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Ironman's Physical Toll....

Saturday, 11 February 2012 02:00

(Photo by Joe Jaszewski / Idaho Statesman)

By Matt Fitzgerald (triathlon.competitor.com)

In the past year Chris McCormack, Julie Dibens and Chrissie Wellington have announced they will take a step back from Ironman racing for various reasons. All were at the top of their careers and have emphasized the toll that Ironman training and racing takes on the body. The following story explains exactly what the body goes through over 140.6 miles of racing. This story originally appeared in the January/February, 2009 edition of Inside Triathlon magazine.

From the outside, swimming, cycling and running appear as movement. But from inside the triathlete someone has put a DVD of the process at rest on 4x fast forward. Armies of oxygen radicals punch holes in muscle cell membranes, causing a general deterioration that calls to mind those computer animations that show a person aging 20 years in 10 seconds.

Indeed, from an internal perspective, completing an Ironman is a bit like sitting on a sofa for 12 hours and aging two decades. In other words, the changes the body undergoes in 12 hours of extreme exertion are similar to some of those that occur in the body over the course of two decades of non-exertion, as a result of normal aging. Fortunately, though, those years are restored to you within a few weeks. Then it