Why don’t you just hit the lap button for each section? Then it’s easy to look back and only see the run sections.
Possibly, possibly not. It depends on how sustainable that pace is for you and how long you can maintain it for.
The run/walk strategy works because it can allow you to run faster during those run sections than you ordinarily would without the walk breaks. It’s essentially a mild form of interval session giving yourself a period of recovery before running again. For a good number (the majority?) of IM athletes a run/walk strategy can lead to a faster time than if they were to try to run the whole distance.
Cheers - lap, seems obvious now you say it, unfortunately not a feature of Strava for Apple Watch . It may not be such a problem as I thought though…If my average was 5:45/km including walking, that would be a 4:01 marathon, I should be targeting a 6:02 average for a 4:15 marathon.
On RPE, you’re right it’s intervals - and intervals even at Half Mara pace aren’t going to be an RPE 4 session. Thinking it through, I was trying out race pace in interval form. 2h10 was pretty hard, and pace was dropping off. I could’ve finished the 3h planned session but pace and form would have been affected.
I’ll call this one an RPE6 session and because it’s a relatively flat loop, target a 6:02 average next time.
FWIW I’m doing a long run significantly below my target pace. that helps to keep everything flowing w/o too much damage and I’m fit the next week. as a check I am looking afterwards: aiming HR to be around endurance whereas when I run an open HIM it would be right up at subthreshold/threshold.
so all in all your plan is probably good to go a bit slower
during the winter I did short walk breaks just to keep HR low (as per matt dixon off-season). helped a bunch with keeping the run extremely easy, I never really got into any higher HR zone b/c during the walking the HR drops a lot.
Further to this - I should just basically slack off this week, right? Low intensity/duration rides/workouts as I’m expecting to do a ton of TSS next week. I’ve not done a training camp before so I should approach it conservatively I guess.
I’ve not done training camps either, and I can’t recall the TR advice on training camps but it’s definitely come up on the podcasts before. Iirc you’re either someone who goes hard with the crowd early doors and suffers the rest of the week, or you swallow your ego and pace yourself all week.
I suppose you would/could build TSS towards it…and basically taper this week. Cycling is one thing, but I’d want to have got to 5 or 6h/week swimming before doing 8.
I did have a quick listen to Episode 188 (I think) where the subject came up. Easy week before, recover afterwards, try not to do more than twice your regular TSS (uh oh).
Oh I’m definitely a pacer. Sucks to see your buddies disappearing up the road but blowing up sucks more
Regarding the swimming; I believe we are going to be extremely technique focused in the pool such that the intensity will be low to moderate for much of it. This might end up being mentally exhausting though. Also I find that recovering from a swim set feels easier than the other disciplines (less overlap in muscles used, lower peak and average HR) so I’m feeling optimistic! I’ll come crawling back having changed my tune around Wednesday, probably, so prepare to tell me that you told me so!
I’ve done one, I was shooting for to see 12 hours something on the clock, biked like a twat, can’t remember miles 14-24 on the run and finished 14.32. Are you sure with your conclusion?
Looking to knock 3-4 hours off that time next year.
But seriously, just think about that statement for a second…”worst” Ironman? How many people have you met in your life, and how many of them can swim 2.4 miles, let alone get on a bike afterwards? We all want to be faster, sure, but we all know that getting to the start line is the hardest part, crossing the finish line at all is !
To follow up on the above just wanted to recommend Mike Reilly’s book to y’all (not an ad). Honestly cried like every page and appreciate more that I’ve been called an Ironman (by Mike himself).
Put in 1x3800m effort this morning at 1:51/100 which is okay for me, an 01:10:55 IM swim split would be a race day PB, but what’s particularly pleasing is my HR averaged 134bpm, a genuinely all day kind of effort. 10bpm below my last half, 30bpm below my last full…and a touch faster than both.
Okay, it was a pool swim with pull buoy, but they tend to match my OW efforts within a minute or so.
Did a swim time trial yesterday and a run today to get updated threshold paces. In a bit under two months of training, I’ve managed to boost my CSS from 1:41 to 1:33 (min/100yd) and my threshold run pace from 7:34 to 7:04 (min/mi). Still lots of room to improve but it’s nice to get some fitness back after not working out consistently for the last four years (deployments and long work weeks).
On a side note…I initially started my training with a 70.3 plan I purchased on trainingpeaks because I didn’t realize that TR had runs/swims in their plans. I noticed about a month ago and am now doing a combination of the bikes from TR’s mid-volume half distance base phase and the runs/swims from my trainingpeaks plan. Once that’s over in another month, I’ll move on to using TR’s plans exclusively. The only thing I don’t like is that they base all of their runs/swims off of RPE, which has always felt just a bit too vague for me. So, I put together a bunch of resources (here, here, here, and here) to make this google doc that will let me come up with specific swim/run paces for TR’s RPE recommendations.
The doc (here for you to look at or copy if you want) is based off Matt Fitzgerald’s 80/20 zones (a TR blog states that’s what their RPE zones are based off of) and, given your set of inputs (into the green-shaded cells), will give you swim/bike/run paces for both the 80/20 zones and TR’s RPE zones (red-shaded cells).
. It may not be such a problem as I thought though…If my average was 5:45/km including walking, that would be a 4:01 marathon, I should be targeting a 6:02 average for a 4:15 marathon.
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