Spend more time with your wife and kids. Don’t take this sport too seriously.

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How does Danny Hart sit down with balls that big?

I can‘t agree more with most advise given to you in this thread, which was however mostly about that you pack too much intensity into your training.
What I have missed a bit is the importance of building up your fat-burning capability. As I (being only a miserable self-coached athlete) have understood, you fuel an IM on the combination of carbohydrate and fat. And if you do not train your fat-burning capability, you‘re also not going to burn a lot of fat in the IM remaining with let‘s say only 85% of the power you could have.

Fat-burning capability is trained in long slow units. You would have to control this with heartrate or power, and you‘ll have to know in which area of the heartrate or power you have to be in your personal case. This could be determined by tests performed by a specialist or by yourself provided you know what you’re doing. Anyway, if you do not do long slow units you‘re never going to get all of your theoretical capabilities. And if you do your long slow units „on feel“ (so not with a hartrate sensor or a powermeter) you‘ will almost certainly go too fast such that your fat-burning system is not trained.

Yes, that's the one! Did you recover in time to run your race and if so, how did it go?

Catching up on a few more replies from yesterday, someone from this thread reached out privately and talked me into joining T26. I'm going to work on making swimming less tiring versus focusing on going much faster. As for burning fat vs carbs, I currently do 1-2 workouts a week making sure I stay in Zone 2. They're boring and almost harder for me to complete than a Z4/Z5 workout but I'm forcing myself to do them. As of now they don't last much longer than 1 hour but as I get closer to race day I plan on making them longer. And last but not least, I'm a husband and father first. I thankfully get to do most of my training when the wife/kids are off to and at school and weekends are when the kiddos nap. Like many others out there, I've been in this sport a few years doing Oly (raced AG Nats a few times), then moved up to 70.3's and now want to take the final leap. Hopefully I don't get addicted and make Kona my next goal :).

Random idea (something I have not done but just thought of)

Go to Last year’s IM race results For your race and go down the list of athletes...look for someone who finished top 5-10%, look them up on Strava...try to find the one with the longest history on Strava...take an hour and write down his / her workouts over the period leading up to the race...

Do that a few times and see if you find a trend

+ reading
+ archives on Slowtwitch

= maybe you can get smarter and faster?

I recovered quickly and did the race (Vancouver Marathon) but hit the wall at mile 13. Didnt prepare for a hilly course and messed up nutrition.
I really liked this plan for STANDALONE marathon - not IM racing. The plan doesnt have any rest period and doesnt take account of the swim/bike/strength.

Listen to the Slowtwitch mafia. Lots of good advice in this thread ;)

Free coaching advice...……..go get a coach.