Pre Las Vegas 70.3 Training Report

I posted a report before my KS 70.3 and found it useful to go back to and think about, so I am doing the same again here.  The KS race itself was bedeviled by very tough conditions and a bad swimming incident, so my time wasn't where I wanted it to be, but (other than the swim thing), I had ultimately judged it successful, and I did meet my goal of qualifying for the WTC 70.3 Championships.

In retrospect, ideally, I probably should have taken a little more just plain time off after KS.  This would have shortened my training for LV (bad), but in the way things worked out, I felt pretty spent and slow in most of July.  (In August, things really started coming around better.)  That said, the family took a week's vacation in early July and starting AFTER that would have been too late.  As a result, it's hard to really say I did anything too terribly wrong given the circumstances.

I continued to follow the general EN plan, but made a few adaptations.

• I continued to swim more than called for (with the ACAC masters group) through the end of July. After that, I shortened the swim workouts down to the hour range, but usually had more than 3.  (And I swam on my own, as the club was off for a month.)
• I was unmerciful on myself in maxing out the number of full 2 hour (or even a little longer) runs possible, of course keeping it to 1 per week.  I got to 2 hours faster than my plan called for and stayed there longer.  However, I did not push the speed on them as much.  For these, running the time at a decent pace (no collapsing allowed), no matter the conditions, was the major goal.   I have no proof, but I have a general observation that it feels like I do better with some overdistance training, even if it means sacrificing a little of the "quality". 
• In my Pre-KS report, I noted that I was ok with the threshold running, but that I was really hurting in the MP and HMP running.  Those paces seemed like way too much work compared to how long I should be able to run them.  In July and August, I sacrificed a fair amount of (50%?) of the threshold pace running in favor of longer HMP-MP segments.  This had the predictable affect of making that pace easier to hold; I probably threw away any chance at getting any faster in a 5K sense, but I really thought this was closer to race specific effort, and I wanted to do even a little better running in LV than I had at KS.
• I had faced a bit of an "intensity burnout" earlier in the year.  For this round, whenever that would start to come on for the bike (which is where it usually happens for me), I would still push the watts expected (maybe even a few more), but do it sitting up rather than in aero.  This relieves the quads for me, but let me get the aerobic work in and get in my race pace (~80-85% FTP) work without having devastated legs.  Only time will tell, but I have felt very good about this.

As noted earlier, July was pretty discouraging.  Nothing was ever over target, and often things were a bit shy of where I'd want them to be.  It was also a crazy busy month for the family and at work, and this may have contributed to fatigue, etc.  However, as August matured, I really started feeling more workouts coming together.

I write this with just under a week to go before the race while in the midst of taper.  Total volumes for the weeks starting July 2: 8 (4 vacation days), 10 (2 vacation days), 15, 14, 11.5, 15.5, 15.5, 11.5, 10, (and this is race week).  So I've put in my time.  And the 11.5 and 10 hour taper weeks have been still hard... no just giving into exhaustion and limping into the race.

I normally have pretty wild oscillations of feeling good and lousy during a taper.  This has been considerably more mellow along those lines.  I have not had any workouts recently that just dragged or where the quads just moaned as they often do.  Is this luck or being a little fresher?  Again, I can't prove this, but I think it may be being a little fresher from easing off the bike a touch as described above.

As a result of these modifications, I basically think I gave away my opportunity to get inherently faster during this two month buildup for LV.  However, what I think I got in return was the opportunity to build where I was to a much more solid level.  My testing numbers would cease to be artifacts of a particularly strong effort/day.  I am hoping that the small gains I might have made are banked against a much greater "insurance" against the day being tough.

I should ultimately comment that another rationale for this modification of my KS prep was that the LV race is KNOWN to be one in tough conditions.  I know it's hilly, and I know it's going to be very hot.  I do ok in hilly, but I'm not the greatest in hot.  So building up the foundation has been meant to be a bulwark against the fact that I may be running in 100 degree heat.  I'm not going to be running 6:45 equivalents on the hot hills in all likelihood, so let's get tough for what I am capable of.  Or so I rationalized.

I probably qualified in the bottom quarter of the field.  I have looked at the times from 2011, and that does seem realistic, to the extent that I have to guess what the effect of the heat is on people.  The 50th percentile of the 45-49 age group was very close to 5:10.  I've done 4:48 on a pretty flat course and 5:0x a couple of times on the KS course, but not sub 5:10 in that kind of brutal heat.

Being realistic, I should be pleased if I place in the second quartile (from the bottom) in this race, and that will be my "B" goal.  My "A" goal will be to be in the top half of the field.  That is, I believe, a very significant challenge, without being an utter pipe dream.

Wish me luck.