Interested in your training intensity at 9 hrs a week, did you go off of Power/HR/RPE? Was that weekly average or peak hours? What is your racing background, 9 hours a week for a ~9hr 140.3 is pretty impressive.

Was the Dachshund cheering section the best ever and how disappointed were you not to see her on the next loop?

 What is your background? Do you have an aerobic base in your lifetime?

Nice job. I finished real near you but I trained about six hours a week more. I would love to try a high intensity approach sometime, at least on the swim and bike.

So pissed I did not even contemplate running a 4th loop:)

Getting to bump fists/paws with a dachshund was a highlight.

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Lars Finanger
Odyssey SwimRun

What was your long bike/run? If you bike with power what was your highest TSS workout?

read your earlier post -- hilarious! congrats on coming up with aces on Saturday. i'm sure if i saw your kit, i would remember you FLYING by in the early miles of the bike, never to be seen again:)

it's going back a handful of years now, but definitely used to put in high volume training blocks (20+ hour weeks). raced somewhat competitively as a cyclist so there are "lifetime miles" in the bank or put differently, I've got racing 'experience', aka, have had my fair share of epic meltdowns over the years.

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Lars Finanger
Odyssey SwimRun

longest ride during this training block was 3:15 (1 time). otherwise 1:15-1:30 is what most of my rides were.

longest run was 2:30, by accident. had planned to recon a trail system on mountain bike but one of my disc brake pads popped out and got lost so i opted to run the trails instead. otherwise did a few half-marathons in ~1:20-1:30 range.

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Lars Finanger
Odyssey SwimRun

What was the average weekly accumulated TSS of the Trainer Road workouts you were doing in prep?

Really fascinating! Can you give a skeleton of what your training week looked like?

9 hours is less than a lot of people train for a sprint. Do you race short course still? If so then how does your training change (if at all)?

you hit the nail on the head. this was the same training approach i took leading into my favorite local sprint race CB&I Tri.

i kept a training diary thanks to Polar Flow and will post screen shots from each of the past three months when final report is complete.

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Lars Finanger
Odyssey SwimRun

low of 290, high of 360 HOWEVER i only did one of their prescribed longer aerobic rides. if i had done all of their long rides i would have gone over the 9 hour max cap i had. but given the two TrainerRoad workouts i did were Vo2max intervals and Over/under intervals, it was still quite strenuous.

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Lars Finanger
Odyssey SwimRun

Congrats on a great race. About how often did you swim, bike and run in each of those 9 weeks?

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What I do: http://app.strava.com/athletes/345699

It seems like the swim focus gave you a solid level of fitness in all 3 sports. Did you have any key sets in the pool to know that you were ready? Did you swim yards or meters? What is your typical sendoff base?

Great job Lars.
I am not surprised. Working out 9-12h a week done correctly should make everybody fast.
Looking forward to learn more.

I'm nowhere near that speed but I agree an IM is very manageable with 9-12 hrs of training a week. I'm following the same approach for IMMT and think will be ok

Congrats on the race.

I'm interested to know why you decided to focus 40% of your time swimming when it has the least impact on your overall time. From what I've read it seems common advice is to cut back here first if you are time crunched? Do you just like swimming or was it part of the strategy?

Lars, huge accomplishment - almost unbelievable! What strikes me the most is that no matter how many hours in the bank you have, how talented you are, and how young you are (big thing), you still missed the durability prep that is in theory required... You could have folded, but you didn't! :-)
As for the 5h in the clipped-down position on the bike: I cannot do 3h/4h if I haven't been conditioning my upper back, trapezius, neck, etc! And the saddle, how to stand so long?!?

Anyway, can you please elaborate more on the nature/quality of your runs? # of sessions and time on them? Similar efforts/logic to the indoor bike ones?

Cheers and congrats

Great job! I find this "experiment" hugley interesting, given that yoru alloted training-time is just about all the time I can spare for my IM-training :-) I've done 3 ironmans last two years, and average around 400-450 hrs/year. Around 5-7 hours during the fall/winter, 7-10 hours during late winter/spring, and some weeks over 10 hours in the buildup to an IM (but no crazy-weeks. I usually peak at 12-13 hrs).

Given your background (and experience with higher volume-training) I'd really like your take on:

- Did you do any "blocks" focusing on one of the three sports, and what are your thoughts on crossover-effects? I.e. which one sport gives the best crossover-benefits to the others?

- How far from your assumed "peak" cycling-level did you get with minimal bike-training? And how did you structure said bike training? Mostly High intensity intervals?

- What do you feel was the bigest drawback with the 9-hr approach. I.e. what were you missing the most (I get that just improving weekly hours will give you more fitness, but I'm more specifically thinking of wheteher you missed long runs, long rides, og just more time to put in more quality sessoins)

Hoping for some good imput here - cause I'm just coming out of winter having focused a good bit on running the last 6 months, and I'm thinking of getting started on some more serious bike-training before I give Norseman a go in August! Currently I've been "drifting along" just doing bike for commute every 4-5 weekdays, but seems like a good time now to put in some more focus on the bike! Hw would you (did you!) approch this?

Nice work, Lars! Did you do an FTP test at the beginning of your training? If so, what was the increase by race day?

Congrats! This is awesome and great to see that you did so well with a "realistic" plan. I'm a more "normal" athlete without your pedigree and find it almost impossible to train more than 15 hours (at peak a few weeks a year). I might've hit 20 hours 2x the last 10 years, I just don't think I'm built for a TON of volume, but I'm very consistent year around.

I've done 7 IM's with varying average weekly hours, but mostly 9-12 hours/week for all of them. During those years, I had varying degrees of performance, but at best I did 10:23 in Germany (after 1st kid). I was lucky enough to do Kona on Lottery, but it was more of a family vacation.

I'm signed up for IM Copenhagen in August and trying to do my best time with a growing family (2 kids now). Also, those years I didn't use Training Peaks, PM, HR monitors, etc...I raced on PE as well. Seems to work for me. Though, the last few years I focused more on running a sub 3 hour marathon and just started doing more cycling starting last Summer so a long way to go.

This year, I'm using a PM, TrainerRoad, Training Peaks, etc...Since Jan I've averaged 7 hours per week and this should increase slightly over the next few months. 90% of my rides on indoors on TR and I'm convinced a 2.5-3 hour session with some Sweet Spot is better than an outdoor 4 hour ride. I'd LOVE to get under 10 hours in Copenhagen! :)


Screenshot Overview of my 7 races with average training hours:



Longer version with deeper dive into the specific weeks for each race:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1d46g2hmnNxwWo-SA8aAauV20EV4iy9CN4SBF03Q1ZJ0/edit#slide=id.p37

Congrats, great effort and lots to be learn from the experiment.

How did you schedule your 9hr training week?

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http://www.tri-monkey.co.uk

Excellent race Lars. Very interested to read your write up/summarization of the whole process. I've been in the sport a little less than 20 years and have a 4:25 70.3 PR from several years ago training 15-20 hours a week at the time - so the aerobic base is there. I am back at it with about 12 hours absolute maximum that I can put in due to career pursuits that I'm equally interested in, as well as not totally irritating my wife. I'm trying not to get ahead of myself, but I'm shocked at how much improvement I'm seeing by focusing on high intensity. I keep referring back to Sami Inkinen's write up, as well as some of Kevin Coady's stuff to keep me confident that going fast is possible on less time. Either way, very impressive result and I'm looking forward to hearing more.

you are really good at CHARTS! you made reviewing your training and subsequent race results very easy to decipher!

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Lars Finanger
Odyssey SwimRun

Hey, I think you need to go on the 7.5 hours per week plan and take on Frodo head to head at Roth and do your standard week of training all in a signal outing and see if you guys can push each other to take things sub 7:30. That should also take care of the sandbagging 5.00.xx bike split and move things closer to 4 hours so the two of you can take out Starky's new benchmark.