Inspired to Aspire

I might have mentioned before that my bestie and her family uprooted and moved to Kailua-Kona, Hawaii earlier this year.  (If you want to read about their adventures, check them out here.)  So this week in Kona, swarms of world class athletes have descended on the town and everybody is abuzz for the Ironman World Championship which is taking place this weekend.  Those amazing specimens of humanity will be swimming 2.4 miles in the Pacific Ocean, biking 112 miles, and running a marathon, over terrain which is NOT flat by any stretch of the imagination.  The race starts at 6:30 am for the elite athletes and 7:00 am for the “regular” people, as if anyone even considering such a feat could possibly be considered regular.  On the other end, the course closes at midnight.  MIDNIGHT, people!!!  If you’re at the back of the pack and struggling you might be racing for 17 hours and still not officially finish.  Holy crap!

I have definitely done a few fitness events here and there, including triathlons, and I love them.  LOVE.  Unfortunately, I’ve never fully trained as well as I’ve wanted to do for any of them, and have always put in a back of the pack finish.  Happily, I’ve never entered an event and had to DNF (not finish), but I have definitely registered for my share of events that I didn’t start, which is a bummer.  And I did finish last once!

Anyway, as a continuation of my thoughts on getting ready to regroup and hopefully restart this mission, I did some thinking over the last couple of days about my next fitness goals.  They are as follows:  1) workout on my recently established schedule of 4 times a week, through the winter, improving my fitness in the process and getting back to running.  2) Enter some races over the coming year.  Short ones like 5Ks, but with some frequency, and actually work on improving my finish times.  Throw in the sprint triathlons I've done before in my neighborhood toward the end of the summer.  

Considering this starting point, my much, much longer term goals will probably sound a little nutty, but they go along the lines of: a half marathon (13.1 miles) and/or Olympic Distance triathlon sometime in 2013, a marathon sometime in 2014, and (drumroll, please), maybe, MAYBE if I've done all these things and really achieved my weight loss and fitness goals in the process, MAYBE I'll consider making the leap to a Half Ironman in the year or two after that.  There's one every summer just a few hours from here on the Eastern Shore in MD.  The amount of training needed to do an event like that would be pretty huge, and I'm not entirely imagining how it wouldn't fit into my life, but my kid will be 10 or 11 by then, and maybe I can do it if I really want it.  I've even got the support of my honey, he actually did not laugh when I told him all this!  Maybe I'm just pipe dreaming.  But you have to shoot for the stars if you want to be sure you'll at least make it to the moon, right?