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发帖数: 19210 | 1 http://home.trainingpeaks.com/articles/triathlon/minimalist-iro
Minimalist Ironman Training
By Matt Fitzgerald
You can prepare for a successful Ironman triathlon with a program that has
an average training volume of only 12 hours per week and a briefly-
maintained peak training volume of 16 hours. And by “successful” I don’t
mean finishing alive. I mean covering the distance as fast as your genetic
potential allows. In fact, I believe that many triathletes can race a faster
Ironman by following a well-constructed 12-hours-a-week program than they
could with a higher-volume approach.
There are five specific reasons a minimalist approach to Ironman training
can work just as well as, if not better than, a higher-volume approach.
1. Swimming performance is all about technique, not fitness
Very little improvement in swimming performance comes from building swim
fitness through hours of training. Almost all swimming improvement comes
from technique refinements that often occur instantaneously. You should swim
-train for an Ironman in a way that encourages and accelerates technique
refinements instead of in a way that concentrates on building fitness. Get
one-on-one stroke coaching from a qualified swim coach, study freestyle
technique (youtube.com is a good source of technique videos), fiddle with
your stroke, use swim aids that encourage technique development and perform
technique drills for body position, rotation, efficient breathing, a strong
pull and efficient kicking. Use intervals and sustained swimming primarily
to ingrain technique and secondarily to develop fitness.
2. The swim just isn’t that important
To complete the swim leg of a Hawaii Ironman as fast as your inner talent
allows, you would have to train in the pool two hours a day, six days a week
, or thereabouts. That’s what it would take to shave off every second
possible. But the swim accounts for only about 10 percent of the time it
takes to complete an Ironman. And you can get at least 90 percent of the way
toward your fastest possible Ironman swim split by swimming just one hour a
day, three times per week. So why not do that?
3. Cycling fitness crosses over well to running
When I trained for my first Ironman in 2002, my run training was severely
compromised due to injury. My race took place in mid-September. Through July
I averaged just 15 miles of running per week. Not until five weeks before
the race was I able to do my first “long” run: a 12-miler. I squeezed in a
16-miler and a lone 20-miler before race day.
Despite these limitations, I was able to run a 3:23 marathon at Ironman
Wisconsin—not as fast as I could have run with better training, but faster
than all but 42 other participants in the race nevertheless. The reason, I
realized, was that my excellent cycling fitness carried me through the run.
You can count on the fitness crossover from cycling to running to trim back
the amount of run training you do in preparing for an Ironman. One long run,
one high-intensity run and a moderate, steady base run (to which more
advanced athlete’s can add a threshold progression or a sprinkling of
fartlek speed intervals) each week will suffice. You may also do one- or two
-mile transition runs after bike workouts to prepare for the specific
challenge of running off the bike.
4. High-intensity indoor cycling is time-efficient and effective
Cycling predominantly indoors can be an effective means to develop a higher
level of cycling fitness with a substantially lesser time commitment to
training than cycling exclusively outside. Riding indoors requires less set-
up time and entails fewer stops than outdoor riding. It is also more intense
—heart rates are always higher on an indoor trainer because there is no
momentum and there are no downhills. Finally, the indoor cycling environment
is more controlled and more conducive to high-intensity riding.
There is a small trend of predominantly indoor bike training at the top
levels of triathlon these days. Andy Potts, the 2007 Ironman 70.3 World
Champion, typically rides outdoors only once a week. His five or six other
rides are indoor workouts featuring lots of lung-busting interval and
threshold efforts and lasting only 45 minutes each, on average. Tyler
Stewart, who has the fastest women’s Ironman bike split in history (4:47:59
at Ironman Florida in 2007), gets most of her bike training in the form of
90-minute interval-based indoor workouts that she teaches for other
triathletes and cyclists. Like Potts, she rides outdoors just once weekly
and she completes only a handful of rides longer than four hours before
racing an Ironman.
I’ve recently adopted a similar approach to my Ironman bike training, and
with excellent results so far. Each week I perform five rides on a CycleOps
300PT indoor trainer. Each of these rides is 30 to 45 minutes long and two
feature very challenging high-intensity work. On Saturdays I hop on my
Kestrel Airfoil and ride long. My power numbers are as high as they have
ever been, but my time commitment to bike training is much smaller than it
has been in the past. Try it and you’ll see.
5. A dozen century training rides won’t give you much more cycling
endurance than two or three
I just mentioned that the fastest female Ironman cyclist in history
completes only a handful of four-plus-hour rides before competing in an
Ironman. This practice is in contrast to that of many competitive Ironman
triathletes, who start doing multi-hour rides months before race day. But
Tyler Stewart’s success proves what common sense would suggest: that it’s
simply not necessary to do a ton of long rides that are close to the Ironman
bike leg distance to build the cycling endurance needed for a successful
Ironman.
If you build a solid foundation of cycling fitness by doing a lot of the
hard threshold and interval training that so many athletes avoid, and by
regularly performing fairly aggressive long rides in the 2.5-3.5-hour range,
you can easily extend the range of your pedaling power to encompass the
full Ironman distance by incrementally increasing the distance of your
weekly long ride from, say, 60 miles to 100 miles through the last eight
weeks of your training preceding your taper. With this approach you will
cultivate adequate endurance without doing so at the expense of pure power,
and with minimal risk of burning out, and, not least importantly, without
wasting a second of your valuable time.
This article was written by Matt Fitzgerald. Matt offers numerous Ironman
training plans on TrainingPeaks.com. View all of Matt's Ironman training
plans. | w***n
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