With this chapter, we're now entering into the details of what you came for. If you went through all the past chapters, you can easily guess that what's coming will be very dense. And you're right. There are so many guidelines that ruled my training routine that I clearly don't know where to start while writing these lines. In this chapter I will give general rules that have dictated my training, then I will jump off to my specific routine for each discipline in the next chapters.
Thinking about it, I can't see any other sport with the level of commitment required by an IronMan to arrive on race day fit, healthy, with 10 hours or under fresh legs. For example ultra-trail must be demanding in terms of training when you go to perform, but you will still be working on the same sport. When it comes down to 3 disciplines, it's incredibly difficult to make progress in one without compromising the two others. To understand why, you need to understand these two things :
- Aerobic & endurance can benefit from cross-training, because improvements are coming mostly from your respiratory system. There is a great transfer between each discipline.
- Anaerobic & threshold improvements can't benefit from cross-training, because improvements are coming directly from the different muscles groups used. There is almost none — if none — transfer between each discipline.
So to be successful, you need at some point to go ham in one discipline to escape any plateau you may be sitting on. Focusing on one sport means over generating fatigue, and therefore impacting your training in other disciplines. If you're on the ultra-endurance game for long, you can afford to have a middle-ranged cursor. But with only a year, and such a high-end goal, I didn't have much choice than to try to skyrocket my overall fitness on a rolling ham way between each discipline.
I still have a brain — part time I must admit — and tried to keep up with some important rules to avoid plateau and/or injuries, that I'm sharing below.
I can’t see any other sport with the level of commitment required by an IronMan to arrive on race day fit, healthy, with 10 hours or under fresh legs.
Don't take yourself for Lionel Sanders
If you have a real passion for triathlon — and you better have one regarding the mission you want to achieve — there is a good chance you watched at least once some video of Lionel Sanders on social media platforms. We may have all dreamed to live the life of professional triathletes, with the ability to train 30 hours a week with almost nothing else to worry about. Yet the vast majority of us are poor age groupers with a shitload of daily life stuff to deal with, from a full-time job to wife and kids. Dreaming big is important, but staying connected with the reality is even more important. Even though I'm single, I found it already pretty hard to deal with 15+ hours of weekly training with my full-time job. Last but not least, I understood that 15 hours or so a week used the right way were vastly enough to make the improvements needed toward my goals. So year-round I ended up with 14h50 of weekly average training, including rest & taper weeks. That means obviously that some weeks had a heavier training load, but it was usually when I could have some days off or holidays allowing me to push the throttle. Quality over volume will always pay more than volume over quality.
Going easy when you should, going ham when you need
Before embracing triathlon and treating myself as a dedicated age group athlete, I was basically that kind of guy just trying to impress with his numbers on Strava. Then I got injured. Again. And again. Until I realised there is absolutely no prize for being the local in-training world champion. « Spectacular achievements are always preceded by unspectacular preparation » commented Roger Staubach one day, a Hall of Fame quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys. That was the baseline of my training philosophy : knowing you can go fast doesn't give you the right to go fast every time. That doesn't mean I went out for gentle walks either. I just learnt to push the throttle when it was required, and being only process oriented.
To deliver on race day require to push your boundaries, sometimes close to break them, during your training block.
The path leading to a perfectly well executed #SUB10 performance implies being consistent — we will talk about this in a few lines — but at the same time you must refuse to have the same training intensity and volume year-round. Your body needs to go through a different kind of stimulus to make improvements, and a broader picture that is called “periodizing”. I don't want to get too much into details about it here because it's an art in itself and a lot of people are way better than me in that domain. But just to give a short context, it's commonly acknowledged that there are four distinct phases in the periodizing process :
- Base — I like the definition of legendary coach Joe Friel regarding it : « The Base period is the time of year when you train to train, not train to race. » Depending on your fitness level and athletic background, this period can be more or less long to get the body used to the greater stresses that will follow. It's usually during that period that strength training can play a great part, for example. I won't talk anymore about the base phase in this blog, so may Google help you.
- Build — You should most likely spend most of your season in the build phase. It's usually 8 to 12 weeks long depending on your race, but for myself I kept it the Cody Beals IronMan 70.3 way1Cody Beals - How do pro triathletes train ? My weekly schedule : part II with a 4 week build block that I could repeat over time. As its name implies, this phase is all about ramping up your fitness through strength-building sessions, sub-threshold work, muscular endurance, and brick sessions. « I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. » asWinston Churchill would say.
- Peak — This one is probably my favourite one, because it's when you can see all the pieces of the fitness puzzle are coming off together as you planned weeks ago. Peak phase is like the final rehearsal of a show, lasting for 2 weeks usually 3 weeks before your race. During that fine-tuning period should take place your longest race-pace efforts, including at least for your #SUB10 attempt a 30+ kilometre run and a 6+ hour ride over a few days timeframe. If you can't sustain the race intensity needed at that point, in my opinion there is absolutely no chance you can make it on race day.
- Taper — A good tapering is a science in itself, and is something highly individual. That 10 day to 7 day period leading to the race is a dramatic reduction in volume to get rid of the past weeks fatigue while maintaining your race intensities to keep your fitness at the level required. If there is anything working only through personal experience here, it would be tapering. I can remember breaking up on the run of my first IronMan 70.3 because of a bad tapering, and it took me quite a while to understand that I couldn't just impersonate what others were doing in this phase.
Looking back, I can assure you that over these 380 days, I had the #SUB10 fitness & freshness level required for less than a week. This is because I understood that only race day matters in the end, all the other days were just about competing against myself, about being better than I was the day before.
Don't get injured, don't be sick
« That's something more easier to say than to do » is probably what 90% of you will say when reading that title. You would be right. I quite frankly never heard the story of a triathlete playing on their high-end fitness line without any setbacks. If you want to be part of the #SUB10 club, you will most likely hit at least one roadblock through your season, and it will be your job to figure out a way around. For myself, if you read the My journey chapter you may have seen that I avoided any sickness preventing me to train for the whole season. To make it happen I took extra precaution for absolutely everything : I went alcohol free for everyday of training apart from the night before my off day, I tried to get my 8 hours of sleep most of the time, I wore tons of warm clothes whenever the temperature was going low, I ate recovery meals straight after long / intensive efforts, etc... I could be that lucky guy, but I think it was not a mere coincidence. Yet I managed to burn myself to the second-degree while cooking pasta, a stupid household accident that was close to ruining my goal, and a good example of things that can happen even though you try to be the most careful person in the world. When it happened to me, it actually triggered one thing even more : perseverance. Perseverance happens when failure is not an option. I think I was even more positive and patient than when I was healthy, because I had an incredible will to prove nothing could stop me. Apart from TrainingPeaks. As I said in the Data chapter it's a wonderful fitness tracker, but it means also showing how fast you can lose your fitness in that kind of moment. So pro tip here : avoid TrainingPeaks in case of emergency.
Split your training the right way
This may sound obvious, but your training time between each discipline should match the predicted race time of each one. If you think about spending let's say an equal time or so in the pool and on the run for your training routine, you're doing it wrong. Biking must be by far your number one, followed by the run and the swim. If you take a look at my fitness summary from TrainingPeaks for my whole season, it's pretty much matching time repartition of my #SUB10 :
- Bike training time : 54% / Bike race time : 51%
- Run training time : 26.6% / Run race time : 34%
- Swim training time : 12% / Swim race time : 12%
As you can see my training repartition during the season was pretty much matching the time sharing expected for each sport on an IronMan ! Rest is core strengthening.
Swimming is 100% equal while biking has a slight difference, still being 38% more than swimming and running combined ! I can't stress how much bike is the key to an IronMan, but we will have time to discuss this in the dedicated chapter. The biggest difference is on the run, with a solid 10% gap and I could explain it for two reasons :
- Running is a traumatic sport with direct impact on the ground for your various joints, asking for way more recovery. That's why I basically tried to limit it to key workouts.
- I'm coming from running, so I didn't need as much work as for bike and swim. I could rely on my base foundation in that sport.
Win the day
Once I understood I could plan and foresee my fitness X days in the future on TrainingPeaks, I spent way too much time scheduling my training sometimes weeks ahead. Only a few weeks later I had to face the harsh reality : it was plain pointless. I realised I was too much of a nerd, and watching my screen for hours trying out to figure out workouts happening in 3 weeks was just distracting me from the « keep it simple and straightforward » mantra. This is the kind of problem you have when you are your own coach; you can forget pretty fast that the most important thing in training is to win the day. Playing in the present tense is the real deal, to always focus on making the best of your today workouts, not on the end result of the training block. I had to wait until the last 3 months of my season to really free myself and not worry anymore about the final outcome of the training block and the race until it's time to so. Don't make the same mistake.
The most important thing in training is to win the day.
Play with the numbers
An IronMan 140.6 is all about being able to deal with fatigue, and that must be reflected in your training. You may be a SUB 2:50:00 marathoner, but if you can't stay fresh with a 300 TSS bike ride of 180 kilometres in your legs prior to the run, I can sign already that you're entitled to a 4h30 marathon walk. Building fatigue over fatigue to get your body ready for a #SUB10 performance is where TSS & IF come in action as you can define the amount of training load you want to put into a week regardless of the time invested.
If we look closely at my TrainingPeaks data throughout the season, we get these numbers, which also account for rest & taper weeks :
- Average of 838 TSS per week
- Average of 0.76 IF per week
My ability to deal with more weekly TSS increased throughout the season, but my IF remains the same all way long. This is utterly important to stick to that mere principle.
This is very interesting because if you look closely at the charts image, my TSS range was wide from week to week, but my IF almost always stayed the same. What does it mean ? That, again, I went for quality over quantity. I understood that my body couldn't afford to stay year-round in some 1,000+ TSS weekly zone, but that wasn't a reason for going easy either. With the underlying assumption that intensity is inversely related to time, I preferred to go for intensity over volume when it came to “light” weeks. As a general rule, with a limited training time of 15 hours to 18 hours a week, I wasn't a big fan of recovery workout. I think that any workout below 0.75 of IF is pointless in order to make improvements, whatever the discipline. Obviously, it was easier to go for a 0.93 IF workout on the bike rather than on the run, but yeah, 0.75 IF was the bare minimum I was aiming for except with a long endurance bike session on the weekend or a soft run from time to time.
So what's the good target to aim for in #SUB10 performance ? It's difficult to say because I was my own guinea pig and I can't rely on anyone else, but I'd not be far from the truth with this :
- Between 900 and 950 TSS weekly
- An average of 150 TSS per day — Assuming you're taking a weekly day off
To help you define what should be good for you, keep in mind that for the high-end age group athletes volume is usually 40% of the fitness form while intensity is producing the 60% left.
Now it's up to you to play with the numbers to make the most out of the time you're allowing yourself to train. You can for sure copy / paste workouts you will find on this blog, or any training plan bought / found on the internet, but it will never be as efficient as building your own, either yourself or with a coach, really adapting to your need. Whatever way you choose to go, you know you're doing it right if you used stress-based periodization, acknowledging that the closer your race gets, the more your key workouts are a simulation of the race conditions either by TSS or IF.
Over the year I managed to deliver rock steady volume to keep that consistency alive whatever.
We will go more deeply into the details with each discipline in its dedicated chapter.
Be consistent
If you don't go out and miss a planned workout, you scale back. You can have the reason you want, good or bad; that's the terrible truth. « We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. » as Aristotle said. Consistency is the hidden face of the training iceberg. No matter how unpredictable life can be from time to time, from responsibilities to illness, you must become a creature of habit. If for any reason your time is unfortunately limited, shorten the warm-up or the cool down, remove one or two repetitions, but train. If you're dealing with a cold and can't cope with high cardio, go to the gym and make the best out of a core strength session. If you really can't make it on a particular day and this is a key workout, then switch with another day to make sure you don't miss it.
95% of the time, you have the solution in your hands. You don't have any excuse, because unlike genetics or talent, you have direct control over it. If you can't accept to be that training workaholic and understand that consistency is key, well... maybe aiming for a #SUB10 result is not for you, yet.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
— Aristotle
Cherish your rest day
There is a lot of debate around the necessity to take a weekly rest day or not. I've looked a lot through professional athletes training — I had to make a lot of assumptions also as most of the data are kept secret — and I'd say none of them has the same definition of a rest day. Some are completely off, while for others 2,500 metres swim is like being on vacation. It's highly individual there, but you have to keep in mind that it's a full-time job for them, so they can also introduce nap here and there during the training week. I didn't have that chance, so it was utterly important to reward myself with a weekly rest day for 3 reasons :
Cheat meal was at some point my reason for living in the midst of winter.
- To avoid mental boom, by far the most important reason for me. Sometimes when I was in the middle of a rough week, the only thing I was relying on was the rest day coming in a day or two.
- To let my body adapt to the past week of training. Improvements are made from the stress and stimulus you're imposing on your body, and at some point giving it just 24 hours of time could greatly help.
- To get my cheat meal and refuel my glycogen stores. I will talk about my diet in the nutrition chapter, but once a week I allowed myself a good and unhealthy junk food or such meal. On the other hand I was allowing my body to get some glycogen — body's high-performance fuel2NCBI - Fundamentals of glycogen metabolism for coaches and athletes to keep it simple — produced without having to be always in just-in-time mode.
In my case it doesn't mean being completely off as I used that day for a one-hour core strength session. It was a 32 TSS session, so very light in terms of demand, and allowed me to take advantage of the day versus my very tight schedule on all the other days. This rest day was always setup on Friday, because my Saturday was made for the long endurance bike ride followed by a brick session — usually, a 200 to 250 TSS day — and fresh legs were really needed there to not fail.
When you will jump to the Workouts chapter, you will most likely notice that I just got one day of rest for 35 days between IronMan Switzerland and Challenge Almere-Amsterdam. This is a risk I took deliberately as my season was “done” already and had nothing to lose. Even though I avoided any injury or sickness for that time, this is plain stupid and I would not recommend it to anybody.