ToBeasy wrote:
You know such "test days" so close to the A race are not a textbook thing.
But look how the top marathoners started to train a couple of years ago and how the times progressed. It's not a short hard/long slow polarized approach anymore. Nowadays the east africans are approaching this with long AND hard sessions. Canova lets his atheltes do very long runs close to marathon pace or long continuous over-under intervals. Sessions like that are crazy hard and sometimes the athletes need muliple easy days to recover afterwards. So they even get away from the three hard days in a week mantra and only run hard again when the body is ready (not when it's time for track tuesday). So in the last preparation period you might have fewer hard sessions but the ones you do are really hard.
Or you can always look at Kipchoge who does a brisk 40km longrun 7 weeks before his marathon.
I've been wondering what happened it triathletes started to approach ironman preparation in the same way. So if they did several very big days in the last two month and use the rest of the days to support that.
The question is does Lionel also only go to 90% effort and save the rest for race day?
(After I thought that I'd left some races in training in the past, I now do my last couple of workouts before big races with the feeling that I could go deeper. I push until it gets hard and then back off. I say to myself that in the race I can push through that and dig very deep but now is not the time for it.)
Anyway it is "Ć¼berinteresting".
I think Lionel uses some verbage that raises some eyebrows - test days - he doesn't train, he practices - and it always sticks out, at least to me, as odd. If he did the exact same workout named race simulation, which many people are doing at this point as far as I can tell per insta, strava etc, it's not as fatalistic sounding as test day sounds, if that makes any sense at all.
Regarding Kipchoge - looks like it was 3 40k runs within 4 weeks, the last of those 10 days out from Berlin in 2017 (in the training log that I have seen that was released). Sure, Eliud is the greatest and obviously not the norm, but knowing that he has a training group seemingly with him all the time I would think that he's not the only one doing this training. I don't believe that
professional triathletes can handle that much work on the run (ITU athletes are seemingly on the rivet of injury most of the time with their speedwork in addition to all the swim and bike work they do).
However, I believe that the best triathletes have this amazing bike durability which allows them to get thru a hard long ride and be fresh enough for the brick run to not take "that much" out for them. Also, Lionel stated last year he did his last long day 11 days out - swam the course - 177k on the bike (4:29) and 15k off it (3:55/k). This is seemingly a pretty standard IM long day for him (he stated an hour less than the previous 10 day block - again 2017), and if he is doing it this time 14 days out, should be able to shed that fatigue better than last year. I am sure that his taper will help him be fresh and ready for the day - while the videos seem to give a
For me, same thing. I am just not able to dig that hard in training leading up to a race, and use that mental strength on race day. Maybe I need to get back to "that place" more in training again, which is probably the case. But I don't have a huge goal like winning the Ironman world championship to push me there ;)
It is uberinteresting for sure - honestly a good portion of the discussion generated from this has been tremendous reading! Also a good amount of other stuff!
DFRU - Detta Family Racing Unit...the kids like it and we all get out and after it...gotta keep the fam involved!