(wind whooshing)
- [Narrator] Morning Trainiacs.
Do you see that?
We're not in Santa Barbara anymore.
Month one of training to try to qualify
for Ironman Kona is over.
We're starting to head home towards Manitoba
in Canada
and we figured, it would ease me back into snow and cold
by staying here
in Park City.
It's not bad.
It's very pretty.
So once we,
(traffic whooshing)
once we,
once we get in an settled where we're staying,
I wanna walk through what the first month
of specific Ironman Kona qualification prep look like.
It's been the biggest training I've ever done
but easier than expected.
There's some quirks that you can take.
Let's just show you at home.
(upbeat music)
All right, so first off let's talk about how we set the bar
to figuring out what it's gonna take to get to Kona.
So in this case, what I end up doing is I say,
you know, what?
Most races, if I took
my Challenge Roth 9:41 Ironman time
and I took that performance on that course on that day,
and actually turned it into about a 9:15,
that would probably get me in the conversation.
So that's what we start training for
and that means that I need to do a swim somewhere
around 64 minutes or better,
like I did in Challenge Roth.
I need to instead of biking 200 watts,
I need to bike somewhere around 220.
Why we come to that?
Is because I know that I can bike 230 in a half Ironman
so it's possible and we've got an idea of what the speed is
when I'm at 230 watts
and at 220 watts I saved somewhere around 12
to 18 minutes on the Challenge Roth course.
And then the run,
I need to save somewhere around 12 seconds per kilometer
so these are like the guidelines
of the standards that get me to that around 9:15 kinda time.
But that doesn't mean that I take those times
and I just absolutely start smashing myself
to get myself into those times,
to speed myself up.
Good training principles apply and that means
that I have to start with where I'm at right now,
I have to lay a base of foundation training,
and here's how we do that.
The first step in getting ready for a big build
and to make big gains,
whether you're looking at getting to Kona or
you're just looking at improving upon
what you've already done,
is you need to lay a base of low heart rate training.
Plews calls this the difference between baking a cake
and the icing on the cake.
You wouldn't make an entire cake with icing,
but that's what people end up saying to me
when they say things like,
well, in the off-season in the base-building season
there was no intensity, I wasn't being challenged at all,
I need to work hard to get faster.
But that's speed work,
that challenge, that intense stuff,
that's the icing on the cake.
That's what happens at the end
once you've baked a really solid cake.
And the cake in training terms means a big base
of low heart rate fitness.
I'm gonna explain.
Says here, is the first four-week real specific build-up.
And what we've got here is a 17 hour
10 minute average week.
The average training stress score, was an 841.
We wanna try to get this up to about 1,000
in the four, five months before Ironman Cork.
But here's the big thing,
this is what allowed me to end up doing three
of the biggest weeks that I've ever done training.
You can see that the time spent in zone one,
and zone two combined, is almost,
quick math, 88% of the total time that I spent training.
That's the foundation, that's the cake that we're making.
But how does this actually get you faster?
Like when does the heart stuff actually come in?
Well, what you end up doing is,
we've baked this cake, we've built up a big base
of just general fitness,
and then what we do is gradually between now
and Ironman Cork, is we make the percentage of intensity
that 12% right now, a bigger and bigger portion
of a 17
to 20 hour week.
So we've got that big base of fitness,
which is going to allow us to then absorb the intensity.
If you go from nothing to intense,
you might get a fair bit faster
for about four to eight weeks,
but it's gonna lead to burnout,
you're not gonna be able to really absorb it very well,
you're actually not going to improve much
with that intensity but in this case,
what we've got is that nice big base of fitness
and then we start bringing in,
gradually week after week little bits more of intensity.
But even with that said, you don't have to go out
and constantly smash yourself, I didn't.
I did 88% of my training at a low intensity
and like the vast majority of it was pretty easy
but with that said, I wanna show you the progress
that I made over those four weeks.
I wanna show you two workouts that are virtually identical.
I'm going to go to this two hour Ironman stimulation
a 220 watts workout that I did right at the beginning
of this four-week build.
So take a look at this 30 minute section here
at around Ironman pace, 224 watts
and 143 beats a minute.
The next 30 minute section, was 216 watts
and 144 beats a minute.
Remember that.
So we're into the mid 140s and around 220 watts.
Going to that same workout that I've just duplicated here
this past week, to see where I'm at
we've got two-hour ride,
we've got those same two, 30 minute intervals
but the first one, 225 watts
and 131 beats a minute
and the next one, 226 watts
at a 130 beats a minute.
So I'm executing the workout actually better
at a lower heart rate
and all of a sudden
that heart rate of trying to hold 220 watts
for an Ironman race, we've got hope to do it,
because I just did two times 30 minutes
at Ironman pace with a nice low heart rate
that I'm going to need for the race.
Let me show you how this is actually translated into the run
in a similar sort of fashion.
After a two-hour ride, there's here back on January 18th,
there's a 6K run and that is clamped
at my zone two heart rate,
and we wanna see just how fast I can go after a bike,
and in this case I was able to go an average pace
of 5:31 per kilometer for six kilometers.
Let's fast-forward to that same 6K run workout
that I did here
in Santa Barbara.
A month later we're looking at instead of 5:31
we're looking at 5:15 per kilometer,
I'll be at, the heart rate is a little bit higher
but this is even on hilly terrain,
so here I am doing a faster pace,
at a similar heart rate on harder terrain.
So we're starting to see all of this cake.
The foundation of the cake actually building fitness
without even really challenging myself
and bringing in the speed yet.
So that's how you end up training slower to get faster.
Efficiency is the name of the game for an Ironman
and this is how you do it.
Finally, the last thing that I wanna show you here is,
how do you know how much is too much?
Do you go two weeks on?
Three weeks off?
Four weeks on?
One week off?
Do you just keep going until you feel like crap?
Well, the answer to all that is no.
In my case, we wanna basically build up as much as possible
without risking injury,
and how Dr. Dan Plews and I manage that is
through heart rate variabilities.
This here is a chart of my heart rate variability.
If it goes red, that means that I'm really pushing into
not being ready to train, I'm not absorbing training.
If it's green, go for it.
So you can see that all throughout the month,
I stayed green everything is good, everything is good
everything is good,
and we would have kept pushing
but what ended up happening is basically
my body ended up breaking down
and I wasn't
really absorbing a ton
of the workouts, the heart rate was higher
than it needed to be in certain efforts
and it's confirmed by heart rate variability
that I needed rest.
So we could've pushed, and pushed, and pushed,
and kept building that foundation of the cake
but it wouldn't have been conducive
so we use heart rate variability to see
how much of the training I'm absorbing
and then when it gets into that red zone,
all of a sudden we back off,
we rest, pick back up when the body's ready.
So it's about giving that body enough stimulus
to keep getting faster
without going into the pain cave.
Ironman training, yeah, it's gonna fatigue you a little bit
but its shouldn't hurt, it shouldn't risk injury,
it shouldn't risk your health.
And this is how we manage it.
So the moral of the story
to all this, is regardless of where you are,
you start with where you are,
not with where you wanna be.
You have to build a big base of fitness
and that's done with low heart rate training
to a level of hours, whether it's six hours or 10 hours,
or 15 hours or 20 hours,
whatever is possible for you,
in order to end up getting faster,
you have to build that foundation of low heart rate fitness
and then throughout the year,
that proportion of intensity
that you end up just including becomes a bigger
and bigger proportion of the time that you spend.
That's how you end up getting faster year after year
to the point that you stay healthy
and you challenge yourself enough
without going too deep into the hole.
Petey agrees.
(dog growling)
So that's month one of trying to get to Kona this year.
Gonna try to take a crack out of that Ironman Cork
and if you wanna follow along make sure
that you hit the subscribe button below.
I'm gonna try to do a monthly update
with the progress of how the training is going
what the weeks look like,
so that you can get a sense of what it takes
to go from just being an average age-group athlete
with no background in swim, bike, run, any of these,
to trying to get to our sport's pinnacle.
It's what we're all probably shooting for.
Later, Trainiacs, subscribe.