I’m still having a nightmare around nutrition on the bike for IM UK and what to carry and how, and race planning. Moved away from Maurten 320 back to SIS beta fuel 80, but still with the maurten gels.
Head is literally not computing how i can carry the nutrition - i reckon i will be out there easily on the bike for 6hours+ because of the amount of climbing to be done. Looking forward to when 140.6 is over and back to 70.3.
Answers on a post card?
Did we already address why you’re not using the on course nutrition?
I haven’t done the math fpr 6+ hrs but here’s what I usually do:
That being said it is an awful lot of weight to carry around and getting the water target right is not easy. If there is a significant amount of climbing and some technical descents I’d probably look closer into on course nutrition to save weight and not riun bike handling.
What bottle setup do you have? BTS? BTA?
My preference is to carry the sugar in a concentrate and get water on the course.
I’m closer to a 5hr IM biker and target 100g/hr and this is what I’ve done:
Start the bike with a BTA w/ 100 g carb ready to drink and 2xBTS w/ 200 g carb each. BTS bottles are clear with markings at 1/2 volume.
I take a water bottle at nearly every aid station, drink some, top off the front, drink some more, dump some on my head if hot and toss the bottle.
Every hour or so, add carbs from the concentrate to the front. The markings make easier to track how much you’ve had.
Having a gel or two and a bit of solid food from the aid stations can be a good way to mix it up as well, but much harder for me to track mentally.
If it was 6 hours or 7 hours I’d just increase the concentration of the 2 BTS bottles. With hot water, getting 300g of sugar to dissolve in a 750ml bottle isn’t hard.
For 70.3, I do pretty much the same thing, just with a single BTS bottle.
This is perhaps an incredibly silly question……
Are you able to do all of this mixing and transferring while riding??
Before I reach out to support, just curious: for those of you doing full-distance, high-volume, does this in my specialty phase look correct to you?
I’m surprised not so much by the back-to-back 5 hour rides, but also the fact that it moved some of these long rides into weekdays, and the shorter rides into the weekend. Does that seem like something went wonky with my plan, or is that expected?
Yeah, I can do it while riding. Slowly and on the bull horns. Put in sugar water/syrup before you get to the aid station. At the
My BTA bottle is a xlab torpedo w/ a quick fill cap. Just shove in the bottle tip and squeeze. The quick fill cap will slosh and leak a bit, which creates a mess, so it’s saved for races only.
For training, I use the sealed cap and will pull over to the side of the road to refill.
No, that looks super funky. The 2 long rides per week is not typical.
A typical week in HV is 2 workouts during the week (up to 2 hours). One short endurance during the week (Whorl-like) and one long endurance on the weekend.
cheers.
Looks like week 3 into recovery week 4 which explains the shorter rides at the weekend as they are additional.
Week 3 should be threshold, tempo, long endurance, short endurance.
The days they are on are what you selected when setting the plan up though.
I’d ask about your PLs too - you seem to have a really low threshold vs really high endurance.
Week before starting High Volume Long Distance Specialty:
Blimey!
Into week 11 of my plan for Copenhagen in August, 2nd week of build. Week 10 recap:
Total: 11h15 Load 695
Swim: 4.5k 1h21
Bike: 5h40 175km
Run: 4h13 48km
A little bit short on time this weekend due to 3 birthdays but overall hitting some rhythm. FTP up to 340 (lower than when I’m focusing more on the bike ofc, but endurance is there), running easy at 5min/km, swimming easy pace around 1:48/100m.
Took part in Paris Marathon 2nd April but took it relatively easy running alongside my brother to a 3:40ish, legs felt tired for a few days but I was able to settle back in to training immediately. Hoping to increase frequency of easy runs and swims in order to add some more volume without too much stress and improve my swim technique.
Thankfully no injuries so far although I need to improve my stretching/core routine to limit the inevitable aches and muscle tightness which risk developing into dysfunction.
B events:
2nd April - Paris Marathon [DONE]
14th May - Struggle the Dales sportive (108mi/174km with 9340ft/2870m climbing)
28th May - Edinburgh half marathon
17th June - Highland Cross (20 mile mountain run and 30 mile cycle)
July - look for a half distance Tri
A event:
20th August - Copenhagen IronMan
I think that’s pretty typical for the IM plans and IMO, feels a little like a miss w/ AT when you do lots of work on either side of a zone, but the workouts you don’t have secondary WLs assigned to them, you get no progression in that skipped zone.
You might want to jumpstart the threshold workouts w/ a stretch or mild breakthrough workout.
Long bikes on Saturdays, long runs on Sundays—that’s why I was surprised to see five-hour bike rides on a Thursday or Friday. I’m starting specialty next Tuesday, maybe it’ll sort itself out when the phase starts, but if not I’ll ask support.
Yep, I’ve had pretty good consistency with the endurance and tempo rides but my threshold and VO2max PLs have fallen behind in the past couple of weeks.
@Jonathan 70.3 Oceanside data
Holy smokes that’s a lot of training. Highland and highland +2 back to back would have me worried. I did a few weeks where I had 2 long rides but they were separated by a few days. If I did b2b, it would be 3-3.5 hrs each
The first time I’ve seen ocean water as part of the nutrition plan 
Thinking about the transition discussion on the recent podcast.
At Cascais transition 1 was 1km +36m according to my watch: up a ramp out of the water and up a hill into the transition area then up a steep ramp to the bike start.
According to the watch roughly speaking I ran for 5min30 changed for 2min30 ran for 3min.
I haven’t timed my wet suit removal and donning bike gear in years but that seems like a fair amount of time….1min would be what I imagine.
