Aluminum Man

Well, it has been nearly two weeks since I did the 114 miles on the C&O. My buddy who went with me apparently got hit by a car while biking in downtown Frederick and walked away with a severe concussion. Glad to hear he is ok, but scary none-the-less. I haven't been biking since. I weighed myself when I got home and was startled to see I was down to 139 pounds, a weight I can honestly say I don't ever remember seeing, even in high school when I was playing soccer every day. 139 pounds is an unhealthy low and I spent the next couple days packing on weight to get myself back up to a more healthy 145. I started lifting weights again as well, which has been a lot of fun. I destroyed my legs doing squats and that put me on the sideline of any cardio training for a few days. But I am feeling great now.

So the title of this post is Aluminum Man. What is the Aluminum Man? Well, talking with my buddy we realized that over the past few years we have done the running and biking portions of the Ironman. A few years back we backpacked 27 miles in a day. While we certainly weren't running and it did take us a good portion of the day, we were carrying close to 70 pounds on our backs. And just two weekends ago we did 114 miles of biking. The only thing left is the 2.4 mile swim.

Looking at that, we decided to come up with a half iron man we could do back to back in a single day. 1.1 miles of swimming, 57 miles of biking, and 13.1 miles of running. I devised a way we could do this self-contained and dubbed it the Aluminum Man (Iron's atomic number is 26, aluminum is 13). We would take off from my house, go to the B&A, ride around the BWI Loop four times then come back to my house. From there we would leave our bikes, switch into running clothes and run down East West to the B&A and follow that all the way south to the Naval Academy Bridge. Once there we would jump in the Severn River and swim 1.1 miles northward to the other bridge and exit there.



The reasoning behind this route is that we are never very far away from water or food. If we coordinate it well, we can park a car at the airport loop with food and water. Each lap, if we needed it, we could go to the car and get fresh water and/or food before continuing. Of course we can refill when we get back to my house. The run is a bit different. We might need a swag biker to stay with us with a backpack full of food and water that we can use as we run south. At the swimming point we can have another car to change in, refuel, and then have a canoe accompany us across the river for safety. Once there we can have the canoe-ist take us back across the river to the car and call it a day.

We are planning this for this time next year. I know the biking portion will be simple and I have confidence in my swimming ability. The only question will be the running, but if we give ourselves a full year of training, I see this being very very doable.