Day in the life - 2026 Ironman szn!

What's up, YouTube? Man, back at it. 2026. New year. Yeah, we haven't made a YouTube video in a while. I have Lauda here. I have Soph here. We're just going to shoot some of my training as we're kickstarting the year. I guess I'm going to run through a quick I don't know, race rewind of like 2025. I'm not going to do a whole individual video on 2025. Long story short, it was a hard year. Good year. Big year of growth. As I've talked about many times, it was just hard. I don't know, on a lot of different occasions. Mentally, physically, I was sick. I had some mental stuff. We moved to Colorado. We moved back to Tampa, Florida. This is a lot of change. A lot of change I think that's going to set me up good for the next hopefully 10 years. Now I have a home base. I have roots. I have family support, friends support. Long term, it's going to be better. Obviously, it wasn't great moving in the middle of the year. Whatever. Today, I'm going to do this 5K threshold swim. Usually, it's 40 degrees right now in Florida. It's quite cold in Florida. Usually, for my hard cold swims, I go to the YMCA. YMCA is an 85 degree pool. It's this cold. I'd like the water to be warm. This is my lovely neighborhood pool. I only swim here when it's warm though because they don't cover the pool. It's heated. We'll see how heated it is in a minute. We're going to do the threshold swim. Then I'll go for a run afterwards and just follow along. I guess the last race I did was Ironman Arizona. I'll give a quick rundown on that because we didn't do a YouTube video on it. The day started out. It was good. I had a good swim. I was with pretty much the main pack with Arnaud Guillaume, Sam Long, some good swimmers who swam 51 minutes or something like that. I was with them through about 3K. I fell off. I don't know. I think I lost a minute, 90 seconds to them, right? I don't know. Sometimes even two. It wasn't too far behind them. I just lost all of that in the last K. My arms got tired. Then I was kind of in no man's land. I was kind of like that first loser to miss the main pack. I got out of the water, heard that. Sam and Colin, that kind of second half, was 100 seconds or so ahead of me. I felt absolutely horrendous on the bike. I wanted to drop out, but I was like, bro, you can't drop out of another race this year, so I'm going to just do zone 1 power and just do this as an easy training day. I did that for a lap. Found out I actually took time. I was like 20 seconds back, riding quite easy. I was like, oh great, that's nice. Then it kind of gave me a shot of adrenaline. Ironman Arizona is three loops on the bike, so it was one loop. It told me I had pretty much lost no time. I was like, I'm going to just drill this second lap real quick and just catch up, because the legs started coming around. Drilled the second lap. Braced the gap up to, I think it was Arno, Gio, Sam Long, Colin Schutz, and maybe one other guy that I'm missing their name. Caught them, I think at the end, pretty much close to the end of the second lap, so I don't know, 70-ish miles into the race, so I had done the first 70 solo. We were moving. I think I went through the 70.3 split in like 157 or something. We were ripping. Anyway, caught Sam and all of them, and we were all working really well together, pulling turns, blah, blah, blah. Made the final turn to come back home. The last 20 miles, and I think at that point Arno had dropped, Colin had dropped. It was literally just Sam and I, and we're coming off the highway. I think it's called the B-Line in Phoenix, and we're coming off, and we've got maybe 10K, six miles to go into the race. At this point, Sam and I are literally swapping leads. The guy was leading at the time. I'm taking one last gel. The referee's pretty much pulling off. The bike is literally over. We're in town basically. I'm riding. I'm in the aero bars obviously. My front end wiggles, and I almost crash into an A-Trooper because it's a three-loop course. My front tire's flat. I was like, awesome. It's great. Stayed calm. Threw the bike down. Had a flat kit. Fixed it. Bam, bam. Get three more miles down the road. Bath bomb goes flat. I'm out of supplies, whatever you want to call it. I'm 5K to go to the bike finish line. Then I'm like, maybe I can just ride my bike on the rims. I'm just riding on the rims for a quarter of a mile. Trying not to cry on the side of the road with literally two miles to go on the bike. I was like, wow. I was sitting on the side of the road. I was like, yeah, of course this is happening. I'm in a great position. Got two flat tires. Feeling good. Yeah, of course this happens. Makes sense. A missed opportunity to not get the Kona slot, not make some prize money, blah, blah, blah. I was right there in the top five, right in the thick of it. I don't know. I was just at that point. I was so ready for the season to be done. Yeah, just to move on. I took a week off. Pretty much completely off. Talked to my coach, Sean. Talked to Soph. Talked to my friends. What I need to do to get back to where I was in 2024. Yeah, it was just a hard year, but made the most of it. Like I said, we're back here at home. I feel great. I'm really motivated for 2026. I'm going to start my season on Oceanside and the Ironman Texas and then I think 70.3 Florida and then re-evaluate my year from there. I'm really excited for that. I have some big things planned. Some really cool new sponsors. I'm in a great place mentally. Physically, training's been going good. I think we're a month into base training. Yeah. 12 o'clock. About an hour. Hour post swim. I'm going to go for a 10 mile hour long easy run. That's what's on my schedule. I'm going to eat lunch and have a bike workout. That'll be the day. I'm feeling pretty good. Texted Sean, my coach, the splits. Yeah, I'm really happy with it. Training in the right direction. I kind of judged that. Like I said, back at the pool, I was swimming 7 out of 10 and getting down to 110. He said if I can get down holding 109, 108, 110-ish for longer 400s, 500s type reps and it not be super taxing, that'd be great because my biggest problem is I've always been able, not always, but in the last year, I've been able to swim with the 51, 52, whatever, 50 minute group in Placid or Arizona or Texas, like Santa Cruz, St. George. I can swim with all these packs for like halfway-ish and then I'm just like blown to pieces. Just getting more yards under me and just getting a bit more endurance, swim specific endurance. Usually when I do these easy runs, I don't have much time during the day to talk to people so I usually just call people when I'm running on my AirPods, so I'm actually going to call Sean, my coach, while I'm running. Sometimes I'll call Gavin, I'll call Stu, literally just talk about triathlon, but I just make my quick phone calls while I'm running. Works out pretty good, makes the time go by. If you want to take this 25 carb Z2 tropical fruit, I think it's the best one. A lot of people think it's the pink one. Talia is the best one, tropical fruit's pretty good. Then shoes, I always get asked. I'm running the Cloud Surfer Max. Best shoe I've ever ran in arguably, really nice. Not super cushiony, not super minimal, it's just perfect mix of knocking out. It's like 10 miles to mileage. I think KB and Gustav are running these as well. If those guys are doing it, I'm going to do it too and you should too. Swim done, run done. Did a 10 mile easy run just around the neighborhood. My neighborhood here for Florida is actually quite hilly, but we tried to stay in flats, easier to film and whatnot. I did 10 miles, easy 6.17 pace. Let's check my heart rate. 145 average heart rate, so I'd say pretty easy. That's like the coolest weather I've had in a month here. The run felt a lot easier. Called my coach, Sean, literally talked to him. I think I ran for 62 minutes or something. I think I talked to him for 55 minutes of it. Just catching up on training, plans for next year, races. I'm going down to West Palm Beach with my friend and person I coach, Gavin for a long weekend training camp. Just going over some stuff that we want to accomplish down there, training wise. Things are moving in the right direction. I'm really trying to run quite a bit this year along so with swimming a lot. I know my bike is in a good position on the world stage or whatever of triathlon. I think I just really need to swim more and that's around 30,000 yards a week and 60 ish miles a week. Some weeks will be a bit higher, some weeks will be a bit lower, but pretty much trying to run an hour ish every day to have that 60 miles a week average with a good long run on Sundays I think will set me up to be in a really good position come March, April for racing. Something I did early on in triathlon and then it's just as you guys know, as everybody knows, it's so hard to balance all three of the sports. Swimming a lot and running a lot and then when you run a lot your bike legs are shot because you're so sore from the run so it's just such this balancing act of how can I run a lot while not losing power on the bike, losing confidence, stuff like that. But right now, really trying to put the bike in maintenance mode and push 150 watts for this ride coming up. I'm going to push 150 watts and I'm just going to try not to cry about it because I've had a good swim, I had a good run. Those are my objectives for the day. For the next, I'd say three months, the bike will just be what it's going to be. So yeah, it's good. So maybe some pasta and I'm going to eat that and then try to maybe go outside. There is no sun so maybe we'll be inside. Training Peaks virtual household now. Super nice. Much more realistic. A couple different little features and stuff like that could actually make laps and an open ride. So yeah, I've been using this for about a week now and that's what I'll be using and what the team Fully Athletics will be using in 2026. So super exciting. I'm going to pick a route today. Hilly Day Out. I'm going to do that one. Y'all have seen the whole day. Good, quality swim. Nice, aerobic, easy. What do you want to call it? 10 mile hour long run. And then now I'm here for the next three hours. I am trying to wrap my head around that but it's trying to be a good thing. I have 10 to 20 minute long reps. So I'm used to these other kind of plugs. I want to do the workout. I really appreciate that. So yeah, I'll probably be in at least an hour before I start that because I feel fine. First video of 2026. I'm really committed to good YouTube videos. More consistent YouTube videos this evening. It's been a journey up until Kona. That's what we care about. That's what I want to do. I want to compete to the best of my ability. It's all content or whatever it is. So I'm happy to bring you guys along for the ride. We have a lot of here in Florida. And when I go to Colorado we'll have the OG canister making videos. So great people behind me helping me with the YouTube. It's not the easiest but I know I took jaywalking a lot of people. A lot of people took jaywalking then. hiatus is over. Season is here. Winter is over. Well, winter is here. The off season is over. I'm fired up. Hope you're fired up. And yeah, I'll see everyone in March. We'll have more YouTube videos coming out. That season goes along. Thanks for all the support. I know it wasn't the big year we all dreamed of but we're coming with a vengeance. 2026. Fired up. So thanks for all the love. See everyone in the next one. Peace.