As you surely have understood by now, most of my knowledge is coming from the Internet. There are quite a lot of interesting things out there, from articles to forums and groups. I can't remember where I read it, but I once saw someone saying that trying somehow confidently to get a #SUB10 required to do at least 4,000 kilometres of bike for a 16-week training block prior to the attempt, so an average of 35 kilometres per day. Based on my personal experience and kilometres rode in training, I can acknowledge it's certainly true. Looking back at my debut in the triathlon, I was not realising how the bike was really the most important thing. Whatever the race distance, you'll always spend half your time on the saddle. That should reflect heavily in your training.

Chasing the #SUB10, being really good on the bike is not an option, and I hope the list of notes you will find below will help you to enter or improve into that category.

Ride alone

Is it because I love being on my own ? This would be surely up for discussion, but I still deeply believe that riding alone is key when it comes to long-distance triathlon success on the bike. Without getting too deep, i can immediately see 3 reasons pushing for this :

1. Pacing your effort. IronMan 70.3 & IronMan 140.6 are non-drafting races where you have to rely on your own pacing effort. When you're riding in a group, your effort is dependant of the effort produced by other riders around you.
2. Drafting. This is linked to the first point, as with drafting there is a good chance you will not be able to produce the effort required in your workout, apart from if you're training with people way better than you are.
3. Mental strength. Probably the most important point at the end of the day. If you aim for a #SUB10 you should be aiming for a 5 hours bike leg, which is okay if you compare it to the time spent by most of the age group field. Still, it will inevitably feel a long, very long time sitting alone and pedaling. You have to be prepared for that challenge and inner journey, and it can't be done while having chit chat with others on your ride.

I discovered biking with my IronMan training, and what a journey it has been learning to ride solo in the backyard of french riviera almost every week-end !

Following these reasons, I can only count one hand the number of rides I did with someone else during that year. Three of them were during a 3-day bike boot camp to build a lot of fatigue over fatigue, one a week after my IronMan Switzerland because there was absolutely nothing at stake apart getting back on the bike, and another one the last week before Challenge Almere-Amsterdam because the job was done and it was a reward to myself.

To give a point of comparison, I'm following a 70.3 triathlete for years, doing around 70% of their ride — especially the long ones — in a group. He's clearly a better cyclist than I am, and is breaking me no question in a 70.3 by at least 10 minutes. But when it comes to the 140.6 distance, he had the edge for only a minute on our respective latest race ! This is, and I'm sure of it, because I learnt to build a world of my own capacity to handle the pacing effort and mental strength needed over the loneliness course of 180 kilometres. Something he hasn't trained enough alone.

Don't forget your MAP — Maximum Aerobic Power

Talking about the FTP — Functional Threshold Power, the maximum power you can sustain for an hour — is a common thing among cyclists, and I surely don't need to get more into it. However, the MAP — Maximum Aerobic Power — is not something I'm hearing a lot about, but it can play a great role in your path to improvement. The MAP is basically your athlete's O2 max on the bike, the power produced at VO2 maximum. It can't be maintained usually for more than a minute at the end of a ramp test, where the power output you produce is required to increase throughout the test. Another interesting data you can obtain from this test is your mean maximal 5 minutes power. The test's intensity usually does a good job forcing you to produce a high 5 minutes power in the last stages of the test. Typically, a rider's best 5 minutes power should be around 90% of his MAP using the ramp test.

That being said, why is it so important to have a look at it ? As I've said over and over, endurance sports are all about oxygen. When you're training the right way, you increase both the amount of oxygen you can use and the amount of power you can produce with that oxygen. The first being the MAP, and underneath that value is your ability to produce sustainable power through FTP. In a picturesque manner, it's like having a car where your MAP would be your maximum horsepower, and your FTP the % of that power you can use on a long-time effort. MAP is an an indicator of the aerobic ceiling and it gives some clues as to whether working on lifting the roof is needed, or whether one can just continue climbing the FTP ladder. To know exactly where you range, you can use a FTP:MAP ratio using your best P20:P6 values on TrainingPeaks. To give some insights on where you rank among others, typically FTP falls in the range of 70-80% of MAP; some of the best athletes out there can even get close to 90% ! So the lower the need to work your FTP, the higher the need to work on your MAP.

The best way to improve in that field is surprisingly done through long rides done at a relatively low intensity, most recent studies say. The thing is that if you ever get injured or ill, the fitness progress made through a good base built up will last longer than short, high-intensity training. Problem is, you need a hell of time to fit in long rides, or enough of them. I couldn't afford it, so I went the higher intensity training way.

Get that high cadence

Cadence has always been a highly disputed topic in the world of cycling. I won't start a thread about it, but to make everybody happy out there, i think there is simply no ideal cadence that works for all cyclists. But what is for sure, there is one that's more efficient when it comes to long-distance triathlon, and it all lies in the upper range.

Spinning or mashing on the pedals, both ways will make your bike move forward. But not with the same muscles. Slow cadence will require the use of your fast-twitching muscles while fast cadence will rely on the slow-twitching muscles. Wait, what did you say, I'm not a doctor ! Me neither, so to avoid some Google session, slow-twitch muscles help enable long-endurance feats such as distance running, while fast-twitch muscles fatigue faster but are used in powerful bursts of movements like sprinting.

My Challenge Almere-Amsterdam bike data is a piece of art to me, and the result of hundreds of hours on the saddle.

As you should be able to relate on your own, on long-distance triathlon you want to avoid as much as possible the use of fast-twitch ones, the most powerful but lowest in endurance. Here comes the choice of a fast-spinning revolution, as at equal power output, a higher cadence requires less muscular force per revolution, therefore relying more on your slow-twitch muscles and cardiovascular system.

So I can safely assure you that high cadence on the bike = more fresh on the run ! Working in the long term to be able to produce a 90 rpm to 95 rpm over the course of a 180 kilometres bike ride is something I tried to aim for over the season. I still fell short on my #SUB10 with an average of 87 rpm, but it still surely already help to reduce my carbohydrate energy consumption.

Play with ERG Mode

One of the biggest problems athletes have when it comes to training is pacing themselves during an interval, and I don't exclude myself from that fact. I often start strong, then lactate gets into my legs and I have to focus on the effort while checking if the power output is right; it's just too much to process mentally. The latest generation of smart trainers are incredible when it comes to solving this problem with features like ERG.

ERG mode is a function to control your power output in a steady way, by forcing you to ride at a given power by adjusting the resistance of the bike trainer, regardless of your cadence or your gearing selection. If you have let's say a 20-minute set to do at 200 watts, all you have is to pedal. Whether it's 70 rpm or 90 rpm, it will deliver a consistent 200 watts power output, allowing you to complete workouts exactly as they are intended. This is a game changer.

Still, I can see two cons against ERG mode :

1. Power is Force x Speed. As the power is adjusting to your cadence, the less that last one is, the higher the resistance gets. This can turn quickly into a nightmare as below 50 rpm it will require from you a lot of strength to get it up again. So make sure your training zones are perfectly set, otherwise it can be completely counter-productive if you can't keep pedaling at a sustainable rpm.
   2. ERG is in some way like having someone in front of you, with you just having to follow their tempo. You don't have to think, you just rely on it. Mentally it's a lot easier, but this leads to the exact same problem as riding in a group. Long-distance triathlon is non drafting, and it's not only about the watts you can save there, it's also about being able to pace your effort on your own. If you don't spend time learning to properly use your gears, and teaching your body to feel the different grade of perceived effort, it will not work the right way on race day.

Use ERG mode for your key intervals session, but not for everything.

Ride inside

The first time I went on a bike was because of a good friend spamming Instagram stories of him riding indoor on something that was sounding like a video game. Most of you already know what I'm talking about : Zwift. I always have been a gamer by heart, and most of my childhood was about spamming the PlayStation. So when I discovered this virtual cycling — and later on running — software allowing you to ride with thousands of people from all over the world straight from your comfy home... oh, boy ! That was exactly in February 2018, I was injured and couldn't run, so I went to a local bike shop that had a Zwift setup ready. I did a 45-minute ride there, and all it took me to order a home trainer and find a used bike was the time needed to get back home. Only later I realised it was maybe that decision to ride indoor that allowed me to make so much fitness improvements in such a short amount of time.

I roughly did 80% of all my yearly rides on the home trainer. That's a total of 10 000 kilometres inside for the whole season, so I'll let you do the maths on how many litres of sweat went on my floor. Getting out of the bed in the morning, taking a shower to get the blood flowing, grabbing an espresso, putting on bib shorts, powering on the home trainer, starting the workout. It took me exactly 30 minutes to proceed with this morning routine, without having to worry about the tyre pressure, outside weather, being too cold, being too hot, dealing with traffic, stopping at traffic lights, repairing a puncture, not being able to push on the pedal because you're downhill having to coast... And the list could go on and on. Riding the trainer is a godsend to any athlete taking their training seriously, looking to be efficient and safe.

Netflix & long ride on Zwift, name a more iconic duo I’ll wait.

When your time is limited by a job and/or a family, it's so patently obvious to make key bike sessions indoor nowadays that I don't understand not doing it. I still rode outside from time to time in the South of France, where my parents are living, and it was every single time a wonderful experience. But to be fair, I knew while doing them outside that I wasn't as effective as I could have been inside. Stopping to take pictures, or to grab some more water, dealing with some traffic... But it was okay because it was more about pedaling and learning to deal with fatigue than raising FTP with key 3x15 minute sessions that shouldn't be interrupted.

Last but not least, you will surely notice over time that riding inside is more difficult than riding outside. One of the main reasons, if not the main, is because of the way your body is moving. As your bike is locked to the home trainer, your upper body movement will be limited due to this. You just can't throw the bike from side to side as you would do outside to shift your weight out of the saddle by taking advantage of gravity. This has a substantial impact on your effort as upper body strength is used outdoors to help provide more power and give the lower body time to recover during hard efforts.

Ride hard

Moving deeply into the Zwift universe, I met a lot of virtual friends, some of them racing a lot on the platform. I was truly amazed because 3 times per week, they were going full ham in a 60-minutes race and were able to repeat the same effort 48 hours later. This is something they wouldn't be able to do on the run, with so many traumas associated with ground contact.

This story is leading to something simple : don't waste your time, ride hard.

I was usually riding 4 times a week, and despite falling on the floor straight after, I was able to produce a second workout the same day after some rest and a good recovery meal. When you take a closer look at my IF over the course of the season, I average a 0.74 IF, which is pretty solid if you consider it includes warm up and cool down.

So how was I dividing my training week on the bike ? It was an immutable process with 2 rides to improve FTP and/or MAP, and 2 rides to improve endurance.

This left me with 5 simple workouts to integrate into my schedule :

1. A sweet spot workout
2. A VO2 workout
3. A tempo workout
4. A 100 minutes to 140 minutes endurance workout
5. A 180 minutes to 210 minutes endurance workout

As being on the bike was a little bit more than half of my training time, I would usually spend 7 hours to 8 hours a week on that discipline. If done right, that's vastly enough to make incredible gains, as I went in just 5 months from an FTP of 211 watts — 3 W/KG to a FTP of 284 watts — 4.12 W/KG !

Ride relatively short

Just before starting my training in September 2018, I had a lunch with a friend of a friend who did an IronMan a few weeks earlier. I had never met him before, but as I have a thirst for knowledge, it was interesting to have his insights. I remember he told me to be ready to tackle a long endurance ride of 5 hours or more on the bike on the Sunday. There is something in the air about that kind of long endurance ride to prepare body & mind for the distance. Well, I may be up for a head-on opposition with many coaches there, but with my experience over a year trying different things, I think those kind of rides are useless for 99% of triathletes. That last one per cent missing being pros and age group athletes aiming for Kona, who are in a completely different universe to others, even those like us chasing #SUB10.

It took me quite a time to understand this, and I had my share of long rides before acknowledging that a long ride of 4 hours or more induced a significant training load and fatigue on my body, eventually impacting too much my training in the following days. It's just not worth it.

Being able to do a bike bootcamp with a friend in my training block was a real game changer to skyrocket my riding abilities !

If you consider your weekly long ride has to be followed by a brick run adding on top TSS, anything between 3 hours and 3h30 will be vastly enough to get the job done. It doesn't mean that you can't from time to time go further, but it should in my opinion happen in these two cases :

• Bike boot camp. From 2 to 3 months away from your race, you can setup a training boot camp dedicated only to bike. At the end of May 2018, so two months before IronMan Switzerland, I went to the South of France with a friend to ride hard over a weekend. We had 3 rides of 250 TSS average each — 300 TSS was my IronMan bike leg target. When we closed out the last one, I knew I would do it on race day without much trouble.
• Peak phase. From 3 weeks to 2 weeks away from your race, it is mandatory I think to get at least one ride equal to your target TSS. For me it was exactly 17 days away from IronMan Switzerland with 6 hours / 305 TSS on the home trainer. Guess it counts double, right ?

For the record, I did slightly different before Challenge Almere-Amsterdam and my #SUB10 attempt as I went for a 2-day bike boot camp in the Alps 3 weeks prior to the race, which was actually at the very beginning of the peak phase. So no need to do another long ride 2 weeks before, with such a short time I was simply aiming to be fresh.

Ride aero, sometimes

When I jumped on my bike at Challenge Almere-Amsterdam to go through the 180 kilometres, and went down on my aero bars, it was the first time I was doing this action since IronMan Switzerland 7 weeks ago. But for the whole ride — completely flat — I never had to sit up because it was not sustainable for my body.

Keeping an aero position is not easy because it's everything but natural to the body, asking a lot of your abs and your back. When I started the training in September 2018, I had incredible difficulties to keep this position for more than 20 minutes. In fact, I had to deal with a reluctant trapezius muscle and it took me over 6 months and a lot of time at the osteopath and at the bike store for fitting to unlock it, and finally be able to keep that position for hours. But from that day, I never spent much time working on it. Some would argue it's a shame because there is aero position and aero position, and I could have worked harder on getting my arms the closest possible from my body to get a lower aerodynamic drag. That's right, my captain, but at some point on my first year of triathlon I had a dozen of things to deal with in order to improve, and so i made the choice to keep a okay position and save improvements for a potential another journey in a few years.

« Aero as fuck » is the mantra.

So don't think that you have to make all your endurance rides in aero position to be successful on race day. If you know you can keep it, and you have a standard road bike, just ride it and take advantage of the beautiful landscapes around.

Aero bike is still everything

This is probably the part of the blog I'm the most uncomfortable with, because it's all about the money you can throw at your bike. Speed is something you can buy in a long-distance triathlon, and I bought some as you saw in the Equipment chapter.

Still, apart if you're born with pedals under your feet, or with a strong prior experience in riding, an aero bike seems to be mandatory to a #SUB10 performance. As a non-drafting race *cough*, up, down, flat or turning, we are always pushing our own way through the wind. Therefore, aerodynamics trumps weight in our sport.

Without breaking the bank, there is still a lot you can do to improve your aero drag and save a lot of seconds by the end of the bike leg :

• Aero helmet — 300 USD. This is probably the cheapest way to increase your general aerodynamics on the bike. A decent aero helmet can help you to easily save 5 watts and around 2 minutes over the course of 180 kilometres according to studies¹How to ruin an aero road helmet (don’t do this!) - Bikeradar. Still, it took me quite a while to get used to the right head position on the bike to not ruin that aero advantage and allow the air to correctly flow through it in order to cool down my head in a decent way. So make sure to take time to ride and practice with it.
• Triathlon suit — 235 USD. I'm writing it down for the record here, but I just can't believe you could go that far on this blog without being equipped with a fitted compression triathlon suit kit. As I don't know where else to write down this information, mine is a custom Whistler model from the Jakroo company.
• Bottles & gels — 175 USD. What the point of spending time getting a fit bike just to come back home and mount on prominent bottles ? Some time trial bikes like the Specialized Shiv have an integrated water tank, but that was not the case for my Argon 18 E119 so I went for X-Lab Torpedo Versa 500 and Elite Chrono CX bottle. On the same line we could add up with a sweet aero food box to avoid having your gels floating around the frame, so take a look for example at the Profile Design one.
• Bike fit — 120 USD. Bike fit is absolutely mandatory to improve your comfort, maximize your efficiency, and avoid injury in the long term. I'm sure that 80 % of the muscular average rider problems could be solved with a bike fit : knee pain, lower back, neck soreness, hip flexibility, lung capacity, etc... The list could be longer. The body is an incredible machine in itself, but you have to treat it as such and don't limit its mechanics. If your bike is not fitted correctly, you will eventually end up sitting upright straight in the middle of the bike leg to shake out stiff or cramping triceps for maybe two or three minutes. Poof... this will cost you so much time that just by doing this you'll have lost the thousands of dollars invested in your high-end aero bike. Please consider doing it as often as you will feel necessary as your position and mechanics can move along the season. I changed my aero position twice with a bike fit session during my season.
• Shaving legs & arms — 13 USD. Your girlfriend / boyfriend is about to hate me big time here. Yikes. There is a good chance you're already shaving your legs, which has been proven in wind tunnels to save up to 4 watts on average. But what about the arms ? This is something I was not even thinking about until I read a serious article about it. I consider that when it comes to free potential marginal gains, none of them should be neglected, and so we should discuss this very particular topic later in the book with more insights.
• Weight — Free. This one may be up to debate as it's heavily reliant on the bike course you pick. The flatter, the less you care about. Until you go on the run, but we will discuss this in the Nutrition and hydration chapter. Still, as a general the rule, the leaner you are to a certain extent, the better.
• Tyre pressure — Free. Like for many topics in this blog, tyre pressure is a science in itself, and I would strongly recommend you do your own research starting with this wonderful article from BestBikeSplit. To keep it simple and to quote them « The greater the friction, the slower you will go. Poor road conditions, lower quality tyres and tubes, rider weight, and speed all contribute to adding friction and thus slow you down. Tyre pressure also plays an important role, but like tyre quality and road conditions, it is baked into a single parameter called co-efficient of rolling resistance — CRR. » You have to try different setup to get the best one fitting you; it could take some time, but it can save you over 2 minutes on an IronMan 140.6 bike leg, so it's worth it !
• Legal drafting — Free. Aie aie aie... I hope will not end up being lynched for this one. IronMan rules are clear when it comes to drafting : « Drafting is not allowed at any time (the draft zone is 12 metres from front wheel to front wheel or 6 bike lengths) » It doesn't mean that straight after that distance, you can't get benefit from the turmoil of the athlete in front of you. Actually I remember a post of Philipp Seipp — coach of Sebastian Kienle — where he argued that despite the 12 metre non-drafting rule, Sebastian was able to ride in “recovery” mode, and call for 20 metres drafting zone at least for the pro athletes.

So when you list all this, we obviously can't make a straight sum — it's not that simple — but we can easily think it's possible to save at least 50 watts (!!!) for a budget of around 800 USD. That's 20 minutes on an IronMan 140.6 bike leg, I will let that sink in there as a conclusion.