Pre KS-70.3 Training report
I thought it would be worth writing this training report in advance of my race so that it would have a little bit more credibility. The KS 70.3 is my A race for the first half of the season. I have a goal of a PR on the course and hope to place well. I've been basically following the Endurance Nation plan, with various modifications as dictated by my life and needs. Thanks to the EN coaches and community, and especially Patrick McCrann who has gone out of his way to keep me in check, give me advice, and occasionally calm me down this season.
After last year and my performance at two HIMs and the full IM at WI, i tried to do a critical analysis of how I could get faster. At the IM distance, the answer is simple: I have to execute the run well. I still believe that my WI bike split was responsible but that I underestimated the heat on the run. At the HIM distance, though, I'm executing fairly well. I ran well enough in 2011 that I thought I could actually shave more time from improving my swim than from improving my run. This could come from both the actual minutes saved in the water and limiting the "damage" done by it at the beginning of the bike. I had a somewhat under powered bike at KS and still wonder if that was due to being underprepared at the swim.
Fate dealt me an easy choice when I sustained a fairly serious hamstring injury about Nov 1 2011. This meant I was not going to be able to run seriously until early 2012 anyway, and I focused my efforts over the winter on the bike, just carefully bringing my run along. By mid-February, I maxed out on an FTP test at just barely 4.0 W/kg on the road bike. (My FTP tests are inevitably better indoors than outdoors and better on the road bike than TT bike.) Over that period I took a couple single-weeks easy and another at the transition in mid Feb.
I had been doing enough running that my 5K test pace was actually about where it was at the same time in 2011, but not what it was at my peak in 2011, i.e., around 19:40. But I knew I hadn't worked enough distance to maintain the corresponding paces out to the half marathon distance for sure.
Mid-February: The Run Focus and early outdoor riding
My plan developed so that I would take 8 more weeks working my run and just "holding" the bike before turning in earnest to the HIM prep phase. This would have me still running relatively short and hard through the week of April 9 and give me 8-9 weeks of real HIM prep with the longer rides and runs.
With the very early warm spring, I was able to get outside on the TT bike much earlier than I had anticipated. As expected, the FTP dropped, but I had messed around with my fit, shortening my cranks to 165 mm, and the drop off was less than in 2010 and 2011. I tested out at 247 and this was confirmed by the Critical Power plot in Golden Cheetah.
The biggest challenge I had with the run was bringing more endurance in. I had only basically run threshold (6:30-6:40), VO2 pace, or easy. The biggest challenges were increasing the duration of the threshold intervals and being able to run extended tempo intervals. The bike did seem to hold stable.
The swim
I started swimming with a small masters group in January. Boy, was there room for improvement. My stated goal was to have a swim split at my race of 32:xx of "in the water" time. That was pretty aggressive considering most of my HIM times were 38-39 min. Uggh. But I was going to put in the work and see what happened. I honestly believed that was more realistic than taking 6 minutes off my run.
The swim program was 3 days/week, with 2 1-hour workouts (ca. 3000 yds) and 1 2-hour workout. I got a few lessons from the coaching staff, and there's no question that (a) the lessons helped and (b) I had to get fitter at swimming to improve my stroke too. On weeks that I felt good, I would usually stick in an extra 30-45 minute swim at a lunch time one day for some frequency.
As of this writing (May 20), I can hold steady a 1:30 (100 yds) pace with some work, and can do it easily when pulling. I find that virtually everyone in the pool has an additional fast gear that I do not. But I am the oldest swimmer of the masters (and obviously older than all the kids), and I may have beaten both of my fast twitch muscle fibers out of existence many years ago. I note that, although I am among the slowest swimmers, I can hold near my fastest pace better than most of the swimmers of anywhere near comparable ability (masters or young girls). So I am ok with that.
I am swimming better than I have at any time since I started triathlon.
But it has come at a cost. The swims are hard, and there is nothing I can really do about the time/day that they are. Most of the time, since I moved to my full HIM training, they have been the same day as a long run or a long bike. There simply is no kidding about the fact that you've done a hard 2-hour swim shortly before trying to do a long hard bike ride. This has been less than ideal because it just makes it that much harder (if not impossible) to hit the wattage targets. The only consolation I have taken is that on the few weekends where I have managed to rest/recover better between swim and bike, the bike intervals have been where they should be.
I also observed that as soon as i started doing my long weekend stuff, my swim time progress completely plateaued, and I had a few poor Tuesday morning swims. It took 5 weeks of long rides on the weekends before I was recovered well enough from them by Tuesday morning that I felt really good.
However, again, as I write this, I feel I'm breaking out of the plateau in that 6th week.
Where I stand
Because of the relatively short HIM prep, I gave up the opportunity to race the Bluff Creek Sprint/Oly try on May 20 in favor of getting one last hard weekend of double hard rides. Although it would have been fun, I do not regret it now. With the hard swims and limited number of long ride weekends, I felt that the quality rides this weekend would outweigh any benefits of racing.
The strengths of my position right now are that the swim is good and the bike feels appropriately strong when I am a little rested. I feel like the 6 weeks has been the minimum time I needed to adapt to the long rides and runs.
I am a bit concerned about my run still, however. The threshold running is fine. So is my ability to just grind out a couple of hours of running. But where I have felt inadequate is the ability to run more than about 20 minute segments of sub-7:00 (marathon or half marathon) pace at a time. It just feels like a heck of a lot of work.
As taper begins now, more than any time I can remember, I am hoping for "the magic" on the run. I am not expecting to get faster in an absolute sense, but i am hoping that that the ability to sustain the marathon pace running comes with greater rest.
By this time, three weeks from now, I will know.
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