Lionel Sanders posted an interesting blog about his training leading up to his 2nd place finish at KONA this year.
That post linked here: https://lsanderstri.com/2017/10/19/kona-2017/
In it he share some charts and stats about his swimming, cycling, and running training totals and averages.
He also included this chart of his combined total weekly training hours starting from early December 2016:
And to finish the blog post off, he throws in a PMC screenshot of his 14-week “Kona Block” leading up to the world championships, which he says peaks out at 182 CTL:
This looked like a cool opportunity to get some insight into the training behind a world-caliber performance, so I dug a bit deeper...
Weekly hours isn't enough information to build a PMC, you also need the intensity so you can calculate training load.
But, with a PMC screenshot I knew I could approximate what kind of training loads he was doing to hit 182 CTL. Couple that with his weekly hours and I could figure out intensity, and get a better picture of his overall training...
WARNING, serious data geekery lies ahead!
To start I took his PMC screenshot (this is a distorted view):
And recreated it on a weekly basis using Bereda (beredatraining.com):
And you can see that it was a pretty good match:
Recreating the CTL progression in Bereda gave me the approximate weekly training loads that Lionel would have had to withstand to get from 110 CTL to 182 CTL in the 14 weeks, shown by the red bars below:
I also read the values of the weekly training hours from his chart and plugged those into the chart too. Having weekly training hours AND training load means Bereda can calculate an intensity, and so we can see that Lionel’s “Kona Block” was done at an overall intensity value of about 0.8.
Here’s a spreadsheet output of the plan from above:
Check out the size of those training loads in the last five weeks!
I know there are a lot of Lionel fans on the forum so I thought I’d share my findings.
If you're interested, I go into a bit more detail in this post: https://www.beredatraining.com/2017/11/19/lionel-sanders-kona-block/
Weekly hours are great, but when I saw that massive 182 CTL I had to know how he got there. Truth is, I think other Ironman athletes go higher than that... Anyone know of another athlete with data like this that I could dive into?
Thanks!
That post linked here: https://lsanderstri.com/2017/10/19/kona-2017/
In it he share some charts and stats about his swimming, cycling, and running training totals and averages.
He also included this chart of his combined total weekly training hours starting from early December 2016:
And to finish the blog post off, he throws in a PMC screenshot of his 14-week “Kona Block” leading up to the world championships, which he says peaks out at 182 CTL:
This looked like a cool opportunity to get some insight into the training behind a world-caliber performance, so I dug a bit deeper...
Weekly hours isn't enough information to build a PMC, you also need the intensity so you can calculate training load.
But, with a PMC screenshot I knew I could approximate what kind of training loads he was doing to hit 182 CTL. Couple that with his weekly hours and I could figure out intensity, and get a better picture of his overall training...
WARNING, serious data geekery lies ahead!
To start I took his PMC screenshot (this is a distorted view):
And recreated it on a weekly basis using Bereda (beredatraining.com):
And you can see that it was a pretty good match:
Recreating the CTL progression in Bereda gave me the approximate weekly training loads that Lionel would have had to withstand to get from 110 CTL to 182 CTL in the 14 weeks, shown by the red bars below:
I also read the values of the weekly training hours from his chart and plugged those into the chart too. Having weekly training hours AND training load means Bereda can calculate an intensity, and so we can see that Lionel’s “Kona Block” was done at an overall intensity value of about 0.8.
Here’s a spreadsheet output of the plan from above:
Check out the size of those training loads in the last five weeks!
I know there are a lot of Lionel fans on the forum so I thought I’d share my findings.
If you're interested, I go into a bit more detail in this post: https://www.beredatraining.com/2017/11/19/lionel-sanders-kona-block/
Weekly hours are great, but when I saw that massive 182 CTL I had to know how he got there. Truth is, I think other Ironman athletes go higher than that... Anyone know of another athlete with data like this that I could dive into?
Thanks!