I’ll be doing the Great Floridian ironman-distance race this month, and will be bringing my family with me to watch. We have three children aged 4, 2, and 1, so they’re too young to stay at the course all day. Does anyone have good ideas about how I could get an update or two to my wife so that she can estimate when I’ll finish the run? That would allow her to bring the kids back to see me finish.
Training for an ironman with kids at those ages . . . you must have a very loving wife!
MyAthletelive.com. Works great. Gets my wife’s seal of approval.
Ditto. Or, if you’d rather buy than rent, the Garmin GTU 10 does essentially the same thing. Either way, your wife would need a smart phone, iPad, laptop or something…
That looks like the kind of thing I’ve been thinking about. I have a Timex Global Trainer, which is no use to my wife. I also have a smartphone (HTC Inspire) with GPS, which is relatively bulky and fragile, and may not have enough battery life.
The run course is 3 laps, out and back. That would make it harder to know where I am on the run just by looking at the map. However, according to the website, it shows distance, so my wife could subtract 112 to get my run progress–correct?
I do have a very supportive family–they’re great! And I have been doing a lot of very early bike rides starting indoors.
ditto on the tracking already mentioned but i’d like more info on how you fit training in with the wife-kids… we just had our first and wife gave me the go ahead for IMAZ 2012 but i’m tri’ing (
) to figure out how to best make it work with the little one so he knows he still has a dad. I’m guessing mostly all early morning workouts and a computrainer???
I know someone that used the MyAthleteLive tracker for IMWI. She said it worked great.
For the Gulf Coast Triathlon HIM in May I gave my wife a list of expected times for me and 3 friends that were also competing. It worked well too. I indicated our best guess for each segment and transition. My wife adjusted the list as the day wore on. Keep in mine we didn’t have any little ones to contend with and it was only a half.
The $40 to rent the tracking device is probably your best bet.
It really hasn’t been that bad. I’ve been using “Going Long” by Friel and Byrn to plan my training, and I highly recommend it. My goal is to complete the race, and I completed one 12 years ago, so I have been targeting the lower end of the training durations. I focus on the key workouts, and don’t worry when I have to miss a maintenance/skill workout. For me, it has boiled down to getting up early one weekday morning for a long run, and getting up early enough on Saturday so that I can be home from my long bike by 8am, when my wife is done walking with the boys. I modified my training plan so that my long bikes for the first two weeks of each period are around 3 hours, and the third week is longer. 1-1.5 hour swims haven’t been much of an issue in comparison. If I get up early enough to do the maintenance/skill workouts before work near the office, I beat traffic, and I don’t have to get up that much earlier. The hardest thing is getting up for any workout (or for anything, for that matter) after a night of interrupted sleep.
Here’s my key advice for anyone in my situation:
- Sketch out a training plan and discuss it with your wife. Explain to her why you want to do it, and how important it is to you for her to be involved in that part of your life. If you both decide to do it, register for the race and commit to doing it. You’ll have to figure out how to make some details work around your schedule.
- Plan all of your workouts for the week and put them on a calendar. Get all of your gear together the night before so that you just have to wake up, pull on your clothes, and walk out the door. If you have a plan and are prepared, it’s harder to talk yourself out of a workout.
- Have realistic goals, make sure your wife and your work know that they come before your race, and enjoy the exercise.
The cheapskate in me compels me to ask:
Has anyone tried using Google Latitude with a smart phone for this type of thing?