Challenge Accepted!

Or: a childhood dream, a questionable commuting calculation, and the beginning of actual planning rigour.

There is a short and beautiful moment after finishing a big endurance event where one might consider becoming a reasonable person. You sit there, tired but satisfied. You think about balance. Recovery. Health. Maybe gardening. Maybe drinking coffee slowly. Maybe training without immediately converting every calendar gap into a mildly concerning endurance project.

That moment passed- a long time ago. So here we go again.

Road2IMCascais.

Ironman Portugal Cascais 2026 has entered the chat. This is, depending on the angle, either a structured athletic goal, a long-term experiment in controlled suffering, a family trip with a suspiciously large sporting side quest, or another attempt to turn stubbornness into a race result before it turns into therapy.

Probably all four.

The beautifully imperfect baseline

The current situation is beautifully imperfect.

My estimated FTP is around 276 W. That is not bad. It is also not the 316 W version of myself that apparently existed in 2025 and now lives on in Strava like a digital ghost of better legs. At my current weight, this gives me enough power to move forward with dignity, but not enough to casually pretend I am an aero missile built for the Portuguese coast.

The engine is there.

It just currently sits in a chassis that enjoys bread, family life, work stress, and the occasional emotional support dessert.

The swim: refreshingly honest

The swim is clearer. I will not suddenly become fast. This is almost liberating.

There will be no secret Olympic transformation. No heroic emergence from the water as a newly discovered Swiss Michael Phelps. The working assumption is around 1:55 min per 100 m, which means I should exit the water alive, mostly oriented, and hopefully still in possession of my timing chip.

That is enough.

The Aerium saga

The bike, however, is where things got complicated.

Or more precisely: the bike became a saga. I ordered a CUBE Aerium in September. Back then, delivery was announced for the end of February. A charming idea. February came and went, as February tends to do. Then the horizon shifted to the end of April. Also optimistic. Then came May, and my training plan had already spent weeks confidently prescribing:

Commute by Aerium

while the actual Aerium continued to pursue a highly minimalist existence. My thighs were ready. My back was ready. My drinking strategy was ready. Only the bike itself seemed committed to a more meditative approach.

But now, apparently, the thing is being assembled.

This is a major development. The Aerium has moved from prophecy to workshop. From email thread to physical object. From “soon” to “someone is actually tightening bolts.”

And that changes everything.

A childhood dream with integrated hydration

Because the Aerium is not only a bike. It is also a childhood dream with integrated hydration. I have wanted a time trial bike for ages. Not in a rational way. More in the way children look at machines that appear too fast even when standing still. A time trial bike is not just a bicycle. It is a promise that physics can be negotiated with, if only one is willing to sit uncomfortably enough.

Of course, this is slightly over the top.

I am not becoming a Kona athlete. Nobody is waiting for me on Aliʻi Drive. There is no documentary crew. No slow-motion footage of me staring at the ocean while someone whispers about sacrifice.

There is, however, a commute.

The calculation that became a bike

And this is where the adult brain became dangerous. At some point, I did the calculations. Because of course I did. I looked at commuting time, effort, speed, practicality, and the question of what would actually give me an advantage.

The answer was irritatingly simple:

Only a very expensive 45 km/h pedelec would probably make commuting meaningfully faster. So the rational solution would have been: go electric. But the economic, style-driven and emotional solution was not. So, naturally, I chose a time trial bike.

Because apparently my mind found a loophole.

I do not go e-bike.
I go aero.

Or at least that is the story my brain is currently selling to the finance department. Because already my Swissman build is aero, just not fully-fledged.

Instead of buying motor support, I bought aerodynamically optimised tube shapes. Instead of a battery, I bought carbon. Instead of admitting that commuting efficiency is a practical problem, I turned it into an aerodynamic identity project.

Very mature.

Very me.

The moment excuses evaporate

Now that the bike is becoming real, the excuses are evaporating. As long as the Aerium was delayed, I had a wonderfully comfortable excuse.

No Aerium, no aero commuting. No aero commuting, no precise bike adaptation.

No precise bike adaptation, no need to confront the awkward fact that riding a time trial bike is not exactly the same as imagining oneself looking fast on a time trial bike.

But once it is ready, I have to ride it. Once I ride it, I have to adapt to it. Once I adapt to it, I have to use it properly. And once I use it properly, I can no longer blame the invisible bike for visible legs.

Uncomfortable, but fair.

Planning rigour enters the room

The bike becoming real also triggered something else: planning rigour. A slightly alarming phrase, I know. But it is true.

The moment the Aerium became tangible, my training brain stopped operating in the vague emotional zone of “I should probably do more soon” and moved into something more structured.

Suddenly, Cascais was no longer a distant idea on the Atlantic coast. It became a sequence of weeks, sessions, rides, runs, swims, fatigue management, fueling tests, and small decisions that either compound in the right direction or quietly sabotage the whole project.

The bike build triggered the plan build. Very poetic. Very expensive poetry, admittedly.

Zurich Marathon taught me something

There is another reason why the plan suddenly matters more. Zurich Marathon showed me something useful. Standing at a start line without proper preparation is simply not fun anymore. There was a time when I could romanticize that. When underprepared starts felt like adventure, grit, improvisation, character building, and other words people (yes, that’s me) use when they have made poor decisions but want them to sound meaningful.

But now?

No.

I am too old for that. Not too old to race. Not too old to suffer. Not too old to chase something ambitious. But too old to knowingly arrive underprepared and then act surprised when the day becomes a long, slow negotiation with regret.

There is a difference between courage and administrative failure. Zurich made that quite clear.

Cascais is now a family project

So Cascais deserves better.

Especially because this is no longer just my private endurance nonsense. The flights are booked. And because nothing says “simple race trip” like coordinating a family adventure with split flight schedules, Lisbon sightseeing, race logistics, luggage, children, equipment, and the quiet hope that the bike case appears in the same country as the athlete.

Cascais has become bigger than a race. It is now a family project with an Ironman embedded in it. That changes the emotional contract.

If I drag everyone into this, if the trip becomes part holiday, part logistics puzzle, part Atlantic adventure, and part “Papa disappears for a day in Lycra,” then I owe it to myself and to them to at least try to be prepared.

Not perfect. Prepared. Within the boundary conditions. And there are many boundary conditions.

Work. Family. Fatigue. Travel. Time. Recovery. Running fitness. Swimming slots. The still slightly hypothetical relationship between my body and the aero position. The fact that fitness does not improve simply because one purchased an aggressive-looking bicycle.

Annoying, but true.

The actual plan

So the current plan is not heroic. That is important. This is not about smashing every session, waking up at stupid o’clock, and becoming a motivational quote in compression socks. I have tried versions of that. They work right up to the moment where they do not.

The plan is to become durable – again. To swim enough. To bike well. To run often enough that running stops feeling like a hostile takeover of my musculoskeletal system.

And this is probably the real Road2IMCascais project. Not the bike. Not the pink details. Not the FTP. Not even the question of whether I can hold aero position without folding into a human question mark.

The real project is whether I can prepare for something big with more structure, more patience, and fewer heroic self-destructive side quests.

But yes, the bike matters

Still, let us not pretend the bike does not matter.

It does.

A proper time trial bike brings a very specific kind of psychological pressure. Once you own one, riding slowly starts to feel like poor brand management. Especially if it gets pink or purple accents, because then the whole setup no longer whispers “serious triathlete.”

It says, quite clearly:

I waited nine months for this and now you are all going to notice.

There may be pink Vittoria Corsa Pro tires – at least that’s the plan for race day. There may be purple Wolf Tooth pedals- yes, they have arrived already. There will almost certainly be a small identity crisis somewhere between aerodynamics and mountain bike nostalgia, because despite all the road kilometers, I am still an MTB rider at heart and apparently even Ironman cannot fully civilize me.

The run problem

Then there is the run. Ah yes. The run.

The discipline that waits patiently at the end of an Ironman like a tax audit with running shoes. My running fitness is currently bad. Not dramatic. Not cinematic. Just bad in that quiet administrative way where the body opens an internal ticket and writes:

Running capacity currently unavailable.
Please contact endurance department.

This needs attention. Not panic. Attention. The aim is frequency, patience, and enough restraint not to turn every small comeback into a preventable injury.

The run does not need one heroic breakthrough. It needs boring consistency. Which is unfortunate, because boring consistency is both highly effective and deeply offensive to my preferred narrative style.

So this is where I am now

The bike is being assembled.

The plan is being assembled.

The family trip is booked.

The athlete, frankly, is also being assembled.

The swim is defined. The bike is becoming real. The run is waving a small red flag from the side of the road. FTP is lower than it once was. Weight is higher than ideal. Motivation is alive. Humor remains medically necessary.

And somewhere between Chur, Saas-Fee, Geneva, Lisbon, Cascais, and whatever airport logistics we have created for ourselves, the idea is to turn all of this into an Ironman preparation.

Not a redemption story. Not a heroic comeback. More a controlled experiment in whether ambition can become healthier without becoming boring.

Here we go again. Different coast.Same stubbornness.

And this time, very soon, an actual bike.