Ironman, Emotions & Losing 25.4kg
It scares Mrs. Njoku, yet it comes very naturally to me. She calls me an extremist. She is terrified of my lack of moderation. I am either 100% uninterested or 1,000% consumed by it. There is very little room in the middle. This mirrors my emotions. I swing from absolute highs to crushing lows. On balance I consider myself a pessimist. My wife thinks I am emotionally unbalanced.
I wouldn’t consider myself a body conscious person. In fact I always used to joke to Mrs. Njoku that I didn’t need to focus on health or looks. That my ‘journey [love] was over’. So for years she pleaded with me to try and get healthy. My mum manages with diabetes so she was concerned I too would get it. I readily acknowledged this but basically ignored her. But that changed in 2017, during her tough pregnancy, where she was essentially house bound for 5 months. We were forced to stay in London and ended up moving to Blackheath, which is 15 mins from where I grew up as a child. Blackheath/Greenwich is beautiful. Wide open spaces, green everywhere and and has a very “old money” health conscious vibe. I wanted to lease a RR Vogue but she implored me to buy a bike and start exercising instead. I finally listened. I loved it. That was almost exactly 2 years ago.
There are three stages of my weight loss journey.
- Wasted 2017.
- Pre Cape Town Triathlon. 2018 + Jan/Feb 2019
- Post Cape Town Triathlon — March 2019 onwards
Wasted 2017
There is a saying that you can’t “out exercise” a bad diet. My 2017 is a perfect example of that. 2017 was a complete failure. Over the entire year I lost 3.2kg (I can drop that in a month now). Purely due to my bad eating habits, I was literally stagnant on the weight loss chart (above). I had changed but not my lifestyle. Eating anything at anytime. I am a consummate cake connoisseur and proud of it. So even though I was exercising 3–4 times a week. I hadn’t really made a lifestyle change.
Pre Cape Town Triathlon. 2018 + Jan/Feb 2019
14th Jan 2018 → 10 Feb 2019. In January 2018, I decided I wanted to do Triathlons. They are hard. You usually need to dedicate 10–12hours of training per week just to start. But I had decided. Before I was 40 (11/12/20) I wanted to complete an Ironman 70.3. That's a 1.9km open water swim, 90km bike ride and 21.1km run. All in less than 6hrs. That was the big scary goal. I enjoyed cycling, I loved swimming but couldn’t run at all. I needed something to rally my energy and dedication towards it. I needed a target. I saw Cape Town 2019 as the obvious start and felt 13 months should be enough time for me to prepare. I knew I could complete the swimming and cycling distances but was really concerned about running. See, I had ran a Half Marathon in 2004 and had gotten something called shin splints which stopped me running for 14 years. Weighing 130 kg+ wasn’t a good place to start. So I focused on swimming and cycling and weight loss until I lost at least 10 kg, before I started running. That was in November 2018, before I kicked off my run training. Which only left me 3.5 months. For my 38th birthday, I bought myself a triathlon bike, one of the best Triathlon bikes I could find. A beast.
I remember when I told people I was doing triathlons. Most black folks told me it sounded like something rich middle aged folks did.
I found my first Triathlon brutal. Brutal, brutal, brutal. Physically and emotionally. I felt I was well prepared. Perhaps not the best I could have been. But still ready enough. Weighing 119 kg I knew was a problem. I just learned the hard way how much of a problem it was. Although it was my first race, the swim was a complete shock to me. The start was frantic and furious. I was kicked in the face, the chest, the back. I swam over people, into people and under people. People swam into, over and under me. It was crazy. I was almost disqualified for not following the swim course route. Nothing I had done had prepared me for this. In fact the day before was the first time I had actually swam in open water. I found the bike ride pretty humiliating. I saw folks gliding pass me effortlessly. It wasn’t the equipment, my gear was tier 1. It was me. Literally. I knew carrying weight on a bike was a disadvantage but as I trained alone I really didn’t have a concept of this in reality. Even though I completed 40 km in 1 hr 13 mins 13s, which was a great time for me and comfortably my personal best. I felt I could or should have been faster. I knew I had to lose weight. I made a commitment to myself. That I wouldn’t even ride the bike until I had lost 10kg. I also made a commitment right there and then I would be between 100–105 kg for my next Triathlon. So even with that, the most difficult thing for me was the run. 10km. I had only managed 7km maximum distance prior to that. So I knew this was going to hurt. And boy did it. I walked. I jogged. I walked some more. But I completed it. But it hurt. I was so sad. And again I made a commitment to myself that I would never feel like this again. I would become a much stronger runner by my next event in Paris. When I raced, I would leave everything out there.
Post Cape Town Triathlon — March 2019 onwards
After the Cape Town Triathlon, I went into overdrive. I was dedicated to not feeling the way I did on the bike and run. I didn’t have time. So I searched and found a Half Marathon in Lusaka (at the time 10 weeks away) and started training for that. I decided (without merit and based on no logic whatsoever) that I wanted to complete 21 km in <2hrs (I had just completed 10 km in 67mins so a more realistic time, if I could even complete the distance was 2hrs30mins). It was a big scary target, which I didn’t achieve in the end, but the result was I became a pretty strong 10km runner. I focused on losing weight to improve my running strength and speeds. Because I am naturally a rubbish eater (that's not unlikely to ever change) I found the only way to maintain my calorific deficiencies (in order to lose weight) was to fast. I found an amazing app Zero which is great for tracking and organising intermittent fasting. I moved between the 16:8 / 18:6 and 20:4 (fast for 20 hrs and eat for 4 hrs). The 20:4 literally made me sad. It destroyed my day so I simply stopped it after a week or so. So now I can run fast and lost weight linearly.
TrainingPeaks is an amazing structured training tool. I basically live in here now. I have bought different training plans (Ironman 70.3, base swimming, Half Marathons etc.). They provide so much data which helps structure my training regimes. I essentially completed 80% of what they needed me to do. And the results were dramatic and immediate. Some examples below.
I invested in a specific Triathlon watch, the Garmin Forerunner 935 with the supporting Tri bundle (heart rate monitors etc) has really helped me understand how the impact HR has on everything. It’s been a game changer for me and my training.
Dem pay you?
Mrs. Njoku thinks I have taken it too far and is scared that I won’t stop when I hit my 100kg weight target. That I may be taking this all a little too seriously. To be fair, most times she wakes up these days I am out of the house pounding the streets of Accra somewhere. I guess she misses waking up to see her husband, a common comment from friends are ‘dem pay you’? The journey has gone beyond the physical realm for me. It has really helped me emotionally. It has definitely smoothed out my highs and lows. I find going to bed at 10ish and waking up at 4–5ish to train is now the new normal. In fact my son wakes up 5:30am 4 mornings a week to train for his swim team. I find that making decisions after 1–2 hours training is much more balanced than before. I definitely feel better than I ever remember feeling. This isn’t cosmetic six-packs and arms health. This is core health changes. My mum has diet-controlled diabetes. That was always a big health concern for Mrs. Njoku and Mama Njoku.
I remember Sim waxing lyrical about the benefits of health and diet a few years ago, when I spent a night at his house in Cape Town. I remember thinking we were going to talk startups and technology until the early hours of the morning. Instead he retired to bed by 10pm. Which I thought was weird. He then invited me to join him and his wife the next morning for a 9am spin class. That was fucking weird. I thought to myself he had sold out. Retired to the bliss of Cape Town hippy living. He was right, as he usually always is. He was ahead of the curve and was just trying to tell the young buck (that’s me) what the future looked like.
We don’t worry about health issues in the Njoku family. We are ALL super active now. We are balanced and happier for it. I now look forward to hitting my weight goals and competing in some pretty amazing events over the rest of 2019.
Garmin Paris Triathlon — 30th June
London Triathlon — 28th July
Barcelona Triathlon — 7th October
Ironman 70.3 Turkey — 3rd November
I now feel ready to become an Ironman 1 year earlier than planned.
So now folks know why I blog less. Over this journey I have simply become a more balanced and happy person. The energy I used to blog always came from an unhappy, angry place. That’s why when I read my previous blog posts I always sound unhappy about something or the other. It’s always a borderline rant. Whereas if I am angry I can write a post in a couple of hours and one sitting. Just writing this took almost 2 weeks. Or, to give it a metric,
