The Real Work Starts Now

It's December and suddenly we're into the final 3 months of training before I-Day.  Given that the final 3-4 weeks is spent tapering, it means that I have 2 months of real work to be as prepared as I can be to tackle the ironman challenge.

And real work it will be.

Over winter I have been given a variety of training programmes that have focused on the different disciplines of ironman.  There have been the long group bike rides.  There has been swim camp and the swim drills to get the technique going.  And I have maintained some running and completed my favourite running events to maintain that discipline as well.

The last couple of weeks, then, have been relatively relaxed as far as training goes and, as an example, this was my schedule for the last week of November:

Monday: 1000m swim
Tuesday: rest day
Wednesday: 1 hour bike
Thursday: 1 hour run
Friday: rest day
Saturday: 30min swim, 1 hour bike, 45min run
Sunday: 2 hour bike

My fitness/strength/endurance must have improved as that type of schedule seemed pretty relaxed.  What I hadn't quite realised, however, was that it would be the calm before the storm.  Coach Dave had big plans and he was saving it for December and January.

When I got my training programme covering the period up to 6 February (when the tapering begins) there was one word to sum it up.

Yikes.

My comment on Facebook summed it up pretty well also: "...makes my training up to now look like a walk in the park.  The real work starts now!"

Basically we're into the serious stuff now and this is where every session becomes critical to my eventual success in Taupo.  I can expect to get tired and so need to focus on making sure I get enough sleep and recovery time.  I need to eat well.  And I need to focus on completing one day at a time - otherwise I'll get overwhelmed with the enormity of it all.

As a comparison, then, here is my program for the week immediately after Christmas:

Monday: rest day
Tuesday: 3200m swim + 40min run
Wednesday: 3hr bike + 40min run
Thursday: 90min run
Friday: 3hr bike + 30min run
Saturday: 70min open water swim + 2 hr bike + 60min run
Sunday: 4hr bike + 40min run

The time allowed for all this also represents a significant increase and to give an idea of the scale of the training load over the next couple of months, here is a weekly summary of the hours I'll be dedicating to training:

Week beginning	Swim	Bike	Run	Total
29-Nov	1:20	8:30	1:35	11:25
6-Dec	2:10	9:00	3:40	14:50
13-Dec	2:30	10:00	0:50	13:20
20-Dec	1:30	7:00	1:40	10:10
27-Dec	2:50	12:00	5:00	19:50
3-Jan	3:05	13:00	3:30	19:35
10-Jan	3:00	4:00	1:10	8:10
17-Jan	3:00	8:00	2:45	13:45
24-Jan	3:10	12:00	4:50	20:00
31-Jan	3:40	12:00	4:00	19:40

Ironman is definitely my part time job in the short term ... albeit unpaid!