The 'long point' on the curve was the "Race across the U.S.A" where athletes were running 3080mi in 140 days. So, certainly not "regular people"


Here is the chart from the study. You can see that at 50 days, the predicted energy limit is still ~6x BMR which would fit in well with Iron Cowboy - assuming each Ironman is +/-10000 kcal expenditure.



I used to work at the same health club as Wolfgang Dietrich here in Boulder and the chats with him were interesting to say the least! At the time, it blew my mind hearing how the German's trained. From recollection - "800k bike weeks at a heart rate of 120 bpm (in addition to swim/run training!)" was his prescription. Certainly gels with your comments on the 40hr training weeks. That said, I was also working with Gordo at the time who was, himself, rolling 35 hour weeks - week after week, so I guess it wasn't entirely limited to the Germans

The history of volume based training in Germany is strong - coming from Alois Mader's strong influence. Initially with rowers ( https://web.archive.org/...ts_performance4.html) but it really transcended rowing to permeate every endurance sport. And, while I agree that the volume has been 'watered down' to some extent, even among the Germans, there are some Germans who still swear by the benefit of many hours in the saddle at very low intensities. E.g. this guy...


"We are riding for 5 hours at 120W and we don't care because we just make the basic mileage really really slow...to set the base for the season"

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Alan Couzens, M.Sc. (Sports Science)
Exercise Physiologist/Coach
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Alan_Couzens
Web: https://alancouzens.com

Wolfgang Dietrich here in Boulder and, at the time, it blew my mind hearing how the German's trained. From recollection - "800k bike weeks at a heart rate of 120 bpm" was his prescription.//

800k would be an average week for them, and I can tell you for certain, it was not all done at 120 HR. They would often do the Swami's ride/race on Saturdays, and then a biggish group ride on Sunday of the Henshaw loop of about 115, and be racing up the mountains, and occasionally the Wednesday ride/race. And his 5/6 times a week of swimming was pretty intense too, guys like Rob Mackel would not let him near a 120 HR..And then he would do the Tuesday run, which was balls to the wall for him, and one other race type run, along with the Sunday 2 1/2 to 3 hour run.. I would do most swims with them, and about half the bikes and runs, usually the race paced ones.


His biggest week that I can remember was 600 miles of cycling, 5 days swimming 4k meters, and 75 miles running. That has to be close to 50 hours of training. And whatever the calorie cost, they were putting it in, as they only lost a tiny bit of weight in the beginning, and then were stable most of the time..So either on the high side of calorie absorbers, or the very high side of human efficiency, probably both..

Thanks Monty. Those are the sort of crazy details that sound familiar

I will say on the 120bpm side of things that when athletes start doing huge volumes at those low HR's, 'easy' no longer becomes 'easy'. It never ceases to amaze the sort of cardiac efficiency numbers that some of the high volume pro's put up.

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Alan Couzens, M.Sc. (Sports Science)
Exercise Physiologist/Coach
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Alan_Couzens
Web: https://alancouzens.com

Also found this in an old ST interview with Wolfgang...

ST: How did you train? Always hard?

Wolfgang: Never. Well, never is not true. I maybe road once a week hard and ran once a week hard. The rest was all pretty much aerobic base training. I think Mark was starting to do it once he started to realize that he was dying every time he was racing Hawaii. I think he changed his training so it was a lot more base and a lot less hammering. If you want to be a good Ironman athlete you need to do your base. The rules have changed a little bit now, but you have to do your base, no doubt about it.

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Alan Couzens, M.Sc. (Sports Science)
Exercise Physiologist/Coach
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Alan_Couzens
Web: https://alancouzens.com

Alan - Any thoughts on why the ability to absorb calories decreases over time??? I can't think of a good reason why this would be true, but OTOH perhaps that is just "the way it works"???

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

I don't personally think that it's the ability to absorb calories that decreases over time. I think what tends to happen in very well trained athletes is that they become very metabolically efficient and so the basal metabolism slows over time.

Someone commented that they would expect athletes to have a high metabolism but what I've seen would suggest the opposite: Athletes with many, many years of endurance training tend to become very 'thrifty' in spending energy on basal processes, i.e. have lower than average metabolic rates (for the same weight/muscle mass)

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Alan Couzens, M.Sc. (Sports Science)
Exercise Physiologist/Coach
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Alan_Couzens
Web: https://alancouzens.com

Ah, I see, that makes sense. Thanks for the insights!!!

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

Would the guy who is doing 60 full tri’s in 60 days at this moment come close to calorie deficit?

I thought that this was generally accepted to be true. That your body attempts to maintain a consistent state, in this case weight, and as such, when you start working out consistently your BMR will lower to adjust to the new energy demands of the new workout regiment.

Didn't they do some studies on The Biggest Loser contestants and found that most of them ended up putting back on weight even though they didn't go back to their old eating habits (at least not totally) and tried to have some sort of workout routine? The idea was that by doing the 8 hour a day workout regiment (or whatever it was) that the show put them through, their BMR dropped significantly lower and after the show was over, because of their really low BMR, it became near impossible to keep weight off without keeping up that workout routine, which of course, none of them could.

At least that's how I remember reading about it. It's been a while and I could be misremembering things. Also, new research may have come out since that changes the perspective on this.

Almost certainly!

At 9,000-10,000 kcal expenditure for each Ironman (for an average size guy) and an additional 1500-2000 in BMR a day makes for a total expenditure of ~11,000 per day.

With max CHO absorption topping out around 350kcal/hr and max fat and protein absorption far slower than that, even if he was chowing down every waking hour, he'll be battling to absorb much more than 6000-7000 kcal/day over that duration, leading to a deficit of at least 4,000/day! He's going to be catabolizing fat (& some muscle) to keep up with that & it wouldn't be possible without an *extended* anabolic recovery period after that to rebuild the reserves.

Of course, there are ranges to all of these - expenditure and absorption and I would assume he is on the low end of expenditure (efficient) and the high end of absorption but I'd bet the house that he's not going to be able to match expenditure over that duration.

That's really the bottom line qu of the research paper - they would suggest that the max calorie absorption over the long term is ~2.5*BMR. So, for a 2,000kcal BMR, 5,000kcal/day. Much more than that and you're going to be dipping into the reserves.

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Alan Couzens, M.Sc. (Sports Science)
Exercise Physiologist/Coach
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Alan_Couzens
Web: https://alancouzens.com