Training to 'compete' at a middle-distance race in order to qualify for the world champs is a big prospect, because now you not only need to focus on your strengths and weaknesses and compare them not just against the clock and your ability, but also against your competitors.
Play to your strengths
You also need to start thinking tactfully, choosing a race that plays to your strengths. For many races, looking at previous results will give you an idea of the times needed to win them (they don’t often change much from year to year).
So for example, if an overall time of 4:10hrs usually wins the race, then that’s a good target. Equally, you can look at the individual disciplines and see how the race usually pans out.
Is it a runner’s event or a cyclist’s? Then, you can compare these times to what you believe you can do. This begins to give you training targets or performance milestones to achieve. You can also generalise this and focus more on racing results.
For example, if you looked at three or four different events, you could see that all the qualifying women were running under 1:30hrs off the bike. These more generalised stats also help guide your training targets. You must be a strong biker and swimmer if you can’t do that.
No magic session
This process of understanding your competition and the targets you need to achieve then shapes your training goals. There is no magic training session – sorry. But you must use your knowledge to perform in each discipline.
How you set up your training week or block will ultimately depend on where you need to focus your attention to hit the targets. You may choose to do a swim block, you may need to focus on running form, or perhaps it’s nutrition.
You must then think about the following objectives (in this order):
1. Health. It’s too easy to shift the dial too much on performance and under-perform due to ill health through overtraining, poor recovery and nutrition.
2. Consistency in training. Consistency now will enable you to see your improvements.
3. An active approach to training. Getting a coach is ideal but if that’s not possible you should at least be following a training plan and adjusting it to fit in with how you feel on any given day.
All this means you should be crystal clear on what your sessions add to your race-day performance. The sessions may be similar to ones you’ve done previously, but the motivation or objective outcome of them would be different.
You can’t beat someone who’s having the race of their life, but you can try and be the person others are trying to beat.
Fuelling and pacing session
This session aims to improve your fuelling strategy and race position. After a warm-up, try the following:
Bike
4 x 30mins at sweetspot with 5mins recovery. The focus is to stay in your race position and over-fuel by about 10-20%.
Run
4 x 15mins starting at sweetspot or tempo pace then building; 2mins recovery. Aim to take nutrition on in each 15min block to help adjust to too much gut load.
Cool-down
20-30mins easy spinning, with 5mins recovery. The focus is to stay in your race position and over-fuel by about 10-20%.
Top image credit: Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty Images for Ironman
