Daniela: 100 days to IM Mallorca 70.3

100 days to go until her first half distance race, let’s find out how things are going…

Background

Daniela has appeared on this blog a couple of times. First in 2015 when she got interested in road cycling and then as part of our relay team at Finntriathlon Joroinen. After a fun 2015 as riding different gran fondo type events we were looking forward to 2016 to see how much better she would get during the winter by focusing on cycling.

Well, your mind can change and that was what happened during the Winter of 2016. She got interested in doing a triathlon – which is quite normal when you are surrounded by people who do triathlons and rave about them quite often. Then she decided that she wanted to try a couple of triathlons. Suddenly, doing some bike races changed to 2 sprint distance races and 1 olympic distance race for the Summer of 2016.

For an active person as her completing these distances is not a huge ask, but there was some additional challenge ahead. She had always liked water, but open water was a scary place for her (“there might be some creatures that will bite me” being one of the explanations). In addition there was basically no background in swimming, so it was time to learn a new sport from the beginning. Also her running had been very minimal since 2014, because her ankle did not cope so well with running and that led to some rehabilitation and a break from running. In a nutshell she had gotten confident and fitter on a bike but swimming and running needed some work.

Fitting 3 different sports in your schedule is always challenging but with the help of her swimming coach Anu and from me we made it work and got her rolling in all of the needed disciplines. We are far from competitive level but one of the greatest things in triathlon is that you are racing yourself and you can always be better.

Daniela completed succesfully all of her races in 2016 and that meant she overcame her fear of open water and actually placed 3rd on her age group at the sprint race in Challenge Turku.

Goals for the race

After the Olympic distance race at Käringsund in August Daniela saw that a lot of our teammates at SKB Racing Team were going to participate at Mallorca 70.3 and she immediately asked me that would she be able to do it? My answer was – as it always is with healthy individuals – “off course, it just depends on the speed you want to get through it”. So, she registered to the race and we started getting ready for the challenge at hand.

When you are doing the longest race of your life the wise choice is to focus doing a controlled race and finishing strong. Daniela has only 3 tri races under her belt and no competitive endurance background, so we are aiming for a solid race and if it ends with a run less than 2 hours, it will be a success.

Starting Level

Daniela will do a swimming test and the always so joyfull bike FTP test this weekend, so we can talk about numbers a bit more at the beginning of next week. We usually use a 5 km test for running but our tri-team had weird mix of a bench press + Cooper last week and Daniella participated on that. After a maximum bench press (40 kg without any training) her 12 min run was 2500 m. So there is a solid number to work from.

Next steps

We have a little bit over three months to go before the race and naturally the goal is the raise her fitness levels higher and prepare for the race as well we can. Where can we get? You never know, but you always have to try your best. That’s all you can ask and I have no doubt that she will do just that.

We will actively follow Daniela’s training toward the race. Next we will start from the “big” picture for the next three months and as promised the results from her swim and bike test.