At present I am 14 weeks away from my main event this year, Ironman Hamburg. The aim of the next few weeks are to start conditioning my body to get as comfortable as possible working at race for prolonged periods of time. This typically involves much higher volume training weeks in both time and distance. I'm currently in Wales for the next six to eight weeks until I head back Cambridge to start to dialing in the very race specific training. So I plan maximize the use of all the facilities I have here on my door step living on the University Campus.
Each training block is divided into three weeks increasing in volume and intensity, low, medium and high. The lowest being made up of about 14 hours of training time and the highest of around 17 hours.
Week 1, low.
Week 2, medium.
Week 3, High.
The principle behind three alternating weeks is that it is progressive but allows time for your body and mind to recovery coming out of a high load training week going into a low load training week. Allowing you the opportunity to absorb the training and to start the new cycle fresh.
Beyond this I have also set dates for some "test" days. Basically very long and very hard sessions to simulate race day conditions without dealing with the entire physical and mental stress of doing the full distance. Or components of them are actually larger than the actual race itself with the aim of making the race less intimidating.
I have three sessions lined up so far. One being a 140 km bike ride at sub race pace, then a further 40 km at race pace, and then a run off the bike made up of 4 x 3 km intervals above race pace effort. The second is much more simple, but far more intimidating, inspired by Lucy Charles (came 2nd at the Ironman world championships last year). It is made up of a 250 km bike ride (70 km more than the actual bike leg of the race itself), followed by 10 km run off the bike. The whole point it making an full ironman triathlon seem easier. The final is quite straight forward, an insanely monotonous sequence of swim set making up 6,000 m in the pool in total, one of Daniela Ryf's swim sessions (3x and current raining women's Ironman World Champion). This last one more of being a mental exercise.
Follow to more training rants and info leading up to Ironman Hamburg. :D