Since I finished the race weight project a little earlier than expected, and since I experience some very good performance gains the the final 3 weeks of cake-eating, I decided to pull the trigger and enter Ironman Texas (April 22nd), as a big training day for Ironman Boulder in June (11th).
This will be an interesting exercise in “Just in Time” training. Basically, I’ve maintained my bike and run with regular training, at a level at which I can just launch into an Ironman build at short notice without any issues. This “base” is not very time intensive. In fact my weekly hours between January and April has been under 11 hours per week. Most of that has been biking and running, since my swim volume has averaged 1500m per week (for comparison, my normal swim volume training for an Ironman is 15-25km per week). My longest run before I entered Texas was 14 miles, and most rides were not longer than 2 hours.
So with 2 weeks to go, I had a bit of work to do, especially on the swim. 1500m per week just really nothing, and my swim was in terrible shape. Last Monday, I was struggling to swim faster than 1:35/100m for short intervals (like 100m) and my 200m intervals were coming in at over 3:20. My strategy was to swim every day, as far as I could before my form would break down, building up to where I could manage 4000m easily. That took about 7 days (17k of swimming), and by this Monday (April 17th) my swim was back on track. My 100m intervals were down to 1:22 and my 200s were down under 3 minutes, under 2:50 if I swam hard. Plus I could get through 4k of swimming in one session with not too much fatigue. So we’ll see how race day goes, but I’m confident that I will at least make the distance.
Biking has been going well. I haven’t done any long bike rides (4 hours max, with a few 3 hour rides). But my power is good, so expect a decent bike split at Texas. I’m guessing it will be under 5 hours but I’ve never raced there before so I’m not sure. Best case 4:40, worst case 5:00.
Running is a bit of an unknown. No long runs at all, although I got in 18 miles last Friday. I feel my pace is where it needs to be, but not sure about my endurance at all. On race day I will just start with a run/walk structure (9 min run, 1 min walk) and see how things go. I expect I could run a 3:30 marathon if everything goes well. Probably more around 3:45, but I really just don’t know.
But whatever happens, I will be there with quite a few friends, and two of my coached athletes. So just being there for a big supported training day will be fun!