At Oregon 70.3 this weekend I was lucky enough to pick up one of the qualifier slots for TaupÅ in December. My priority race of the season is Ironman Canada on August 25th, but that means 15 weeks later I’m now racing in TaupÅ. My original plan after IM Canada was to take a three week end-of-season break and then start base training for next year.
But with TaupÅ now on the calendar, I’m wondering if it’s better to either:
Stick to the plan for this season & treat TaupÅ as a B-priority race very very early in my 2025 seasonExtend the season 15 weeks & Treat TaupÅ as an A priority race at the end of a very long 2024 season
I’m registered for IM Ottawa 2025 and already sort of looking towards that for next year, so I’m leaning towards #1. But what would you do?
Just do IM Canada, take 6 weeks of downtime and start a new Taupo focused training block on Oct 15 which is plenty of time if you have fitness from Penticton. You don’t lose much endurance in 6 weeks and 70.3 is really a mega endurance event anyway. Plus unless you are going to contend for the podium, you’re contending for 20th, 40th, 80th, 160th, in which case you are packfill at the race, meaning “don’t get yourself bent out of joint for a peak performance in Taupo”, if you think you have a chance for top 20, then you may have a chance for top 5 (depends on who shows up), in which case you may need to sharpen fitness…pack fill people, we’re there to get trounced by the top people. Don’t worry too much about your ftiness…+/- 3-5 minutes is meaningless in the big picture of life if you are gonna be a pack fill cannon fodder entry
Congrats!
Outside of someone racing a world champs for the podium (which I’ve never been good enough to do at WC level), I think you just train well enough to have a great time and your fitness will carry over just fine.
I’m racing Ironman Panama City Beach 8 weeks before Taupo and it’s also my A race (PCB that is).
My goal in Taupo is basically enjoy the race surrounded by great competitors and be content with a decent sub-5.
Thank you both for the insight. It’s good to hear some external perspective.
My biggest hesitation was there is some small voice telling me that ‘if you’re going to go race the best you should bring your best’, but I think devashis_paul raises a really good point that from a purely strategic perspective it’s not really that valuable to rewrite my season to throw all my weight and attention into a race where my best hope realistically would be top 100. I imagine the sort of people that aim for the WC podium as their A priority race also plan in advance to qualify and spent the effort to build their season around that progression… maybe I’ll get there eventually 🙂
Going to stick with the plan for this season and then starting building out a good base to race TaupÅ comfortably in Dec. Thanks again for the feedback!
Yeah don’t worry about being your best, almost your best, sucky relative to your best because even at the podium level NO ONE cares about the numerical entry beside your name in the results other than yourself. Go enjoy the experience and see you in Taupo. I will literally do a three week build in Nov on the trainer and do 7 days of volume when I get to NZ and see if I can make the top half of the field in my age group and if I am bottom or last that’s fine, I beat all the 55-59s around the world who did not go or can barely make it to the fridge for a can of beer. The competition is actually not with those who are in the race…to a degree we are all peers. In the bigger scope of life the completion is with all the people who can’t even do all this