could find my breaking point. I decided to go solo all day long with the exception of the first 20x100.

Here is the run down

6:50am – kick off with a 10km run that needed to be sub 38mins for bonus points.  I thought this was going to be a huge challenge but it felt really comfortable banging it out in 36:51

Straight home for a fast breakfast before a 30km spin to loosen off the legs. That felt lousy but I needed to be done for a 9:40am departure to the pool.

Birthday swim set – 100x100 on 1:45 (long course outdoor pool) with every 20^th being recovery (backstroke / breaststroke). Obviously this swim was going to take a long, long time – approximately 3hrs. It was a bit like an ironman with the end being so far away all you could do was focus on the set of 20 you were working through. The set went surprisingly well not dragging on to much. I stayed in the moment and just banged out rep after rep.

Hats off to the others who made the 100x100. I’ve got a swim background so I knew I could do it. For most of those guys this was double the distance they had ever swum combined with the fact it was day 10 of epic camp.

As soon as I was out of the swim it was straight into a pretty non descript 2hr run where I was more concerned about staying out of the sun than cracking any particular pace.

Finally I wanted to bang out 90km on the bike but I only had 3hr30 to get it done and the terrain is not flat around here. I headed down towards Thones which was supposed to be a nice town but when I started hitting traffic lights I knew I needed to turn in order to keep my average speed high enough. The final 1hr of this ride was rough and a sure fire way for me to recognize this was getting emotional thinking about my awesome family back home.

Its fair to say I was pretty spent at the end of the day but well pleased with my efforts.