Like most triathletes out there, I trend towards the type A personality, happy with a plan and a strategy on how to achieve whatever goals I’m setting for myself. Measuring progress towards those goals in a systematic and logical way. Each session is there for a reason and leads into the next.

So far in my rather short racing journey, I’ve only ever written my own training plans. Taking input from a multitude of different theories and workouts to build what works best for my available time and fitness level. While I created the plan for my 24 hour race last year, creating a plan for Ultraman has been quite a different challenge. Having the bulk of my training through the winter months in Central Wisconsin and through the holidays with my extremely large family is quite daunting. To me, it is more important to keep a balance in my life and to keep the training fun.

While I started back in August, I’m finally getting around to sharing my plan to cover 320 miles (515km) over 3 days. There were 4 key components I wanted to focus the training around for this race:

1. Stacking Fatigue – going into a 3 day race, the majority of the bike and all of the run would be on tired legs.
2. Crew Support – the aid stations will be wherever I needed them, and I should take advantage. Slowing or stopping to stretch and get caught up on nutrition will be key.
3. Enjoy It – if this isn’t fun, why do it? Race day will focus on fun, so try to come up with interesting workouts or challenges to keep training fun.
4. Balance – while there are always sacrifices to make while getting to race day, be smart about how I’m spending my time so other aspects of life don’t completely fall apart.

Keeping those principles in mind, here’s what I’ve come up with.

Each week is similar in during the weekdays. There’s a cycle of recovery from the long weekend’s work, slowly building up the distances again. Then end the week with hard efforts, ensuring the long workouts will be done with some fatigue already built up.

• Monday – Recovery, walking and body weight strength training, focusing on core and all those little supportive muscles. Working in some plyometrics, but nothing with intensity or much weight. Additionally, focus on flexibility, while that’s a theme throughout the week, Monday is the day to focus on getting as limber as possible.
• Tuesday – AM swim, about 2.4 miles, or an Ironman distance swim, in mixed sets, focusing on speed and endurance building. PM recovery run or ride, keeping an easy pace, get the muscles working again.
• Wednesday – AM recovery run or ride, whichever wasn’t done Tuesday. Usually get a walk in too.
• Thursday – AM swim, just like Tuesday, but a different mixed set. PM intervals run, at least an hour, speed work and hill work is the goal. Start building up fatigue in the legs
• Friday – AM intervals Bike, 60-90-120 minutes of a pre-planned session, letting the trainer guide the effort. PM enjoy some time with friends and family
• Saturday – Typically the long cycle day, easier effort, but for a long period, swims added for extra fun. Make sure to see family and friends and get some chores done.
• Sunday – Typically the long run day, get out on those tired legs from the day before and pound out the miles, preparing for the Ultraman double marathon on day 3. Swims also added here, as the long run isn’t nearly as long as the bike day. Spend some time watching football, and running errands, then family dinner.

As the weeks grow closer to race day, the weekend efforts continue to increase, with pull back weeks to help keep me sane. To help keep things interesting, there are special sessions built in as well. Bike sessions in a heated room without a fan, run days with half the session in the morning and half at night, swim bike split sessions and as much race simulation as I can manage inside. All of which culminates in the hardest training session I’ve yet to attempt, a full Ironman distance triathlon, all inside, at target race pace. It’s gonna be fun!

Without my crew, I’d never be able to make it to this race, let alone through it. They’ll be stepping in to do these massive workouts with me, or at least to be there and drink beer while I sweat it out on the bike. Having company for the long sessions makes such an incredible difference and I feel extremely fortunate to have such a great team around me.

Tools to Measure Success By

For the past number of year racing, I’ve built my race plan within Excel. Mapping out each week’s sessions and calculating totals to attempt to measure where I was currently in relation to previous weeks. This mainly focused on time spent training, but not necessarily the quality of training. Working towards Ultraman, I thought I could use more and found TrainingPeaks to be a wonderful tool to leverage. I could setup sessions for any discipline and they would be loaded to my watch for executing the workout that day. Each event would be measured with a Total Stress Score (TSS), which uses both duration and intensity to get a better estimate of where my current fitness and fatigue levels are at.

As soon as I hooked up my Garmin account, Training Peaks actually back filled an entire profile for me. I could see all the past training and races. This was incredible, rather than just guessing at where I was at, here was clear quantitative evidence of the success or failure of my previous plans. Best yet, as I added in the workouts for my existing plan towards Ultraman, the estimated effort (TSS) would be calculated. I could actually see what sticking to the plan would do for my fitness and fatigue levels. Pretty impressive stuff!

Rather than putting in a bunch of the charts and graphs here, I’ll just leave it at this. There’s a tool for every job, and if that job is getting yourself into the best possible shape before a race, TrainingPeaks is the way to go.

Here’s a sample snapshot to share of how Training Peaks maps out the plan as we sit now.

This doesn’t make much sense at first glance, but the general idea is to keep that blue line tending up. Each of the pink spikes represents a hard weekend’s worth of work building up the fatigue level. So the taper at the end slides that pink line as low as possible right before race day.

If you love data, digging into this site is so rewarding. I’m happy to have found this tool, and looking forward to leveraging it towards all of my future adventures. Looking forward to race day!

 If you have any interest in seeing the specific workouts or plan structure, get in touch. Always happy to discuss training plans and what works or doesn’t work for other athletes out there. rhoehn24@gmail.com