IM 70.3 Cascais 🇵🇹💪🏼
Vim, vi e venci 🥳 All roads led to last Saturday...
I’m officially an IRONMAN 70.3 Cascais ‘25 Finisher - in 5h24 - smashing my 6 hour target by quite the margin 🔥
In a pep talk over coffee in my hometown of Lagos, a few days before the race, my tri-coach (who coincidentally was on holiday and staying under a km from home!) said make sure “the race doesn’t happen to you, you happen to the race” 🤓
And that’s exactly what happened…
Despite the 7 hours sleep in total for the 2 nights before the race 🥱
And the stupid choice of a supersized McDonalds on Thursday evening 🍔
And losing 5-10 minutes on the bike because of last minute strategy changes despite all the advice not to change things last minute 🤦🏻♂️
I guess you live and you learn 🤪
In control during the swim and super fast bike hitting 70km/h on the downhills and holding 40km/h on the way back from Lisbon 🚀
During the hilly run in the blistering 30 degrees heat, my hydration strategy was on point - aced the half mara in 1h42 (at an easy 156 heart rate, so could have maybe pushed a bit harder!) 🏃🏻♂️
Big shout out to ma brotha from anotha Christian Firth-Morais (who finished the full and half here before) came up from the Algarve at 4am to see me off and last minute pep talk ❤️
At swim start, heard a beautiful rendition of our Portugal national anthem followed by coincidentally the last song I heard the night before Time by Hans Zimmer which went straight on to one of my favourite songs AC/DC's Thunderstruck (singing it out at the top of my lungs!) - a perfect start 🇵🇹🤘🏼
Amazing to be out there on and off the course with some fellow comrades from my tri-club in Amsterdam and also got to catch up with an ex-colleague Olivier Salmon as well as some Strava buddies who I got to meet in real life - one chick, when I lost my Oakley's at a hydration strategy 2km from the end shouted at me "forget about them, you're so close, keep running!" and then goes "hey you're Tariq from my Strava right!" - the serendipity (got the glasses back after!)😅🙌🏼
Finally, BIG LOVE to the OG Ironmom and Irondad who bought me to this world - blessed to still be able share lovely times with them 🥰
WHAT’S NEXT⁉️
The week before Cascais, I registered for the Berlin marathon in October as I’m really loving the running now, I will aim for a <3h30 for my first marathon 🔥
But wait, there’s more…
On that same day I went full psycho and signed up for a full IRONMAN in Klagenfurt Austria in June joining a cool bunch of fellow lunatics venturing off from NL for it 😬
As well as a training camp together with the Precision Coaching gang at the Anfi Group Sports Academy in Gran Canaria in March - cervezas, tapas y elevación 🏖️
Now enjoying some down time back in Lagos and getting stuck in to Rich Roll's Finding Ultra after recommendations from several people 📖
