training for my first half next month, and i’ve heard from 2 triathletes that a half is harder than a full. i’d like to do a full ironman eventually…
when questioned how a half is harder, my friends say that you push the half much harder since it’s a much shorter distance. heck, to me, having done only sprints, a sprint is hard work!!
however, i’d like to hear from hardcore st-ers. is a half ironman tougher than a full ironman?
thanks,
cyclisto
In my experience you, if you are fairly fit, can actually race a half, get into a head to head battle and still pull off a great race. In the IM pacing, nutrition, fitness, luck, brain power and the intangibles all become much more important. Many people will ride the first 40-50k of the full harder then they should and pay for it for the rest of the day. In the half you might be able to get away with it. Same on the run, go too hard in the beginning of the full and you could lose 2-3 min over the last 20k for every min you made up in the first 10k. In the half you might be able to pull it off.
Sprints are hard if you race them from gun to tape, there is no letting up. At least in an Oly and more so in a half you need to be smarter with the pacing.
It’s harder like your friend described, but if he were to race a full all out and race a half all out, I don’t think he’d have the same opinion. I think people think this for the same reason you see people say a full marathon is easier than a half. Their goal was to do well in a half, but just to finish the full. If they were trying to run 2hrs in the full it probably wouldn’t seem as easy.
I don’t know about harder - there are too many aspects of the races to say one is harder than the other for me (mentally hard versus physically hard).
One thing I can say for certain is that I hurt a lot more after a half, and it takes me just as long to recover. I’m pretty certain it’s due to the much faster run pace.
Mentally, I think both are tough - IM because of the time you spend hurting, and 1/2’s because of the intensity of the run.
If you forced me to pick one, I’d say 1/2. However, I’ve only done 5 of each so that’s a pretty small sample size to go from.
“i’d like to hear from hardcore st-ers. is a half ironman tougher than a full ironman?”
In my personal experience, a full IM is much harder than a half IM. It’s the length of the run( 26 miles) in a full IM that really hammers the body.
Fleck
I agree 100%. A full IM is way tougher, even if you are in survival mode. This is mostly because of the marathon looming large. Swim - easy. Bike - not a problem: done lots of hard centuries. Marathons hurt bad no matter how easy, stand along or in an IM, and I’m a runner.
The half can feel more difficult, probably because it can be done at a higher intensity level. But it is nothing compared with the agony of an Ironman distance event.
If you get into distress at the 1/2, you only have just so far left to go on the bike, and the run. But if you do so at an Ironman, well, its just a whole different ball of wax.
At Ironman the pain comes from sheer exhaustion, at the 1/2 it comes from the intensity.
Just like the distance of a sprint allows you to go nearly 100% for the whole thing, making the pain come from lactic acid buildup - the ironman distance pain comes from a different animal - mental and physical exhaustion.
For me - Olympics produce the most “pain” - that 90% effort for 2 + hours absolutely kills me. Ironman though, man, you’re left with your own thoughts about how much you hurt - with the realization of just how much further there is to go.
Nah, 1/2 and full Ironman pain are both painful, but they’re 2 different kinds of pain.
Putting “racing” aside. I can nearly fake my way through a 1/2 IM. Can’t do that for a full IM, its just too long. With 15 years of training in the back pocket, I can fake most races, just not a full IM.
Most people go into an Ironman with a lot of respect, and feeling quite comfortable wtih “just finishing”, with no time goals, or slow time goals. Just read this board and everyone will say don’t have a time goal for your first IM.
But with the 1/2 people start putting more expectations on themselves (especially as you keep racing them). So you now start pushing the limits of intentsity vs. pacing.
I know this is a different beast alltogether, but what about comparing the difficulty of an Ironman compared to the Desoto TTT? I’ve had people tell me that the TTT 3rd day 1/2 kicks their ass way more than most IM’s they have done.
This seems like a really weak question to me. Which is harder? If the question is which is harder to finish, then the answer is obvious, the full IM. It is, after all, twice as far. If the question is really about something else, then this needs to be clarified. “Harder” is kind of vague beyond harder to finish or accomplish, which is how most people evaluate the difficulty of a race. Or, the difficulty with most anything (getting an academic degree, climbing Everest, becoming the CEO of X). For me, it would be “harder” to break 16:30 in a 5k than finish an IM. I would not consider a 5k race harder though.