Alex on Trails

Here we go. It’s May 12th, 2019, in Aix-en-Provence, and my alarm clock blares at 4am. Despite a restless night, the anticipation fuels my energy. Two hours later, I find myself on the edge of Peyrolles Lake, 50km north of Aix-en-Provence. The water is a chilling 15°C, and it’s cold, windy, and still dark outside. The race begins, and as I dip my toe into the freezing water, fog clouds my swimming goggles. Swimming amidst a throng of competitors, I can’t help but question my sanity—what am I doing here? Let me take a moment to explain the race and how it unfolded for me. The Half Ironman consists of three disciplines: a 1.9km swim, a 90km bike ride with 1200m of elevation gain, and a 21km run—a half marathon. I completed the race in 6 hours and 31 minutes, with splits of 52 minutes for swimming, 3 hours and 21 minutes for cycling, and 2 hours for running, plus the transitions. The mind has a way of selectively remembering events. Despite the grueling start and the immense effort, my m...

After MDS, I unexpectedly felt a post-event blues. I had trained for this race for months, prepped on all the details including the material, the food, the weight of my bag etc... and now the race was over and I had completed my objective. A couple of things were hard for me: Even though I did my best to share my experience, take some pictures, and tell my story, I still felt I was only able to share only a taste of what I had lived, and no matter how hard I would try, people would not get what I had gone through. I read later that it was called the "going on the moon" syndrom that many people going on top of the Everest feel. There was now this void in front of me. It was actually hard for me not to have a greater challenge to live for and I needed a new challenge. In addition to this post race "trauma", one of my learnings from talking to all the veteran trailers at MDS was that I should immediately acquire a race bike to start diversifying my trainings ...