Misunderstanding of IM Specific Fitness and its Development

The fitness systems or components required for success at the IM distance are:

1. Optimal body composition.  Why train harder or longer when you can gain instant fitness with improved body comp?

2. Improved economy (swim technique, pedaling efficiency and bike fit, running economy). Again, free speed.

3. Endurance, the ability to "go" for a long time. The base for all other fitness systems. 

4. Force, the ability to produce forceful muscle contractions.

5. Muscular Endurance, the ability to sustain these contractions for a long time.  ME = E + F

Most self-coached athletes misunderstand how to develop these fitness components, or place them in the wrong order.  This confusion is extremely common and begins with the typical athlete's definition of success at the IM distance as:

Success = THE Distance + Speed 

THE Distance = 2.4 + 112 + 26.2 = 140.6 miles
Athletes can definitely wrap their heads around those numbers and the idea of 140 miles in a single definitely drives home the point that they will have to do some long training.  They may even buy into the concept of Event Based Volume and understand it would behoove them to swim 1 x 4k, bike 1 x 100-112, and run 2.5 hrs, as separate sessions, at least once before race day.  High volume training, to build the endurance required to move our bodies 140.6 miles in 17 hours.  You can't fake the funk on this one.

Speed = Go Faster. 
How do we do that?  This book, this website, that training partner says faster = Lactate Threshold-based training.  Track, tempo intervals, hammer rides, etc.  "After all, it worked when I was training for Olympic distance."

So to achieve this definition of Success, we must combine high volume and high intensity training, right?  Wrong!

It's not about who goes fastest but rather who slows down the least.

IM training volume + LT-based "get faster" training is sub-optimal.  Notice I didn't say it doesn't work.  This is how I trained myself until about April of 2003 and I was very successful.  But it is extremely difficult for the average, or even above-average, self-coached athlete to manage.  I managed it, but I'm not average.  I'm a geek, live and breath this stuff, and am just barely smart enough to know when to back off.  But I was waayyyyy on the edge for the first 18 months of my IM career.  The fact is that most self-coached athletes think if some is good, then more must be better.  They don't back off when they need to, or they do too much, too hard, all the time.

Why is Distance + LT-based training model suboptimal?

1. The combination of high volume and high intensity carries a high risk of injury.  We can talk all day about sexy, high speed training to get you faster. Great. Do it and get faster.  Want to lose it all?  Get hurt.  90% of IM training success is nothing more than simply showing up every single day.  The other 10% is just details.

2. It's inefficient for a number of reasons, but most importantly because as the athlete gets closer to the race he targets the wrong fitness system.  I'm an elite IM competitor and my avg IM heart rate is 25-30 beats below my LTHR.  Who cares what your pace or power is at LTHR?  How fast are you at this IM heart rate?  It's the difference between being 40k TT strong and 112 mile strong.  Two different fitness systems and two different skill sets.

Therefore, for 97% of the self-coached Ironman athletes in the world, there MUST be an inverse relationship between training volume and training intensity.

Time Investment Manager

Our most precious resource is time.  Time to work, time to train, time with our families and time with ourselves.  There is only so much of it and everyone needs more.  As a self-coached Ironman athlete your primary role is a Time Investment Manager. 

When you begin to plan your training, and as you manage the details going forward, ask yourself two questions:

1. How do I effectively manage the variables of duration, frequency and intensity?  For most working Ironman athletes, training frequency is largely determined by real world demands.  The question then becomes “what is the combination of intensity and training volume appropriate to me?”

2. Given my strengths, weaknesses, and the unique demands of Ironman racing, where are my optimum time investment opportunities for each sport? I’ll discuss these ideas in future installments.

Aerobic Threshold: The Appropriate Intensity for Ironman Training. 
Gordo Byrn has written a great deal on this subject.  You can find his ideas here.  Mine are here.  The key points I communicate to my athletes are:

• The purpose of training at or near aerobic threshold is to expose you to a small to moderate amount of lactate, again, and again, and again.  In other words, the recovery cost of the session is relatively low, supporting frequent exposure to this intensity.
• High frequency, moderate to high volume of exposure to this intensity is good.
• Pace is “Focused” vs Just Riding/Running Along (JRA). You are required to focus a bit to maintain this pace.  The mental focus required for Steady training is critical for Ironman success.
• The combination of volume and intensity is what makes a Steady session difficult, not the volume or intensity alone.  Steady is not ‘hard.’  A 4 hour ride may not be hard.  But most athletes find a 3-4 hour Steady ride quite challenging.  If you don’t, I’ll tell you that your Steady isn’t Steady enough.

Appropriate Training Volume
What volume of training is appropriate for you?  First, realize that training volume contains two recovery costs: physical and mental.  Your ability to pay for the physical cost improves with improved fitness.  Bill’s 5 hour easy ride may be Joe’s epic adventure, from an endurance perspective.  Read Event Based Volume for a more detailed discussion of raw training volume.  I'll cover more details when we discuss weekly and annual scheduling.

But we often overlook the mental cost of training volume. 

• What is your mental perspective on what ‘long’ is and what is the mental cost of these long sessions?  In other words, how big a deal to you is a 2 hour run or 4 hour ride?  How much mental preparation is required before the session and how much mental recovery time do you need after the session?
• How long do you have until your race and do you really need to be training ‘long’ for six months?  Will you go nuts if you do?  Will you be divorced/unemployed?
• What is your training environment?  The mental cost of alone in the basement is quite different from in the sun with your friends.  If you are racing Ironman Florida and are restricted to indoor training, do you need to be going long in the basement in February?  How will the mental cost of that training affect you four months down the road?
• How much mental energy do you have and do you have a strategy to conserve this energy across the entire season?  The nature of your long sessions can either burn you out very quickly or encourage you to be fresh and motivated for the entire season.  It’s largely a function of perspective and effective scheduling. 

Appropriate Combination of Training Volume and Intensity
Given the above, how do you determine the combination of volume and intensity appropriate for you?  Use the concepts in Event Based Volume to suggest raw training volumes for weekday and key training sessions.  For the percentage of this raw volume at Steady, I’ve developed the concept of Repeatability:

• For weekday sessions: could I/would I want to repeat this workout tomorrow if I had to?
• For long/weekend sessions: will this combination of volume and intensity compromise my workouts scheduled for the next 48 hours? 

Allow this combination of volume and intensity to be self-selected, given how you feel that day.  This allows you to manage the mental and physical recovery costs of the session in real time.  Remember, you want to expose yourself to this intensity frequently, first, for a long time, second.  Too much intensity and/or volume will compromise downstream sessions, reducing this exposure.  As you become physically and mentally stronger the percentage of Steady within each session will increase naturally.  A typical Crucible Fitness workout will be “Ride/run for X min at Easy with Self-Selected Steady time.”  How much Steady time?  You determine that on the fly.  Ride how you feel. Before long Steady is just what you do, without even thinking about it.  Let it happen naturally.  See below for possible alternatives to the Self-Selected Steady approach.

Summary
Your primary role as a self-coached athlete is Time Investment Manager, investing your time wisely to yield the highest rate of return.  The first component of this is determining a combination of volume and intensity appropriate for you.  Training at or near Aerobic Threshold is most effective because it is intense enough to encourage adaptation but easy enough to support the relatively high volume training often required for Ironman.  Training volume is highly individual and is a function of physical and mental endurance.  Use the guidance in Event Based Volume to guide your raw volume decisions.  When combining intensity and volume, use the concept of Repeatability: could I/would I want to repeat this workout tomorrow, if I had too?  If I stay the course in this long session will it compromise my downstream training sessions?  The best method is to self-select the amount of Steady time in each workout, managing your recovery cost in real time. 

Next:
Weekly Scheduling

Strategies for managing the mental cost of training volume
Purpose: to keep the athlete mentally and spiritually engage in their training across an entire season, enhancing their ability to apply consistent training volume over time.

• We often get too caught up in training and racing while forgetting that we have created a vehicle to do cool stuff.  Do cool stuff and call it training.  Schedule your “other” training around these cool events.  I’m big on overnight cycling trips, training camps with the boys/girls, etc.  Have fun!!
• Use these events or other breakthrough training sessions to realign your perspective on what ‘long' is, reducing the mental cost of subsequent sessions.  An overdistance is ride is cool.  Do a few of them and 112 becomes just a number on the dial.
• “The training value of misery is over-rated.”  I know I can slam my head into a wall.  Likewise, just because I know I can ride 6 hours by myself doesn’t mean I need to practice it.  “But you’ll be alone on race day.”  No, you won’t.  You’re on a catered training ride with 2000 of your best friends and more motivation in the air than you can stand.  You WILL be mentally engaged during the race. Train with other people and reduce the mental cost of the session, leaving you energized and eager to come back next week.  In other words, have fun and don’t micromanage unimportant details.

Alternatives to Self-Selected Steady Time
Let me first say that the longer the ride or run, the fewer intensity goals you should have for the session.  A 7 hour ride is hard enough without you trying to make it harder by applying intensity goals to the session.  But for more manageable distances that do call for some intensity, sometimes the self-selected route just isn’t enough.  Here are some alternatives to inserting flavors of Steady into your training sessions:

• Clock: at certain points on the clock ride at Steady, Upper Steady, etc.  The remainder of the time is Easy.  This is especially useful for group rides.  For example, you start the ride at 7am, with the first 1 hour as admin/social/easy time.  Then at the top and bottom of each hour everyone rides at their Steady for 20’, then regroups for an easy 10’.  That’s 40’ of Steady time for each 60’ of ride time.  Everyone gets to do their thing and regroup for the trash talk for 20’ each hour. 
• Terrain: use hills or long flats as opportunities to force Steady to Upper Steady time.
• Other: more intense periods based on training partner consent or other demands of the ride.  For example, the long, flat section where you and your partner always wind it out for a few, or the obligation to ride a small group of roadies off your wheel.

Combine these tools with self-selected Steady time to reduce the mental cost of your training sessions.  It's easier to decide to turn up the heat when something or someone makes that decision for you (within reason, of course).

Weekly Scheduling for Ironman Athletes

 Self coached athletes often spend entire weekends poring over spreadsheets, planning every detail of their training for an entire season.  They read books or websites to determine the optimum training sessions to achieve their goals.  However, they often fail when scheduling these workouts within an Ironman training week.  Effective weekly scheduling maximizes our use of available training resources and schedules recovery time within each week, decreasing our risk of injury and overtraining, and increasing our chances of training consistently across the entire season.

These are the key ideas I use to schedule the training of real world Ironman athletes:

Time required to train vs time available to train
Your training schedule and goals must be framed within the limitations of your real world constraints.  Make a very honest assessment of how much training time your life and lifestyle will allow.  Higher goals usually require more training time.  At some point you will be asked to compromise your lifestyle in some manner, if simply training for an Ironman hasn’t already done it for you!  At that point your job as a coach is to reach into your Scheduling Bag of Tricks and figure out ways to make the most efficient use of available training time.

Three questions for each workout:

1. What is the priority of this training session?  You may even assign A, B, and C priorities.  A-priority sessions are usually long bike, long run, and a quality cycling session.  B and C-priority are usually based on individual limiters.  A non-swimmer may assign A or B priority to a technique focused squad session, while a weak runner/strong swimmer may assign B status to most of his runs and C’s to his swims.  The sum of these priorities allows you to set goals for the week and gives you guidance for dropping or shifting workouts when Murphy comes knocking.  For example, given the priorities you’ve assigned to each individual session, the week’s goal of “maintain run frequency of 4-5 runs” may imply:

• Maintain the long run
• Ok to shorten other runs, if needed, but do your best to get in at least X minutes for each session.
• Ok to shorten a bike session, eliminate a swim session, or even add a swim session as active recovery. 

2. Is the scheduled combination of volume and intensity appropriate for my goals?  For weekday sessions this most commonly this means taking a hard look at scheduled intensity.  Cycling session volume is usually a function of session time available.  Running session volume is a function of your running base, ie a 60’ Wednesday run is too long, but 45’ is just right.  However, within each of these sessions it is very easy to schedule the inappropriate intensity, which leads me to my next point.
    
3. What impact will this session have on downstream training sessions?  You must not look at each workout in isolation, but rather within the context of the entire training week.  That killer bike interval session on Tuesday may be a great tool for improving your fitness, but how will it impact your Wednesday and Thursday sessions?  The net is that the Ironman athlete usually can not look to Olympic or even Half Ironman training weeks as a model.  As we’ve discussed before, the intensity of this training is often incompatible with the volume of Ironman training. This is a critical idea that many self-coached athletes miss, simply cramming too much intensity and/or volume too closely together.

Crucible Fitness Suggested Training Week
In Crucible Fitness World, the typical IM week consists of two to four swims, three to four bikes, four to six runs, five to six stretching sessions of 15-20 minutes each, and one to two strength training sessions, if appropriate and time permitting.  Within this week, our key training sessions are the long run, the long bike, and a quality cycling session.  We place these on the calendar first, with 36-48+ hours between each, and schedule other training sessions around them.

Long run: 1.5-2.5 hours, Easy to AeT with self-selected Steady.  For the majority of the season we just run, letting hills bump us into higher heart rate ranges but not forcing it.  As the season progresses we’ll drop the volume and increase the intensity of these runs.  I recommend you run long in the morning, out of the heat.  In fact, I highly recommend you do your most important session of the day in the morning, if possible.  Chances are your boss won’t make you do anything before 7am, but he (and you) have all day to think up a reason to bag your evening session.  Get up early, get it done and forget about it. 

Long bike: 4-6+ hours, Easy to Steady.  Stronger athletes can self-select Upper Steady or even Moderate-Hard.  However, intensity goals decrease as the session volume increases. With very few exceptions, I don’t prescribe brick runs after rides of 5.5-6 hours.  I feel the combined recovery cost is often too great.  I’d rather have the athlete ride for 5-6 hours, rest, recover, and have a quality second long bike or run the next day.

Quality bike: This session is used to accomplish our goals for the training period.  In the early season we may use this session to develop pedaling skills.  We may then progress to workouts targeting Force or lactate threshold power.  These are primarily interval-based and the volume of the session is relatively unimportant. 

AeT: Aerobic Threshold sessions.  The volume of these workouts is highly individual.  Don’t focus on the ‘raw’ volume but rather on the volume at the appropriate intensity.  Tuesday run is usually a PM run, not a brick.

Quality swim and run: again, the purpose of these sessions is to accomplish the goals of the training period.  When I discuss Ironman swimming I'll get into more detail for individual sessions.  But the run, more often than not, is simply about running frequently and consistently.  We don't do much sexy run training, in other words.  More later.

Flex Day: By moving the long run to Thursday we have created the opportunity for a second long bike, a “semi-long” run or another swim session, depending on our goals for the week.  Our key sessions are separated by 48 hours, ideal for recovery time, and we have changed a Thursday ride from a “60-90’alone in the dark before work” session into a “3-5 hour ride with my friends in the sun” session.  Later in the season we’ll use the Flex day to schedule Epic cycling weekends.  You may chose to move your Flex day from Sunday to Saturday.

Day off?  Monday is an active recovery day.  Friday is also a relatively light day.  So is Wednesday for that matter.  I’ve found that by scheduling the training week as a whole and paying more attention to the recovery time between sessions than to the training sessions themselves, we often eliminate the need for a day off.  We increase frequency, particularly on the run.  Having said that, it’s always better to take a day off than to "need” a day off.  If you want to take a day off, go for it.  Just do your best to preserve the integrity of your key sessions, shifting everything else around.