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Ok, it’s been a while since I updated things here. 8 weeks to be precise. Some weeks have been good, some mediocre, and some great! I find myself very pumped/stoked/(whatever the kids say nowadays) lately. Time to put that energy into a keyboard…

A few things have changed since two months ago. I’ve joined a team and now have a coach and training partners! All have been great. It’s been the little extra kick I needed! And the results have followed. I’ve been setting PRs on the bike and run lately during training. My swimming is so far beyond previous results that PRs are kind of irrelevant at this point. 

It’s now only 11 weeks until IM Boulder and 2 weeks to 70.3 Galveston. Just writing that makes me think forward to how much more improvement there is to come… I’ve ridden the IMB course several times and I’m excited for race day. It looks to be a really fast course (for Boulder). I can’t wait for Galveston! It’s been 21 weeks of training without any true race tests. The competitive side of me is itching for a measuring stick. But I got a little bit of that measuring stick today. 

I had a big training day yesterday. 56ish miles on the bike at IM race pace, then a 10k at faster than race pace (I think; stay tuned). But today, I got talked into an actual race. Four mile run. Not your typical distance, but there were beer and burritos at the finish line, so I was obviously game. If you’ve read this far, you probably already know my weaknesses (e.g. beer, burritos).

I had a great run last week at about 8:30 per mile fro 5+ miles. So I toed the line in the 8-minute per mile corral. There were only about 30 people in front of me, so I felt like I was suffering from a bad case of optimism. I’m pretty sure my body fat percentage was the sum total of everyone in front of me.

I looked at my watch after the first quarter mile and my average pace was 7:30. Pump the brakes time. Not sustainable. I settled in and hit 8:00 for the first mile. Still way faster than I typically run. But the first rule of run club is that you must negative split run club. 

Second mile 7:47. OK. A bit ambitious, perhaps. How am I going to beat that twice?? But I could still breathe easily. I’ve been running by feel for the last several months. I used to run by heart rate, but I find feel (RPE essentially) to be great now that I have enough experience to know what various efforts feel like.

Third mile. Oh shit. At 2.5 miles I got a serious knot in my right calf. Not a cramp per se, just a knot. Kinda weird. Let’s figure this out. What if I switch to a heel-ish strike and limp a bit? Yep, that works. Must beat 7:47. A slight downhill got me to 7:44. Knot mostly worked out and I’m back to a balanced stride, though a bit more heel-strike than normal.

Fourth mile. I think a lot of runners were trained/pacing for a 5k (3.1 miles). I kept my pace and people kept falling back to me. When I passed one person, I looked to the next person in front of me. That’s when my pace started to pick up a bit. Calf knot be damned. I knew where the finish line was and I gradually tightened the screw as I approached it. Slight increase in speed. Maintain. OK, slight increase. Maintain. Ramp up a bit. Hold on. One last increase. I kept passing the few people in front of me. Notice I said people; I ended up getting beat by one dog. But they don’t drug test dogs and I have my suspicions… Just sayin’. 

Final result: 5k PR and 24th of 370. That’s the 93rd percentile for the mathletes out there. One of my best results in any race ever!

That was a great capstone for my training SO FAR! Can’t wait until Galveston to put all three disciplines together. Then it’s another 9 weeks to Boulder. Anticipation……….(need more ellipses)……….

Week 14: 4500yd/1h25m swimming; 43.4mi/2h25m cycling; 5.3mi/0h46m running; 2700 calories

Week 15: 2000yd/0h38m swimming; 118mi/6h55m cycling; 19.1mi/2h58m running; 5600 calories

Week 16: 5400yd/1h43m swimming; 86.3mi/5h00m cycling; 11.5mi/1h50m running; 4900 calories

Week 17: 8500yd/2h43m swimming; 88.9mi/5h15m cycling; 12.0mi/1h53m running; 5200 calories

Week 18: 2100yd/0h42m swimming; 82.9mi/4h28m cycling; 16.9mi/2h40m running; 4500 calories

Week 19: 3000yd/0h55m swimming; 128mi/7h29m cycling; 12.0mi/1h49m running; 5700 calories

Week 20: 6500yd/2h04m swimming; 73.2mi/3h59m cycling; 18.8mi/2h53m running; 5500 calories

Week 21: 7300yd/2h19m swimming; 97.7mi/5h15m cycling; 15.9mi/2h14m running; 6000 calories

Cumulative: 92,450yd/36h23m swimming; 1693.7mi/105h00m cycling; 275.8mi/43h43m running; 103,700 calories

WOW, that’s a lot.

Well, there were a couple of detours during these two weeks. 

The first was during my long trainer ride in Week 13. It was a four hour trainer ride. I now know that’s a really long time to spend on a trainer. It’s about 15 minutes longer than the first season (yes, season!) of The Detour on TBS. If you’ve ever watched TBS on Sling, you know you get the same commercials over and over and over and over. Well, after enough commercials for The Detour, I decided to watch it. One ride and I’m now half way through the series!

My long run on the following day was almost exactly the length of The Fifth Element. Just over two hours straight on a treadmill. When does the wind go away, the sun stay out longer, and the temperature get warmer so I can do more of these workouts outside? Not soon enough, as I now measure my workouts by how many TV shows and movies I can watch while not actually going anywhere!

The other detour was more significant. I have been training with Trainer Road for the last 3+ months. They use what they call Virtual Power. It’s great, but with limitations. It takes speed and info about your regular old trainer and converts that to power. Since I already owned a speed sensor and a trainer, it was very low cost. After about two months of training with power, I decided I wanted to measure power during my outdoor training and racing. So I was on the lookout for a proper power meter. I found a good deal on a pedal-based version, so I ordered it two weeks ago. 

I installed them on my bike and did a test to compare my new power meter to virtual power. Detour! Even after calibration, the power meter was showing 30 watts lower than the virtual power! This doesn’t mean I haven’t been improving, because improvement is based on relative numbers. It just means that my absolute numbers are not what I thought they were. So all of that stuff last time about the absolute power numbers? Well……this is a setback for those numbers. 

The new power meter will be great going forward, but with the new power measurement, I needed to do a new FTP test to set a baseline going forward based on the new measurement method. I dropped 23 watts, so as far as improvement goes, I’m 7 watts better. And it was reinforced that FTP tests hurt!

It’s basically an hour of riding, with some preliminary hard efforts to set the stage and mitigate some common things that could throw the test off, then it’s a 20-minute test. This test is 20 minutes of riding as hard as you can maintain for the full 20 minutes. Basically you need to ask yourself every minute or two if you can maintain your pace for the rest of the 20 minutes. And there’s only one correct answer. If the answer is no, you’re going too hard. If the answer is yes, you’re not going hard enough. The answer better be maybe!

After the FTP test, my legs were pretty beat up. I missed a bike ride and a run, and I pushed a bike workout to the following Monday. But Week 13 was still the highest volume week so far (I told you I’d be saying that a lot).

The swimming was good, with my last workout having a 1000yd interval that I did at race pace! It’s only a quarter of Ironman distance, but I really feel like 1:50/100yd is very achievable on race day.

Week 12: 4700yd/1h27m swimming; 59.7mi/3h45m cycling; 20.1mi/3h10m running; 5700 calories

Week 13: 6600yd/2h05m swimming; 119mi/7h30m cycling; 17.1mi/2h45m running; 6500 calories

Cumulative: 53,150yd/22h34m swimming; 975.3mi/64h14m cycling; 164.3mi/26h40m running; 63,600 calories

With a few things going on in the evenings this week and Week 12 Monday off, I pushed a few workouts to Monday. So my mileage wasn’t quite as high as it should have been. Even though I had 3.5 miles of swimming, almost 100 on the bike, and 14 running in January!!

Workouts went well once again this week. So instead of the daily run down, let’s lay out some goals.

I started training with one primary goal: complete an Ironman in 12:09:34 or better (yes, Coop’s best time is 12:09:35). Let’s just call it 12:00 even. I’m familiar with the Boulder course, I train at altitude, have hometown crowd support (THANK YOU!!), and travel costs are negligible. So that’s the race. Formal goal: sub-12 hours at Ironman Boulder (almost two and a half hours faster than when I did the same race in 2015!!)

What about the intermediate goals? Well, I just signed up for Texas 70.3 on April 8th. That’s 9 weeks before IMBoulder. A general guideline is that your 140.6 time will be about double your 70.3 time plus an hour. That would mean I’d need to complete Texas in about five and a half hours. Since I’ll have another two months of training before IMBoulder, the official goal is 5:40.

How do these translate into more specific intermediate and process goals? I generally do pretty well (relatively) running in triathlons (I’m like a really slow Mirinda Carfrae). I passed 500 people in 26 miles during the run at IMBoulder 2015. Of course that means they were all ahead of me after the bike, but let’s not talk about that right now. So I really think I can run a near-4-hour marathon. For swimming, 2:00/100yd translates into about 1:25 for 2.4 miles. 1:45/100yd is about a 1:15 Ironman swim. I think I have a chance at that, but let’s say 1:20 is more realistic. Add 15 minutes for transitions (I really hope to be faster than that), and I’ve got 6:25 for the bike. I should be able to hit 6 hours with some work, giving me 25 minutes for all of those things that go wrong on race day. It’s not a matter of IF, but WHEN things will go wrong.

So how am I going to get there? First, lose weight. It’s no secret that it takes effort to push around extra weight for 12ish hours. When I rowed in college I was in the low 150s. That was about the best shape I’ve been in during my life. I’m probably even training more now than I did then. My goal for this season is to hit the start line at IMBoulder at 156 pounds. I started my training at about 186, so that’s just under a pound a week. I’ve dropped a pound a week so far, so I just need to keep that pace. Any more than that and I’ll be missing the nutrition I need to recover and make strength gains, so I don’t want to lose too much too fast.

Second, get way faster on the bike. This is why I started with TrainerRoad. They promise to make people faster on the bike, and it looked like a system I could get into. Plus they had full Ironman training plans. That’s what I’ve been following. I’ve written about their system a bit before, but I definitely have seen results and recommend them. So TrainerRoad (plus my hard work!) will make me faster and increase my power, but how much sustainable power will I need?

I found a calculator online (https://www.alancouzens.com/blog/Power.html) that estimates the sustained power necessary for a given Ironman course. It’s the internet, so grain of salt and all, but he’s coached a couple dozen people to Kona and he’s got plenty of other credentials and info that seems well thought out, so we’ll go with it for now. Based on the calculator, I’ll need to sustain 167 Watts for a six-hour time. I want to keep my effort to about 70% of my FTP, so I’ll need to get my FTP up to 240 Watts. Well, I started at 189W and I was at 223W a few weeks ago. I think 240W is quite achievable. What about a stretch goal? 200W sustained will get me to 5:30, which requires an FTP of about 285 Watts. That’s almost exactly 4 Watts per kilogram (at my goal weight). That seems ambitious, but I’m going for it!

The third goal is to get a bit faster on the run. Back in the day, I ran at an 8-minute per mile pace, no matter the distance. To hit a 4-hour marathon, I need to run a 9:09 mile pace. I’ve already run 7 miles at that pace outside this winter, so I feel like this is very achievable. No specific process goals here; just keep following my training plan and getting a bit faster.

The fourth goal is to get faster in the water. This is fourth because the swim is just relatively short in an Ironman. I’ve been increasing my volume in the pool and getting faster as a result. I’m an adult onset swimmer, so my goal here is not too ambitious. My two Ironman swims have been 2:13/100yd and 2:05/100yd. I did 2:04/100yd in Boulder 70.3 this past summer. Based on what I’ve been doing in the pool and how it’s felt, 1:50/100yd is my goal.

So those goals would put me at 1:18 swim, 6:00 bike, 4:00 run, plus ~12 minutes for transitions. 11:30 should be achievable. Add 30 minutes for unforeseen issues and I can still hit 12:00.

But what might be possible? A stretch goal? 1:13 for the swim is about the edge of possible. Maybe I can get transitions down to 8 minutes. The bike in Boulder is a little long, so 5:30 is pushing the limit of possible. 3:45 marathon is again the outer limit of possible. If all goes well and there are no unforeseen issues, that makes 10:36 the absolute best case scenario. That would have put me in the top 10 in my age group last year.

Well now that those are written out, it’s time to go get it. I don’t think I’m genetically incapable of reaching any of these goals, it’s just a matter of a lot of hard work!

Stay tuned. If IMBoulder goes well (sub-11:15 or so), there will be another Ironman in my future this fall. If anybody is looking for a tropical vacation right before Thanksgiving, pencil in a trip to Cozumel…

Week 11: 6200yd/1h58m swimming; 98.5mi/6h15m cycling; 14.1mi/2h18m running; 6700 calories

Cumulative: 41,850yd/19h02m swimming; 796.6mi/52h59m cycling; 127.1mi/20h45m running; 51,400 calories

One last goal: More hot tub time!

Week 10 was the highest workload so far in terms of training stress. I started using Training Peaks this week, which really helps me track how things are going, and plan future workload. I’m generally seeing a good correlation between how I feel and what the numbers are saying.

I hit all eleven workouts again this week, so that helps a lot. Some weeks in the past, I’ve only done nine or ten of my eleven. It was also my highest volume swimming week. Cycling and running volume were down a bit from previous highs, but the intensity was there for sure. 

The last two cycling workouts this week were 1.5 hour sweet spot workouts (80-90% of my FTP). So they should have been pretty challenging. I feel like it was just a bit easier than it should have been. I did each at about 3% higher power than prescribed, and I feel like I easily could have added another 2-3%. I might need to reassess my FTP in two weeks! Right now these sweet spot workouts happen to sit right at my target Ironman race power. I just need to raise my FTP so this same power is is about 65-70% of my FTP instead of 90%.

One of those sweet spot workouts was followed by a brick run. I spent 90 minutes at my target race pace/power on the bike, then immediately followed it up with 30 minutes at my target race pace on the run.  It felt really good! Obviously there’s a big difference between 2 hours and 10 hours. But there’s also a big difference between today and race day in 22 weeks!

This week was just over 10 hours and next week is scheduled to be over 13 hours. Then it’s time for a rest week (back down to 9 hours). I was really hoping that last number was a bit lower when I looked it up to type it. 

Week 10: 5500yd/2h22m swimming; 85.9mi/5h20m cycling; 15.4mi/2h36m running; 6000 calories

Cumulative: 35,650yd/17h04m swimming; 698.1mi/46h44m cycling; 113.0mi/18h27m running; 44,700 calories

Week 9 started off well. The full rest day on Christmas was great for many reasons, then it was back to the pool on Tuesday. The main set was 10x100yd. I was able to negative split nearly the whole set with my fastest 100s in the low 1:40s/100yd. The final swim of the week was just over a mile continuous swim and I held just over 2:00/100yd. So clearly I still need to work on sustained pace!

On the bike, the power workout went well. The long ride was over three hours on the trainer (roughly one Patriots/Jets game). That’s a long time to spend on the trainer, but I felt great at the end of the workout, so I’ll take it.

The running workouts were great this week. I did three sessions on the treadmill and one outdoor session. 11 miles of running outside when the wind is blowing at 30mph was a bit challenging, but I was able to do it at sub-9:30 pace average. That was about 10:15 with the wind in my face and 8:45 with the wind at my back! I’ve never seen that much difference between my splits while running. But I’ve never run many miles with a 30mph wind before either! Hair game on point, though.

I did the long run on Saturday, and the continuous swim and long bike on Sunday. Combined I basically did a 70.3 distance workout spread over 24 hours. This is definitely the best shape I’ve been in at the end of December in a really long time.

Week 9: 5150yd/2h12m swimming; 65.2mi/4h15m cycling; 21.0mi/3h14m running; 5600 calories

Cumulative: 30,150yd/14h42m swimming; 612.2mi/41h24m cycling; 97.6mi/15h51m running; 38,700 calories

Week 5 started with an FTP test because I felt I had increased my power enough that my workouts were not at the right effort level – even with the 10% bump I’d been using. It turns out I was right. The FTP test showed that I had increased my functional threshold power by about 18%. So now all of my workouts are a lot more difficult than they have been. But that’s a good thing!

The second and third rides of the week felt like they were at an appropriate level. The fourth ride on Saturday was a 3+ hour trainer ride – my longest trainer ride ever (until two weeks from now at least). It was at a solid power level and by the end it felt like a bit much. I also had serious problems with my sensors dropping out, so I was frustrated the whole ride and the data I got was pretty useless. But the workout was useful!

After that ride was an 11 mile run on Sunday. I only had two runs longer than that during my training for IMBoulder 2015. And those were 2 and 6 weeks before the race, not 6 months before. I’m a bit ahead of my schedule from last time. This run was 40 degrees with a 20 mph wind. I see a lot of long distance treadmill running in my future. No me gusta.

This week was the highest volume week so far and also filled with manual labor for the home remodeling. So I was pretty beat most of the week. My swimming workouts took the hit. I only did one swim. It went well, so I maintained the level I came into the week with, but didn’t really add anything.

After the effort of this week I’m still quite excited about training! And since I don’t have any training pictures yet, here’s a picture of my cat. You know, the way the internet intended.

Week 5: 1500yd/48m swimming; 106.6mi/7h05m cycling; 13.4mi/2h13m running; 5600 calories

Cumulative: 14,400yd/7h27m swimming; 395.5mi/27h33m cycling; 43.1mi/7h19m running; 21,700 calories

It was finally time to get new shoes. I retired the original couple pairs of Newtons I’d been grinding away on for a while and replaced them with Newton Fates. I took them out for a spin around the lake for my first recovery week run. I’m not sure if it was fitness or if Spike Lee from 1989 was right that “it’s gotta be the shoes,” but I dropped from a 10:00/mile pace two weeks ago to 9:09 this week at nearly the same heart rate. That’s a sub-4-hour marathon pace, which is my race goal. Obviously there’s a difference between 4 miles and 26 (or 140.6) miles, but I’ve got six months to extend my range at that pace.

My first ride this week was high-power intervals. I think I got a little overzealous on the first interval when I looked up to see almost 800 watts. I backed off for the rest of the intervals, but I was still well above the target power, even though I did this (and all rides this week) at 110% of target.

I decided to do the third ride this week outside on a mountain bike. I’m not very good at mountain biking. I had a pretty solid crash that left my right leg scraped up, a deep thigh bruise and a sore shoulder. So much for a recovery week.

Two days later it was time for the last ride of the week. It was a 75 minute tempo ride that I’ve done a few times now. This time was at the same power as Week 2, but at 10 bpm lower heart rate!

Swimming went well this week. I took things pretty easy, but my pace is really improving! I did a bunch of 100yd and 250yd sets at around a 1:55/100yd pace. Previously I would average about 2:05. The goal is to get down to 1:45/100yd for 2.4 miles. Lots of work left to go…

Week 4: 5250yd/2h36m swimming; 56.4mi/4h43m cycling; 7.3mi/1h12m running; 4300 calories

Cumulative: 12,900yd/6h39m swimming; 288.9mi/20h28m cycling; 29.7mi/5h6m running; 16,100 calories