ANDREAS DOHMEN

Ironman Athlete

Age: 63

Starting age of Sport (triathlon): 49

Profession: Professor

Experience with competition:

- Doing sports since he was 5. -14 years doing triathlons, all distances.

-Participated in 11 Ironmans (8 completed, 3 “survived”), -20+ half distance

Longest race: Ironman, long distance: 3.8 km, 180 km bike and 42.2 km run.

How did you become a triathlete?

I have been into sports my whole life. I started with Judo when I was five. I did it for six years. […] then I played soccer, as goalkeeper for 25 years. I played in the third league in Germany. […] Also, when I was young, and that helps me today, I went to a swimming club for four years when I was 11 or 12 to 16. […] So, I have tried nearly everything. And then when I finished my studies, I went into profession, became a manager in a high-tech company and traveled around the world a lot […]. Then I started running. Always had my running shoes with me when I was somewhere in a hotel around the world. And I always did that in the morning.

Then one day, end of my forties, I have seen a triathlon event in television the week before and I said to myself, “that's funny, that's pretty interesting. Maybe I should try it”. To my best friend, who I know since kindergarten, we were at the pool and I said “hey, should we do a triathlon?” No response. Then he said, “you are mad. You always were mad since I know you.”

So, long story short, one year after that, we did the first one. It was [approx.] 400 m swim, 20 km bike and 5 km run. That was 15 years ago We had a lot of fun Another friend joined us too, and since then we were building it up year by year

We always looked at the ultimate goal as an Ironman, long distance We had no clue how to get there So, we built it up, built it up and at a certain point in time we had a, call it, window of opportunity. My friend had some time. I had some time. So we said, “let's go for it”. This first Ironman I did was in Cologne, because I was born in Cologne And secondly, the course was flat We needed a flat course And then we did it That was 14, 13 years ago We both came to the finish line That was great Since then, we continued it

Every year we did one, or sometimes I did two and a lot of half distances.

I am turning 64 this year. I will continue to do it. This year, only half distance and sprint And that's the triathlon story

,Like Xtreme father, like Xtreme son'

[...] Just yesterday with my son, I started [the preparation]. He's 20 and he started triathlon three or four years ago. He played football also, and then he had an injury in his knee. So he quitted football. He was a good biker, so I gave him a bike and he got a lot of fun. Also in swimming and running. In the meantime, he is much more faster than myself. He is starting in the Third league in Germany. He is pretty talented. And we just had an event yesterday where we started.

We have done a relay the last two years, every year. Because he was 17 and he wasn't allowed to start alone. And then we said, let's do a relay. So I've done the 3.8km swim. He did the 180km bike and I did the marathon. That was great. Lot of psychology. I will never forget that. That's one of my highlights in my life. After, I don't know, 9-10 hours together with your son. You get into a big stadium, 15,000 people all over the place. It’s very motivating. And then you go through the finish line.

What motivates you to perform this extreme sport of triathlon, additional to being with your son?

It's actually not directly related to sports. Obviously, there are a lot of reasons to stay fit when you're getting older. But you can do it in different ways. My personality structure is that I have always liked challenges. I always like to push things to go across the borderline in certain way. That's the way I'm structured.

[Now] I'm much more relaxed. But when I was younger, I defined myself to be a person who starts when other people say “stop”. I went, for example, to the swimming area in the swimming club. I was, I don't know, seven or eight, or even six… and I couldn't really swim, but I went to the five meters jumping platform and jumped down. Later on, one year later, I went to the 10 meters platform and did a dive. And I couldn't really swim. It is a bit madness, but that's the way I am.

I always looked for things where people said, “forget it”. Physically, but also mentally.

I started nuclear physics, for example. Where a lot of people never understand it. And I like to crack that. I am a very curious person and I start to push the envelope as much as I can. Which is sometimes unhealthy, so it's a tricky thing. Psychology. But any time, the good thing with age, you get more relaxed, and you get a bit more wisdom. Wisdom comes with age. And you're not doing those crazy things anymore. But my base structure, the facility structure, I still like those things.

So now, I do those things much more balanced. For example, many years ago I did an Ironman and two weeks later I did another one. You should not do that. You need at least four to six weeks to recover. I did two in two weeks. You shouldn't, definitely not, you should not recommend it at all. But the other thing is the mental challenge. Because in all those sports, especially those extreme sports, it is a lot of dialogue with yourself. You spend hours and hours and hours only talking to yourself. And there is that famous internal voice who talks to you in all flavors. In terms of “keep on going” or “why the hell are you doing that?” or “forget it. You are mad”. It's that mental thing which actually triggers me most. In my case, when you think you know yourself, and when you go through the limits, you know yourself even better. And you've got that internal fight in terms of “forget it, why are you doing that? Stop, just quit”, No, no, no, no. You keep going. Keep going. It's a perfect thing.

Other people do yoga and meditation. I also do that, but it is a totally different thing. So, besides the physical fitness, it is that thing. The second thing is the personality structure. I'm a very disciplined person now. So I'm very structured. I like to set myself a goal and then work towards it.

That's the way I am. I'm not a person who just takes a day and do whatever comes to my mind. I am not navigating through life like that, that is not me. It just doesn't fit. I’m always looking for things which I want to achieve, and if I like them and I think I have the right goal, then I work towards it.

Concrete strategies to deal with mental challenges

I'll put it this way. In an Ironman you've got officially three disciplines: swimming, cycling and running. Number four is mental. And number five is nutrition.

Breaking the big thing into small steps…

It's like life. I'm a big believer that a lot of small things build up potentially to a big thing. You need to break the big thing down into small steps. Life is not just doing the big thing. You need to be structured, […] you need to have a lot of mental discipline to focus and set yourself interim goals and then work towards them.

You need to fool yourself a bit. […] It's like when you do the marathon, I never think of the whole marathon. Every 2.5 kilometer, there's a water station. And the way I'm thinking is, “okay, we do the next 2.5 km running. That's the next water station. Tick the box, and then we do the next 2.5km”. It’s that mental thing which breaks the whole big thing into smaller parts.

Preparation...

You need to visualize the ways. Just close your eyes, study the course. If you have been there, easy. If you have not been there, try to get as much information as you can. Go on YouTube, find videos and try to visualize the course […]. Try to think how you feel. Try to remember situations where it was tricky to keep on going. Swimming is always tricky because you have thousands of people jumping into the water and it's a hard thing to survive.

It's madness. So you need to go through that. You need to stay by yourself. If you get too much into conflict with others, forget it. Keep yourself, keep yourself, keep your mindset, go, go, go, go, go Especially in the first 500 – 1000 m.

The other thing is also mentally to prepare the material, the bike, running shoes, everything. It's a lot of details. And details matter... Remember, when you want to eat something, you need to eat... If you're getting hungry, it's too late. You need to eat before that. If you get thirsty, it's too late. You need to drink before that. So you remind yourself every 50 minutes. You need to put energy into the machine. That's all always the mental preparation. So it's a lot of that visualization."

How has it evolved? This mindset or this preparation.

With experience it gets easier. You get better at it. Sometimes you do the same mistake again, but you get to know your body much better. In my case, my cardio system is pretty good. Especially for my age. The weak part is my muscle system. Before I would get problems with breathing or pulse, my muscle quitted before that [..] It's hard to get that area to improve. So it's that, the listening to your body. I know my body very well.

If I compare myself with my son, my son does the whole thing entirely with digital data. He got a speed limit data, which shows you all the different power meter. It's a big thing in sports as you know, digitalization, data points. I got those data points. But I'm much more about listening to my body.

When do you think you got this good at listening to your body?

It even started before. Based on my education. Based on my history.

20 years ago, I spent two years in therapy […] Also, I have done an education in psychology. It's called neuro-linguistic programming, NLP. I did meditation. I learned a lot about myself in that phase of my life. And that helps me a lot. In terms of, I know where I am. I'm a bit crazy, but I'm reflective enough to know where to stop. And I learned to protect myself much better.

When I was younger, I always pushed the envelope and I pushed it too high. So, in the end of my thirties, I got in that classical situation of burnout. I was running around, had a good career in business, relatively successful. But the price was too high. I thought “I have so much energy, I don't need to care."

My father and my mother, they're still alive and they have that high level of energy still there. So I inherited that. But what I had not been good in, was balancing it. It became pretty unhealthy. In my business life, I worked 60, 70 hours a week flying around the world, and I crashed nearly when I was 40. Not physically, mentally. And then I went to therapy and that helped me a lot to know much more about my resources. Resource management and all those things I learned helped me later in those Ironmans.

I quitted business when I was 50. I stopped my career, and I knew… I had to do something else. I wanted to spend much more time with my son. I knew my energy level was getting down and I needed another platform because I still have that high energy. And I think I went to Ironman just as a substitute, because it's my personality structure.

I'm much more balanced than in the past. A lot of people, my closer friends who know me very well, when, in that stormy days when I was 41, they said, “Andreas, if you would've gotten a heart attack in those days, no surprise”. And I knew that. I learned to protect myself much better through that therapy. So that was good. It was a painful phase in my life, but something which made me reflect much more on my resources and I transferred that over to sports... That’s one of the reasons why I can still do it with 63, and I hope I can do it when I’m 70, that's my ultimate goal.

My ultimate goal is to do an Ironman together with my son. So he does one, and I do one. He needs another five to seven years to be ready for it. In seven years, I'll be 70. It would be a great achievement for me in life if I could be at the starting line with my son. I have a good chance of getting there, but I need to manage my resources.

So that's the story behind it. I didn't get that via Ironman. I got the key from before. And I applied that now to sports.

What are your thoughts in the race when you feel the pain and how do you cope with it?

So number one, anticipating pain signals like a dashboard […]. And the other thing is just going back to what I said early on, during that therapy, the therapist told me, “listen, you need to think differently”:

“Andreas, look at it like this. You go to a casino. You got only 20 jetons (casino tokens). Rule number one, put two aside as reserve and don't touch them. So you have 18, okay? […] And if those eighteen are gone, you can't put another one on. You don't have more, you only have 18. So, rule number two is to choose. Those two in the reserve, you are only allowed to touch them if you're really in a dangerous or alarming situation”.

Choose your energy jetons. Choose where you want to invest. Sometimes let things go […] Don't jump on every freaking thing. You only have those 18 jetons.

"IF IT DOESN'T FEEL GOOD, YOU ARE ALLOWED TO QUIT"...

So usually in my Ironman, I always have a buffer. I always, when you see me at the finish line, I always smile at the finish line. I never break down. There are a lot of people who are lying there - they're entirely toasted. And there's a doctor coming. That doesn't happen to me. Before [I get to that point], I stop, so I got that buffer. I don't destroy myself.

If I need to walk, I walk. I'm not so time focused. I do it. If I do that thing in 13 hours or 12 hours, you know what? It doesn't really matter for me. I'm ambitious, but it's not the number one thing. I want to remember it as a good race, mentally.

It's a good race if I feel great and I have good memories. I still want to enjoy that.

I learned… “If it doesn't feel good, you are allowed to quit”. [Growing up] I never asked myself the questions, do I really like what I'm doing? Does it feel good? It was a blind spot. The thing was always, “I need to achieve that. I want to be the winner. I want to be the best in class”. I've been a pretty good student. I've been the best in class, and so on and so on. But [I never asked myself those questions]. I never had that… I had to learn that. So, when the therapist said that to me for the first time, “if it doesn't feel good, you can quit”. I said, “how does that feel? I don't know that.” “I don't have a feeling for that. I'm not used to that”. And my goal was [to discover] that. That's a thing I am really proud of.

I was proud when I did the first Ironman, but I was even prouder that I did smile at the finish line Because I didn't trap into my old habits. “Keep going slower. Keep pushing”, (I said). Maybe I would've been 30 minutes faster. You know what? I couldn't care less. The big achievement for me in my life was that I did it, and I was smiling at the finish line.

Old habits die hard. That's an old, old slogan. And I killed that habit […]. I transformed myself. That was the transformation to the new Andreas. And it's much healthier.

Coping with negative thoughts

Don't think a lot about it all the time because the negative thinking it’s not a good thing in sport... You need to think positive. But don't fool yourself. Do the next thing.

Some strategies... Andreas' tricks!

COUNTING TO EIGHT - rescue strategy

Like in swimming, my trick is… everybody got a trick… I always start to count to eight. So I'm doing eight of those counts and then I start again. Another eight. Another eight. There's no reason for doing eight, it just came to my mind one day. It could have been 10 or 11. I don't know.

It's a bit like a meditation. And it's also that discipline. You start to focus on your breathing. Don't think. If you think, you need to count again.

BUILDING STORY BOOKS - during race strategy

I am a teacher, I teach students about different things, digitalization, artificial intelligence. I have a passion for it. And sometimes, I take a theme with me and I build the storybook. I can do that in swimming and in biking. […] (I think) about what I want to build. Then my mind starts and I visualize it, and you know what? Time flies.

[Although, in running] I just focus on running. While running it's too hard for me to think of story books and other things. Because at that stage, you're getting tired in the race and you just need to concentrate on doing the next mile.

TRAIN YOUR MIND- key to overcome the Negative Spiral

"Another mental thing, what always happens… is like Buddhism says: every problem which is not solved in your life will come again and again until you have solved it. [...] It's a danger if you don't have a good brain, then very often it might be a trigger point for bad thoughts. This is where you need to watch it very carefully because it might trigger a negative spiral. And that's the reason why you stop, because it takes energy away from you. You need to be aware of that, pay attention.

Don't do that. Don't go down that path. Block that thought. Not now. Now is not the time to solve that problem If you are in a better shape, you can look at the same thing and say, “okay, funny. Let's think about it for a while, and then you could go to someone else that tells you in which mental shape you are".

The negative spiral, you need to stop it at a certain time because you think, “okay, I've not trained enough.” “Why is that?” “Why can't I cope with that situation?” “Why did I make that mistake? […] And sometimes you get over it, sometimes not. It’s hard. It's an art to realize you can't always turn that around into a great, wonderful race. No, no, no, no. Sometimes, the success is just to stop the negative spiral. [...] Redefine the search. Success is now to pass the test, whatever the score is. That helps you a lot. That frees up energy. [...] That's enough, because, you know what? Every day is different and sometimes you got a great day and sometimes it's a bad day. So that's life.

In sports is not different. You're not a machine. And you need to acknowledge that. Say yes, that's the thing, don't fight it. But at the same time, don't let it in your whole system. If you're spending too much time with the thought, the thought becomes reality and the reality gets into negative energy and that energy will stop you.

This is where one can make the difference. Because I think in a lot of sports, physically and talented, they're all the same. Some are more, some are less. You know that, from your study, sports psychology. The big difference is in your head […]. And that's the trick and the success factor for many, many professional sports.

Do you think everyone is able to do a triathlon, and an Ironman?

I think yes. Everybody can do triathlon. Ironman, no. Because you need to have a certain system or structure for it. You need to have a certain mental strength, and you need to have discipline to train for it.

[…] It needs to be one year of preparation. Maybe even longer. I have a lot of friends who would never, ever have that discipline to do that. To stop drinking, stop smoking, lose 10 kilos, you know, maybe 20. And that's a pretty [big] lifestyle change. So, physically a lot of people can. Mentally, this is where the barrier is. The barrier mentally is much higher.

The body, you can train the body to learn. And forget the time. So if you [set the goal to] just finish it, get to the finish line, you have 17 hours to do that. So, you can do that. But the discipline to start and to do one kilometer running, then do two, then three, then five… This is where I see a lot of people struggling to do that. That's fine, but as you all know, discipline is a thing which is hard to learn. So, I'm gifted because I learned that with my parents, that's the thing I got from them, and I'm very thankful for that.

Do you have any recommendation for those who want to start ultra sports?

Number one thing is to set yourself a goal, a realistic goal. Don't start from zero to “I want to do an Ironman next year”. Don't do that. You need to be really realistic.

Yes, you need to be ambitious, but you know what? There's healthy ambitious, and there's unhealthy ambitious. Be healthy. Set yourself a goal and then work backwards from that goal. Set yourself a goal, which is achievable. Then develop a plan. If you need help, get a trainer, coach. A coach will build you a plan for that.

Second thing is, especially in those ultra sports, many, many small things build up to big things. Like in life. The marathon starts with one kilometer, and then two and next week five. Be patient, but be disciplined. You better run three times a week, five, than once a month. There's no point. Forget that. Again, again, and again and again.

[…] A tip I've given a lot of people: Put your running shoes in front of your bed before you go to bed. This avoids that you are thinking in the morning, should I do one? No, get in your shoes and go for one [kilometer]. […] The decision whether you're running in the morning, it’s done the night before.

STORY TIME

"Finish with a smile"

Do you have any funny anecdote from one of your races?

There is one. I still laugh about it. I think it was 10 years ago. I went to Austria and did a half Ironman with my best friend. At that time, I was in the process of getting my teeth done, so I had substitutes for my entire front teeth for a while. We started the race and did the swimming. Then I did the biking, and at kilometer 60, there was an uphill. On top of the hill, there was a refreshment station. I grabbed a bottle, one of those drinking bottles with small pins that you need to pull out to open. And what I did was, I opened that bottle with my teeth. The problem was, I forgot that I had artificial teeth. They were very fragile. I will never forget that. My whole front teeth were broken. It was a disaster. It's actually a great example of sport psychology, because I had to make a decision.

Everything was gone, and I thought, "What am I going to do now?" And I said, "You know what? There are two ways: I can quit or I can keep going." I still had to do 25 kilometers downhill and a half marathon, which would take another two hours. In that moment, you know what mental trick I pulled? What mathematicians do... define. Mathematicians define things clearly. They say, "It's like this, and that's it." They are objective. That's the assumption. And then they work from there. So, I defined that I didn't have any pain, and I completely forgot about the whole incident. I finished the biking and the half marathon.

And I just forgot about it. Forgot about the pain, everything. It was just gone. So, when I crossed the finish line, my friend was already there and said, "Oh, what happened?" I looked at him and said, "What do you want?" (pronouncing badly). My friend asked, "Did you have a crash?" I replied, "No. Why?" And he said, "Did you have a fight with someone?" "No. Why?" I said again, "Look in the mirror, man," he said. So, psychologically... in that moment, I realized that I looked pretty bad. And I had completely forgotten about it for two and a half hours. We laughed about it uncontrollably.

It's moments like these that show you what kind of mindset you can achieve.