Elite Base
Everybody wants to get fast, hardly anyone
wants to get fit.
I love that little quote because, for me, it sums up where many of us go wrong with our training.
What follows are my thoughts on elite base training. If you are slower, have less time to train, are more prone to injury, have less that optimal body composition, are running short on sleep… then these thoughts are likely EVEN more applicable to you.
The belief that the optimal training strategy changes given the amount of time that you have available in your week… I don’t see it. What I see is a lot of people trying to convince themselves that their plan will work despite their limitations. It might work, I hope it works, but my experience is that you are placing a cap on your ultimate development when you seek to develop speed at the expense of stamina.
Many don’t fully appreciate the implications of a deep level of fitness – put simply, if you want to be able to race off championship training, then you need to develop championship base. Otherwise, you’ll find that your training simply grinds down your body, your immune system and your desire.
It’s no accident that many highly motivated athletes reach their peak performance in the late spring prior to a ‘sharpening’ process that puts themselves straight into the ground.
I am not saying that a stamina-based training strategy is a superior scientific protocol (I’ll let someone else prove that) – my point is that stamina-based training produces superior results. It is a superior protocol in terms of the quality of the training experience as well as the likelihood of superior race performance.
My issue with the concept of “training fast and racing fast” is that I’ve met less than a handful of people that truly understand the speed/pace that athletes of various abilities are going in a race. Hardly anyone approaches the race from the ground up in terms of the physiological requirements (stamina, fuel, endurance). There are certain ‘speed’ requirements but, to me, these aren’t the constraints. The constraints are more in the mind, the ability to assemble the Elements and the ability to fuel/sustain what’s required.
So what is required?
|
|
Male |
Female |
|
Swim |
1:20 per 100 LCM |
1:30 per 100 LCM |
|
Bike |
275 watts |
200 watts |
|
Run |
4:10 per K |
4:25 per K |
That’s my best guess at what it takes to podium in Kona, these days (that performance won’t get you <8:10 or <9:00 respectively). Because of the Medium of Movement, athletes get little benefit from exceeding these targets, especially due to the risk of not hitting the run target later in the day.
The bike stuff is a bit of ballpark as it would be moved based on conditions; draft marshalling and athlete size. As more athletes race with power, we’ll be able to refine these estimates over time. How many elite programs are based around generating the ability to deliver these performances on race day?
FWIW, that elite female performance would get most under 40 men to Kona – and the secret isn’t Yasso 800s at vVO2 Max!
We’ve got a lot of smart people in our sport so there must be other people that have figured various performance templates – I’ve often wondered why leading coaches and athletes don’t talk about it more.
For each athlete, each set of goals, there will be a similar performance template. Where athletes (and coaches) can get an edge is by understanding the current performance template (where we are today) and building a strategy for consistent progress towards the ultimate performance template, while keeping the athlete motivated and satisfied.
We also need the humility to execute within our performance template on race day – a rare commodity. So often, we have all the tools but manage to beat ourselves before we get a chance to perform.
Many of our plans would benefit from periods of the year that are focused on our long term development. There are often short term costs from implementing strategies that will pay dividends over the longer term. Strategies such as…
How often do we spend our time optimizing the wrong end of our performance scale? Neglecting the training that will enable us to maximize the specific demands of _your_ all-day race (not Peter Reid’s). This is where advisers that have helped others like _you_ are most useful. It’s also where field work complements book smarts.
In an all-day event like Ironman, economy, efficiency and durability will dominate athletic performance. Being able to hold our program, nutrition and bodies together for most of the year is the foundation upon which our training performance rests.
Enough of the background – what might a two year program look like? These are just my thoughts – students of sport will find plenty of ideas from the training approach adopted by Olympic swim coaches, probably the deepest field of triathlon related coaching talent – and – a far more competitive sport than international Ironman racing.
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Rejuvenation and Flexibility – each year “starts” with a
period of down time where the focus is improving overall flexibility and
training is completely unstructured.
This period would last for two weeks plus one week for each year of
consistent training up to a maximum of six weeks. If you are an experienced athlete that raced
in
Year One
December and January – a primary focus on flexibility, strength, balance and (sane) run volume. Back off on the cycling, get the run frequency right up and swim normally. Notwithstanding the higher run volume at the end of this phase, you should be able to see improvements in your overall flexibility and maintenance of flexibility gains through massage and short post-training stretching sessions is straightforward.
Why not run a marathon? I find that athletes with a goal running race do their base training too fast. The goal of this phase is the build durability through volume. If you’ve never been a consistent runner then it’s amazing how broken down one can get from, even, 40-80K per week spread across six days of running (FWIW, I recommend 80-160K per week for elites in a run phase). As you breakdown, you’ll experience runs that feel remarkably similar to when the wheels come off in IM – low HR, just tired, stiff with no pop. You don’t need to push through in terms of pace, you simply need to stick with the volume targets and ensure that you don’t give yourself an overuse injury (though many will come close near the end of this phase).
February – for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, I
think that February is the ideal month for a training vacation. Get yourself to the desert Southwest,
Personally, I believe that cranking the volume up in a sunny surrounding is beneficial for both the body and the mind. However, if you can’t do that then you might as well have a bit of a change (and a challenge) to keep things fresh. February’s always been the toughest month of winter for me.
March/April – We’ve got nearly nine weeks to work with here. Try to achieve three things:
Why so much running? Mainly because it seems to work. The pacing demands of elite IM running are not challenging (in a running sense) but the strength/durability/fuelling issues are quite challenging. These are best addressed through frequency. Given the biomechanical risks and increased recovery time associated with running – it makes sense to distance the run focus periods from when we want to be at our most ‘speedy’ in an Ironman sense.
May/June – These should be the highest volume months in your program. Some tips here:
July – How you play July will depend on the location of your key event for the year. If you are aiming for an event that is more than eight weeks away then you’ll likely benefit from two weeks of unstructured training following the Half Ironman race. If your key race falls in August then a single easy week might work for you.
Specific Preparation
Year One
Now it’s tempting to do a lot of race specific work in preparation for your key event in Year One. However, in thinking about my personal tolerance for specific preparation, and watching other athletes frequently (and unnecessarily self-detonate during their Build Periods). I’ve come to the view that most of us can only “really hit it” one out of every two or three years.
Further, to get the most out of true championship level training, I think that six, or even nine, months of base training isn’t enough. So for year one, I’d limit the specific preparation phase to no more than seven weeks, including a two week freshening period.
Sure you might leave a bit of money on the table in Year One, but I believe that when you come to the end of Year Two, you have a greater chance to achieve an even better performance.
Going a bit further – I repeated “Year One” for two and a half years of continued progress before feeling the need to smack a Specific Preparation period. Following thirty months of base focus, I saw a large increase in performance when I changed my protocol.
Now it’s tempting to say that the increase was waiting for me all along. That might be correct but we do know that the magnitude of my improvement over that three year period was at the very high end of what one could reasonably expect. I see this with many other athletes (but not all) that adopt a consistent stamina driven approach.
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Year Two – still to come. Gotta go run.