http://www.slowtwitch.com/Training/General_Training/An_Ironman_campaign_959.html
Maybe I misread, but you got zero intensity in there. I assume on the rides, when you say easy, this is still IM race pace. I remember talking to Natasha Badmann a few years ago at Kona and she said, “hard hard hard”…I think what she meant by that was doing some intervals to stay sharp, as you would in an Olympic or Half IM taper. I wouldn’t be inclined to go hard on the run, but in the pool or bike, why not…and how much is just enough?
“I assume on the rides, when you say easy, this is still IM race pace.”
during the taper, for this athlete, what i wanted was easy, and easy certainly can be IM pace for a 15 or 20 mile ride. or slower, as suits the athlete. natascha is known for her singularly large work output during her taper, even during IM week. that seems to work for her and i wouldn’t urge her to change, but for THIS athlete, who wanted specific improvement during the bike segment, that plan included much longer, harder rides than that athlete had ever done in any athletic campaign. that was the goal.
to put this in perspective, this program was built for an MOP AG athlete, but included more long, hard rides (when quantified by hours in the saddle) than a lot of pros do. this, because i thought this is what would yield the most improvement for this particular athlete (and, i think, for a lot of AGers who’ve never done rides of this duration during an IM campaign). but when you do these sorts of workouts, you risk going over the edge if you add high-HR into the mix. the idea was to work the athlete hard through 6 and 7 and 8 hr rides (and 2 hr runs), then intersperse periods of recovery. but for THIS athlete, who’d never done this sort of workload, there just wasn’t much room for speedwork, or high HR work.
keep in mind that this athlete swims a lot. swimming is the strong suit, relative to the other events. you’ll note a lot of swim sessions as the rest of this program unfolds (backward). it’s hard for an accomplished swimmer not to do some fairly high HR work in the pool, and, recognizing that, this sucked up most of the high HR work the athlete could absorb. but that was fine with me, because the long mileage, long hours in the saddle, basework was yet to be built in this athlete, and that was the theme of the campaign.
OK, I can understand that. What I was thinking of is that many IM athletes barely average 12-15 hours per week even in their big builds. If one totally unloads training load for 3 weeks, this guy will actually get detrained. My thought is the bigger the training load during actual peak weeks, the more one needs to come down to super compensate. The lesser the training load (be it volume and intensity), the less the athelete needs to come down. I’d be more inclined to just toss the long sessions during the weekend and replace with shorter intensity and keep the mid week stuff similar for the 12-15 hour athlete from 21 to 7 days out. That might bring this person down to the 12-8 hour range in these weeks with some intensity (simply by removing the overdistance bike and run workouts that are normally done).
What are your throughts for this type of athlete?
i think the textbook taper calls for more intensity, shorter workouts in the final week, week and a half, and obviously i didn’t do that with this athlete. but this is a middle-aged racer, and we did no run intensity at all during this campaign. so, i felt it was safer to stick with that during the taper. as a former middle distance runner, i love intensity. but i also think it’s high risk, low reward for IM athletes who don’t come from that background, which is why i’m shy to use it.
Agreed about the run intensity being almost zero value for IM’s for most age groupers…what is more important is overall mileage and actually not slowing down (or not walking) on race day. But what I was more interested in was the lack of swim and bike intensity. I think lots of guys would enter the race getting a bit detrained and feeling somewhat flat if they were already on lower volume (for Ironman) and then you cut down intensity…at this point you have 3 weeks of max rest but limited load?
Right now we are 2 weeks out from IMC and Ironman Louiseville, so I thought we’d see more insight from others in the midst of that taper process.
how much did this athlete improve after following the campaign?