Your first Ironman and your projected finish-time becomes a frequently asked question.

What do you think your finish-time will be? This question will come from friends, family, co-workers and fellow athletes.

Its amazing just how loaded this question is.

What should you say?

Usually when someone is training for their first Ironman, they will say something like, "I don't care, I just want to cross the finish line."

Realistically, there are three possible Ironman finish-time scenarios.

The first is the "I don't care as long as its under 17 hours scenario." You tell this one to just about everyone who asks.

The second is the time you tell to very few people, or possibly no-one at all. Its the time you have calculated in your mind that you think you will actually do the race in. You have taken the swim time you know you can do, your best bike time you think you are capable of and added about an hour to your best individual marathon race time. Then you have probably added on 5 minutes for each transition.

So for example: You figure you can smash out that swim in 60 minutes. You know from your training that you can handle that 112 mile bike ride in 6:45. Plus no sweat for the marathon in 4:15--because after all, you ran your last marathon in just over 3 hours. Plus 10 minutes for transitions. You feel strongly that your Ironman finish-time will quite possibly be very near 12:15---12:30.

Then there is the third scenario. Its the finish-time that your Ironman probably will be. Ninety per cent of the time, a first time Ironman will have a finish-time between what they tell everyone and what they truly believe they are capable of.

In the above scenario, I would project that the athletes finish-time would be somewhere in between 13:30 and 14:00 hours.

This is because they imagine themselves running the entire marathon. They just believe they will run it slower than normal. In reality, only a handful of first timers will "ever" run their first ironman marathon from start to finish. Or for that matter even run 75% of the marathon.

Unless you have been there, its hard to factor in how much an energy-wasting swim will cost you. The weather is almost always a factor that is seldom included in the equation. Through excess adrenalin, wasted energy, heat or cold, the average first time Ironman will be shocked at just how bad legs can feel when the bike is left behind and you head out onto the marathon course.

As a result, the marathon will be the great equalizer and even if the above athlete did the one hour swim and 6:45 bike and rolled through the transitions in 5 minutes each, the marathon time will go into the tank the minute the walking begins. Once you start the 15-16 minute miles the time piles up pretty quickly.

This is the reality of the Ironman Triathlon.

The best thing to do, is to go in with a completely open mind. If you've never been there, then don't even try and guess or estimate what your finish-time should be. In the big scheme of things, it just isn't that important. Crossing that finish line and having the word "Ironman" in front of your name certainly is.

So when you are asked that "what do you think your finish-time will be" question, just tell the truth.

Just say you really don't know--because believe me, until you've been there, you really don't.