Nice one @Jesse , what’s tomorrow some Endurance?
I have a large patient load tomorrow so it’ll depend on how well I sleep and how much energy I have left. I’m leaning towards a recovery day since I’ve done 7 sessions in 9 days and 5 in the past 6. Let my body adapt to the recent training impulse.
4 Likes
Big weekend again for me. Long run of 1:40 today, swim tomorrow morning, 5km run with our running club in the afternoon then a 2hr brick session on Sunday.
14 weeks I think until Ironman Valencia 70.3 and I think I may be peaking too early 
2 Likes
@jockefc23 The good news is if you are peaking so soon you will have 14 weeks to work up to another peak leading up to race weekend 
It looks like you have an awesome weekend ahead.
I have 1’21" run and then a 42" double run day; Long HIIT 46" tomorrow (may switch to Tempo Run due to weather) and a beautiful 2’ social long run with friends on Sunday at Glenbow Ranch (see pic below it will have more snow).
5 Likes
I am looking for some feedback from more experienced multisport endurance athletes here. I feel like I am a relatively competent cyclist (not going to win any races or anything, but can do long endurance rides comfortably), but I am concerned about my running ability, which is ultimately what brought me to look at Athletica as an option so I can train both sports with some sort of structure.
My event schedule for the year kind of looks like this:
- End of May – Half Marathon
- Early July – Fondo (100km)
- August – Marathon (depending on how the Half goes, but if my foot doesn’t get injured I intent to do a full here)
- September – Gran Fondo (150 kms)
- October – Gravel Fondo event (100kms, fairly hard course)
I selected long distance duathlon for the events as I want to have enough distance in my legs for a marathon and it seemed the best fit, but when I look into the future of my plan it seems the longest run is 1:45 in time length. My half marathon time I anticipate being around 2:10 - 2:15 by the time it rolls around, so I expect to pounding pavement considerably longer for a full marathon.
So I guess my questions are is this the right way to set this up and should I be concerned that a full marathon will likely be considerably longer than any of the training sessions laid out so far or should I just follow the plan?
If I should be increasing the distance, would you recommend I loosely follow the plan and as I get closer to the full marathon date would you ease up a bit on the Saturday long cycling sessions and add time to the long distance runs to prepare to try and keep overall load inline?
I was playing around with my training setup (currently mid volume long duathlon) last night (bad idea it started me off from scratch again outside of the test week lol – oops) to see if I could get longer distance runs while keeping total training time within 15 hours, but I couldn’t seem to get it to work even playing around the modalities.
Feedback and/or opinions are appreciated here.
1 Like
I’d say you need to be running more than 1.45 or 2 hours for training to do a marathon. Normally anything up to 3 hours / 20 miles - whichever you hit first at a comfortable running pace. Only need to do that a couple of times, but certainly you should be near it a few weeks at least.
Your long distance cycling will help with the endurance side of things and also the mental aspect of it for sure, it takes the same type of toughness to run for 4 hours that it does to cycle for 8 etc… But you can’t replace that pounding on the legs for over 3 hours with anything else really.
Maybe just increase the long runs after the half marathon by 10/20 mins each time, making sure you are recovering as well?
Good luck!
3 Likes
Yep - agree with @jockefc23. Athletica is programmed to avoid large surges in load that would injure you. However in your context with what you aim to do, you may need to violate its recommendations and push out the running. Try to do so as progressively as possible step by step and not all in one goal without anything behind you.
4 Likes
Thanks folks, I think as the volumes ramp up I’ll look to add to the runs, but cut down the Saturday long rides a bit when they are over 4 hours to 3-3.5 to try and manage the overall weekly load.
Appreciate the feedback.
4 Likes
Another option, @DaveBoyle , is to do back to back runs of 90 minutes or so to build up the training stress without the physical stress of a three-hour run.
2 Likes
I didn’t feel great today, and used the “just-try-15-minutes-and-see-how-you-feel” method. Glad I did. Turns out my legs were feeling just fine and the ride went very well.
I was reflecting the benefits of peripheral vs central adaptation to training today, so I decided to slow down my cadence to the 80-85RPM to lean towards peripheral. I can lean towards central adaptations in the HIIT workouts. My aerobic decoupling was 1.58%… Guess I can push a few more watts during my L2 ride tomorrow.
The Tron bike is only 68 more rides away (500m of climbing each). It’s like counting down to xmas ;o)
3 Likes
I didn’t feel great today either… Few too many beers yesterday.
Training this evening really didn’t help me feel better, especially the 14 min run off the bike at 70.3 pace.
Thank goodness tomorrow is a rest day.
1 Like
Just a short ride to finish the week. Today’s and yesterday’s rides show that I have improved since starting up the cycling a few weeks ago. I can hit higher power with lower HR and it feels good.
" […] Your recent bike session reflects your impressive progress, Jesse!" -OG
2 Likes
Recovery ride today. Legs feel good and overall not fatigued (other than lack of sleep).
Asked OG a question about the training, “What is this “steady standard” interval after the warm up? How is it relevant to recovery?”, and I got a reply!
*The “steady standard” interval is a consistent effort that helps evaluate your recovery state by comparing power output to heart rate (efficiency factor). With an efficiency factor of 1.3 and an FTI at 70%, it shows a good balance between effort and your cardiovascular response. " -OG
1 Like
I was due a VO2 session today. HRV4Training has put me off the bottom of my Baseline this morning. It did the same yesterday and it’s dropped further today. I’ve swapped the VO2 with a strength endurance session. My wife came home with lurgi yesterday. It’s possible I’m in the early stages of coming down with it, though no symptoms. If I’m below baseline tomorrow then I’ll cancel the VO2 this week and swap for an easy endurance.
1 Like
I figure it must be something like that. That there’s a baseline for your efficiency factor at that power output. If you are outside the baseline perhaps it’s needs to reduce the load of new few workouts.
1 Like
I didn’t do the strength endurance session yesterday as the weather wasn’t conducive. Thus today I did my strength endurance on the usual quiet lane I use. I was also planning to do my VO2 max session immediately after with a 20 min period between as I rode over to the hill I use for that.
Knowing a had VO2 to follow I limited the minimum Workout Reserve live on my Garmin and didn’t dip below 18%.
Then off to my VO2 max long HIIT hill. I know that when I didn’t dip below 11% minimum Workout Reserve on the intervals on previous sessions; I have managed good repeatability on subsequent intervals. Thus I aimed not to dip below a minimum workout reserve of 11% for this session. If I pace them right I hit the minimum WR as I come into the final section of the hill, and the duration marker is at about the 1/4 mark on the line, before recovery and next ascent, I think I hit the mark at mWR of 11.9%, I’m still awaiting analysis from the AI coach..
1 Like
Tough workout day, Phil! Good work!
Interesting day for me. As I had played around with my settings last week, Athletica gave me another week of Base 1, and I was getting king of bored of all the Z2 work as I hadn’t done much else since the beginning of the month outside of the 5K test and FTP test. So, today I used workout wizard and the wizard decided today would be 40/20s on the bike.
I’ve done 30/30s before and I found this considerably harder being 4 sets with less recovery in between sets as opposed to what I’ve done in the past, but I actually had stronger outputs than when I have last done 30/30s. What’s also interesting to me is that on my FTP test a couple of weeks back test I lost 15 points from October when I last tested, but that didn’t seem to matter today. Not only did I perform better (in my mind), 30 mins post workout I actually felt really good and not trashed.
The only real changes for me so far since signing up with Athletica has been been placing a bigger priority on sleep and my Z2 rides being on the lower end of my Z2 power range to keep my HR inline as prescribed whereas in the past I trained only to power range. Pretty happy right now.
2 Likes
Love that report… keep going…
“Recovery is 90% Sleep, 9% Nutrition, and 1% everything else.” Alistair Brownlee
Appreciated and reflected on by coaches and scientists we admire 
5 Likes