I’m doing my first 70.3 in Antwerp later this month. To date, the only long race I have done is a 111 in Abu Dhabi but was only 2 months into my training so more about blood and guts than technique. I’m aiming for 40 minute swim, 2hr 40min bike and 1hr 40 min run although will be happy with a time between 5:15 and 5:30. I only started training with a heart rate monitor a couple of months ago andhappy how to get the best out of it through training but what sort of profile should I be looking for during the race?
Your heart rate should never be decreasing. If you’re a huge stud, then you pin your HR at threshold at the beginning of the swim and keep it there until you cross the finish line. And that may still yield an always increasing heart rate since threshold HRs for swim, bike and run aren’t the same.
However, you probably can’t do that. Few can.
I don’t know enough about your particular training, background and abilities to say anything concrete, but if you can have your highest HR of the race during the last 6 miles of the run, you’ll do very well.
One possible strategy:
Swim - moderate to moderately hard until the last few hundred meters when you slow it down because the moment you stand up, your HR will shoot up.
Bike - first third moderate, second third moderately hard, last third maintain second third intensity (it will feel harder than the second third)
Run - first half - moderately hard, second half - pour it on and hold on
To make it concrete, my threshold bike HR is 175 and my threshold run HR is 183. My best race ever was Vineman HIM last year. My swim HR average was 150, bike 156, and run 164. My HR was its highest the last 6 miles. Here is what the graph looked like:
The art of racing is knowing how to scale your intensity factor (effort as a percent of threshold). My current belief is that unless your young and dumb or supremely talented and lucky, it takes years to be able push a high percentage of threshold the whole race. I think I’m still pretty far away from doing that.
My advice to you is to go easier than you think you should the first half of the bike and the start of the run. Make a plan so that you can increase your HR as the race progresses. Feel good about the plan and really stick to it!
My advice is worth what you’re paying for it, but it has worked for me!
Think what Jeff told you is some pretty solid advice to go by. No your limits and dont blow up I think your better off if you err a bit on the low side of HR threshold.
Seriously, if you’re basing off of HR, a lot of the reading on the site I have seen has suggested (and you can search for it as well) is that for HIM you do 80-85% of threshold, Olympic 90-95% of threshold and IM 70-75% of threshold.
Pretty much what I went with today, which you can see in my RR.
Bike was done at 80-85% of threshold from a power perspective and run was actually up in the 90-95% of threshold range, which made the second 1/2 quite hard.
Swim, I can’t say as I didn’t have the HRM working for that.
Overall time was pretty much what the OP was looking for + 5 minutes or so in each area but finished in the target range with a 5:25.
Thanks all for your input. I’m not going to base the race on HR but do want to keep an eye on it and hopefully avoid blowing up or just feeling dreadful and monitoring HR seems the best way to manage this.
Same here. While its true that many phisiological and environmental factors may alter HR it is still a great idea to have a target HR for different stages of your race. For me, it will be a sanity check at a point where Im not always thinking clearly =)
