I did my 13th Ironman in Taupo on the 4th of March. I had a personal best but for all the wrong reasons… PB in the slowest Ironman I have ever done.
Photo from NZ herald by Korupt Vision
Well, to give you a short version of the story. I had a brilliant swim, biked too hard, didn’t eat enough for the intensity, ran out of energy, in athletic terms, I bonked and then had to walk the marathon. Rookie mistake, but what I learn is priceless.
Lessons I learnt ...
1. If you go above your Zone 2 heart rate (You have 5 heart rate zones, 1 being the lowest effort and zone 5 the highest. Zone 2 is 60%-70% of maximum heart rate)
your body predominantly burns carbs.
Although I had 1600 calories in all my bottles and gels, it wasn’t enough carbs.
Because I am working above my Zone 2, and I burnt 3300 calories on the bike.
You burn fat as fuel if you go a certain pace, but I burn carbs predominantly because my rate was too fast for what I trained for.
You don’t need to be a scientist to determine a deficit of around 1700 calories.
How could I have done it better? If I had been a fat-adapted athlete who burned fat and carbs, stayed in my Zone, and fuelled appropriately, I could’ve written a more positive post-race report.
Graph from https://www.gethealthyutv.com/post/heart-rate-monitoring/
2. Endurance athletes or any human could only spend two and a half times their basal metabolic rate (BMR). That's the calories you burn if you stay in bed all day. So if my BMR is 1700, I can only spend 4250 calories on the activity. If I want to do an Ironman, I will have a problem. So now, I am working out how to lift my BMR.
Two ways to establish a new average BMR are by being more active each day, so the body needs more calories to run all the bodily systems when resting, and the other is building muscle and eating more to build muscle which is a hot topic for me.
Perimenopause ("around menopause" body transiting to menopause) means my body realises I no longer need extra energy for reproduction, so we subtract that from the BMR. With hormone changes, it's not that easy to build muscle to increase lean muscle. Also, at a certain age, you don’t have all the enzymes that uptake protein and build those muscles. But hey, girls, we are going to die trying. That makes me motivated and excited for life, figuring out how to solve these little obstacles.
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