Big kudos to @mikepugh for his accomplishment of finishing a virtual Ironman! I watched portions of his live stream on YouTube and it was an impressive feat!
After IM Switzerland was pushed out to later this season, he still completed the swim indoors before moving to Zwift for the bike and run. Not only did he complete the distance, but he simulated the elevation gain by choosing one of the more difficult routes on Watopia before finishing up with a marathon on the treadmill.
Congratulations! I’ll be curious to hear more about how the climbing and overall effort felt relative to the actual event once you get out there, Mike. In terms of preparation and getting to the start line that day, did you feel like the virtual Ironman had a similar “feel” to what you expected? And would you change anything about your IRL preparation now that you’ve gone through this event virtually?
Has anyone else done any big virtual events like this, or do you have plans to do it?
Just to clarify - Zwift was in a passive mode (not hooked up to my smart trainer) because I took the Ironman Thun GPX course and was able to load that into my Wahoo Bolt computer via BestBikeSplit. This setup allowed the Wahoo to control my Kickr+Climb to simulate the IM Thun course distance and elevation. The Zwift route I chose was more to get a missing badge, it just happened to have similar elevation gain
The event certainly had a surprise for me with my stomach issues around the 4 hour mark into the bike - I’d never had issues with my fueling before in any of my prior races or training rides - so that was new. I’m glad I found a way to push through it and finish the event.
In terms of anything I’d change - I’d definitely practice my exact nutrition plan several weeks ahead of my event, and we’d do a proper taper. For this particular event, I got the e-mail about IM Thun being postponed in late April and basically told my coach that day I wanted to simulate the entire thing in early to mid May - so we had to do what he called an emergency taper
