There was a time when I could train for an Ironman properly.
By properly, I mean spending an entirely unreasonable number of hours swimming, cycling and running without anybody at home questioning where I was.
Those days are gone.
I now have two children, a business and considerably more things competing for my time. Naturally, I decided this would be an excellent moment to enter another Ironman.
Ironman Frankfurt, to be precise.
In July.
This may have been a mistake.
The problem with Ironman training
If you’ve spent any time lurking around triathlon and Ironman groups, you’ll probably have come across Fink and Friel. Mention either name on Facebook and you’ll generally get 47 different opinions from 32 people, several of whom appear to have made Ironman training their full-time occupation.
The plans work. The slight problem is that some of them also require an enormous amount of time.
At the heavier end, you’re looking at training weeks that can creep towards 18 hours or more.
Eighteen hours.
That’s not really a training plan. That’s a part-time job.
When I completed my first Ironman in Austria in 2013, this wasn’t such a problem. I was completely immersed in triathlon. I trained with my club, my neighbours trained with me and I had considerably fewer responsibilities.
If somebody suggested a four-hour bike ride on Saturday morning, my response was generally, “Sounds good.”
These days it’s more likely to be, “What time are we leaving for football?”
My training back then wasn’t particularly scientific. In fact, “training plan” might be stretching the definition slightly. I swam, rode my bike and ran, then did quite a lot more of all three.
There wasn’t much analysis of precisely what my body needed. I simply threw enough training at myself that eventually some fitness appeared.
And, to be fair, it worked. I finished Ironman Austria in 11:43:01.
Not troubling the professionals, admittedly, but respectable enough that I could spend the next few years casually mentioning it whenever the opportunity arose.
Then life got in the way
Since Austria, I’ve had two children and founded Yellow Jersey Cycle Insurance.
It turns out working in cycling is surprisingly effective at stopping you from actually riding a bike.
Add children into the equation and finding 18 hours a week to train becomes slightly ambitious. Which left me with a fairly obvious question: could I train smarter rather than simply training more?
Not in the irritating motivational-poster sense. I mean genuinely.
Could proper testing tell me exactly where my weaknesses were, allow me to train those weaknesses specifically and remove some of the hours I previously spent doing things simply because a training plan told me to?
There was only one way to find out.
Enter the scientists
At the beginning of January I went to see friend of Yellow Jersey Dr Garry Palmer and his team at Sports Test.
They had four hours of testing planned, which meant my attempt to save time by training scientifically was going to begin by taking up most of an afternoon.
We started rather pleasantly with a sit-down consultation. Garry wanted to understand what I’d done before, what I was doing now and what I was actually hoping to achieve.
The answer to the last question was relatively simple. I’d entered Ironman Frankfurt and wanted to perform somewhere around the level I’d managed in Austria.
Unfortunately, the answer to the middle question was slightly less encouraging.
I wasn’t as fit as I had been. Not even close. And Frankfurt was beginning to loom rather ominously on the calendar.
First, let’s find out how fat I am
The next stage was body composition testing.
Those of you who’ve seen Yellow Jersey at triathlons may have had a go on our InBody machine. You stand on it, hold a couple of handles and it sends a small electrical current through your body to estimate things like muscle mass and body fat.
Very civilised.
Sports Test had another method.
Callipers.
It turns out there are considerably more places on my body where you can grab a fold of skin than I had previously appreciated. I won’t be sharing the photographs.
The team did everything possible to make the process comfortable and professional. Nevertheless, standing semi-naked while somebody methodically measures your fat does make you feel slightly like you’ve been abducted for scientific research.
And the experiments were only just beginning.
Then came the mask
I’d brought my own bike, which was strapped onto Sports Test’s rolling road. This thing was brilliant.
The forks are fixed into a stand while the rear wheel sits on something halfway between a turbo trainer and a set of rollers, with a suspension system underneath the bottom bracket. Unlike most indoor trainers I’d used, the bike could actually move beneath you, and it felt surprisingly close to riding on the road.
I immediately wanted one for the office, although quite what an insurance company would do with a rolling road I hadn’t really thought through.
Then they produced the mask.
It was strapped tightly over my mouth and nose, with tubes and wires running off towards various machines measuring the oxygen I was breathing in and the carbon dioxide I was breathing out.
At this point the whole thing stopped feeling like a bike fit and started feeling considerably more serious.
I’d attempted VO2 max and functional threshold tests myself before. They normally involve following instructions from a book or the internet, pedalling increasingly hard and eventually reaching a point where you start questioning several of your recent life choices.
So I knew this was going to hurt.
Surprisingly, it was quite fun
At first, anyway.
We started with a warm-up and gradually increased the workload. Because everything was being measured, Garry and the team could see what was happening inside my body rather than relying entirely on heart rate, power and my increasingly distressed facial expressions.
Then we started the ramp test.
The resistance increased steadily, as did the numbers and my breathing. The clever bit was that by analysing the gases I was breathing in and out, they could identify the physiological changes happening as the intensity increased.
I, meanwhile, was concentrating mainly on continuing to pedal.
Eventually we reached VO2 max territory. This is approximately the point where the scientific terminology becomes less important because every part of your body is sending the same message:
Stop.
How long you continue after that is apparently a test of character.
I didn’t demonstrate very much character.
My breathing became increasingly frantic, my legs were rapidly becoming less cooperative and eventually my brain won the argument and told my legs that we’d done quite enough science for one afternoon.
I stopped.
There was some sitting down, some water and a short period contemplating the ceiling.
Then Garry announced we were going running.
Excellent.
And now the treadmill
The running test followed much the same principle. Mask back on, onto the treadmill and start relatively comfortably before gradually increasing the pace while the machines analysed what was happening.
Again, the aim wasn’t simply to discover how fast I could run before falling off the back. The data showed how my body was producing energy at different intensities and where the important physiological changes were happening.
Once we’d finished, we finally got to the part I’d really come for.
The numbers.
Lots and lots of numbers.
What did all this actually tell me?
I’ll be completely upfront here. If Garry had handed me the raw data and asked me to explain it, I’d still be sitting there.
Fortunately, he didn’t.
He talked me through it in language intended for people who don’t have a doctorate in sports science.
By comparing the oxygen going in with the carbon dioxide coming out, we could see how my body was fuelling itself at different intensities. At lower workloads, a greater proportion of the energy could come from fat. As the intensity increased, the balance shifted increasingly towards carbohydrate.
We could also identify the points where my physiology changed significantly and use those to establish much more individual training zones.
And that was the bit I was interested in.
The testing gave us a snapshot of where I was now, where my weaknesses appeared to be and what sort of training might actually improve them.
Which brought us back to my original problem.
Time.
Can I really train for an Ironman in eight hours a week?
Garry believed that, with carefully targeted training, I could get myself into the sort of condition I needed on around six to eight hours a week for much of the build.
That got my attention.
There’s an enormous difference between eight hours and eighteen hours when you have children, a business and a life that occasionally requires you to do something other than ride a bicycle.
The recommendation was also that much of my bike training should be done on the turbo.
This isn’t because turbo trainers are more fun than riding outside. They aren’t. Nobody has ever looked out of the window at a beautiful summer morning and thought, “I’d much rather stare at the garage wall.”
The advantage is control.
Outside, power is constantly changing. There are hills, junctions, traffic, descents and the irresistible temptation to chase somebody who has just overtaken you.
On the turbo, if the session requires a specific power output for a specific amount of time, that’s exactly what you can do.
The theory was fairly straightforward. If I only had eight hours available, I needed those eight hours to count rather than spending a chunk of them training at an intensity that wasn’t really achieving what I needed.
This isn’t an eight-hour Ironman miracle plan
There’s an important caveat here.
Sports Test weren’t suggesting that science had somehow discovered a loophole in Ironman training. Sadly, there is no setting on the machine marked “Ironman fitness without doing all the annoying training.”
This wasn’t a shortcut.
And it certainly wasn’t one of those internet adverts promising that a mysterious trick discovered by a mum from Surrey will remove three stone of belly fat by Thursday.
The idea was much less exciting: understand what my body was doing, train accordingly and stop wasting the limited training time I actually had.
Whether that would be enough to get me around Frankfurt in anything approaching my Austria time was another question entirely.
At this point, I genuinely didn’t know.
But that was rather the point of the experiment. I’d already done the high-volume, slightly chaotic version of Ironman training. This time I was going to see what happened when I replaced some of those hours with structure, data and people who understood considerably more about human physiology than I did.
The idea of cutting something approaching 18 hours of training to six or eight was certainly compelling. For somebody with two children and a business, it was probably also the only realistic way I was going to get to the start line properly prepared.
Whether it would actually work was another matter.
Frankfurt would provide the answer.
What could possibly go wrong?
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