Mind Games

For all of my competitive athletic career, the focus was always on putting in the distance. Running cross country, it was always about how many miles we ran. In my 17 years of swimming, it was always about the yardage. Every race that I have trained for up till now has been based off training in terms of distance. And that makes sense. When training for my first marathon, it's practical to train in terms of miles to make sure that you can indeed complete the 26.2. When training for an Olympic distance or half-Ironman distance triathlon, I trained to make sure I could complete the given distance for the swim, bike, and run. When preparing for shorter running races, I build up my mileage to within a couple miles of the total race distance.

This time around, I'm doing things differently. Completely different. Completing an Ironman is as much of a mental task as it is a physical task. And the main goal is not to focus on the 140.6 miles I will have to complete, but to make sure I can last through the roughly 15 hours it's going to take me to complete it. Since I haven't actually started my training program, I'm not quite sure how I am going to feel about it.

The swimming isn't such a big deal because I don't focus on distance or time. Since I swim with an organized team, I put in anywhere between an hour and an hour and forty-five minutes at each practice. Swimming is my strongest leg of a triathlon and not the crux of my training. Biking in terms of time is a little different. I get too caught up in how far I'm riding. The cyclometer just makes it so easy to focus on distance. Running is going to be the most difficult to switch over to time. I'm so used to running a certain distance in a certain time. I've always ran with pace in mind. Maintaining a ten minute mile to run 6 miles in an hour. Now it doesn't matter how many miles I get in during that hour, I just have to keep running for that hour. I feel like maybe I'm going to sacrifice distance now. I don't know if I can keep up my distance when I'm not trying to run a certain distance. Does that even make sense?

So I'm looking for some insight. Has anyone out there done a training program based on time? Any suggestions on doing this? Let me know if you have any experience and I'll let you know how it goes once I get started.