An ambitious goal / A long road

I am a husband to a beautiful wife, a father to a gorgeous little girl,
a geek and a gamer - but can I be an athlete?

Name: Ben Quinney
Age: 34
Athletic background: None
Short term goal: Top 25% Hidden Warrior December 1st 2012
Long term goal: Reach a competitive level in Australian obstacle course racing and compete in the 2014 CrossFit open.
Question: Is 34 too old to start training with the hopes of becoming a competitive athlete?

Some background for the uninitiated
To be fair, when I say "Athletic background: None", that is not entirely true - well not now. I played a little bit of basketball when I was much younger, I used to skateboard until about the time I was able to drive a car and I did some mountain boarding until our daughter was born - but I was never very good at any of them.

2009 - Approx 115kg

I started seeing a personal trainer back in 2006 but never really got my diet under control, so while I was getting stronger all the time I was not losing any weight or looking or feeling any better about myself.

Inspired by a television weight loss show in February 2011 I set myself a goal - to workout for 100 consecutive days. I started doing a workout every morning using Yourshape Fitness Evolved while taking photos and tracking my weight every day. While my overall fitness improved tremendously after 100 days my weight still wasn't moving very quickly.

Results at last!
It was an iOS app that finally made the difference with my diet. myfitnesspal allowed me to set a calorie goal and easily track my food by using the camera on my iPhone as a barcode scanner and an extensive database of nutritional information from almost every food product I put in front of it. Once I learned what food "cost" in terms of calories I was able to track my calorie consumption accurately I went from around 110kg in June 2011, to 100kg in November 2011 then all the way down to 89.9kg in May 2012.

My home gym

In April 2011 I enlisted the services of Brenton, my old personal trainer again, and started spending a lot more time in the gym in my garage. I increased the regularity of my workouts with weights from once a week to five. In September 2011 I got my squat rack (right) and was then able to put more work into squats and bench press. It was about this time that I first heard about Tough Mudder - Tough Mudder changed my outlook on everything!!

Obstacle course racing
After reading the recommended fitness capabilities of Tough Mudder  I realised that if I was going to have any chance of finishing the 20km Tough Mudder course what I really needed to be able to do was RUN! I started trying to run for 10 minutes, then 15, eventually working my way up to about an hour. In February 2012 I came across the Tough Bloke Challenge and it seemed the ideal warm up event for Tough Mudder. In my maiden obstacle course race I came in 217th place out of 2220 with a time of 39min 39sec. Impressive yes? Well I thought so!

Tough Mudder Phillip Island was a fantastic day - I had my daughter, my wife and her mother and father supporting me, eagerly awaiting my arrival at the finish line. It was a beautiful day in a beautiful location. The course was excellent, a wonderful atmosphere and a varied selection of obstacles. The 20km distance was a challenge - but nothing compared to having to wait FOREVER in bottlenecks where the participants got held up waiting for those in front of them to go over, under or through the next set of obstacles.

Sadly, for me, the waiting on the course took some of the joy out of the event. I hadn't been able to push as hard as I wanted, to push as hard as I could. I finished the course with a rough time of 3hrs 30mins - but at least 45 minutes of that was spent just standing around. As a side note I am already booked into the first time slot (8am) of the first day for Tough Mudder Melbourne 2013 with my 61 year old father, but that is a story for another day.

The hunt for more obstacles
After Tough Mudder I developed an almost hyper awareness, a spider sense if you will for the announcements of upcoming obstacle courses. By "spider sense" I of course mean that I started madly following as many people, events and organisations as I could in the various social media outlets. It seems as though I must have caught the front of what has become an obstacle course tsunami as new events and courses are being announced all the time.

At this stage my 2012 & 2013 obstacle course calendars looks like this, with a number of events still yet to announce dates:

2012

Event	Date	Place	Time
Tough Bloke Challenge	3rd March	217th	39:39
Tough Mudder	31st March	Not tracked	3:30:00
Winter Warrior Challenge	4th August	24th	1:12:00
The Stampede Melbourne	27th October
The Hidden Warrior	1st December

2013

Event	Date	Place	Time
Tough Mudder	19th January
Spartan Race	2nd March
Tough Bloke Challenge	23rd March

TBA
Beach Bash 2013

With so many obstacle courses on the calendar for 2012 and even more expected in 2013 it will take some very serious commitment from, not only me, but my loving family if I am going to attend and be competitive in most, if not all of them.

What does it take to be competitive?
So from the very small sample size that I have (3 events), it would seem, to me at least, that I am not a long way off being able to regularly finish in the top 25% while training 5 or 6 days per week without any specific purpose or direction.

So what sort of training would it take to be in the running for a podium finish?

Am I even physically capable?

Have I left it all too late?