2009 Ironman Training Plan

So 2 1/2 weeks post Ironman Florida and I am considering myself fully healed and ready to rumble. Training a little more regularly this week with pretty much a normal training pattern, just much fewer hours. Did my first ride outside for 2 hours this past Sunday and everything felt great. I modified my bike position a little by lowering my aero bars. This lowers your upper body making you more aerodynamic. Very small change of only 1 spacer on my headset, which is about 3/4 of an inch. A headset is where your stem, the thing that you connect your handlebars to is attached. It is longer than it needs to be which enables you to attach the stem at high or lower positions by simply rearranging a set of 5 spacers, each about 3/4 inch tall. The more spacers above the stem the lower the stem is in relation to the ground, the more spacers below the stem, the higher the stem will be. Last year I lowered my stem (aerobars attached to the stem) 2 spacers, but did so in the middle of the season. Believe it or not but that little change of about 1 1/2 inches lowered the amount of power I could generate on the bike drastically, like 2 m.p.h. I had to build the new muscles which are now being work at the new angle I am in. I decided this year I would start the year off at the new position, a much wiser option. Live and learn. Believe it or not I could tell there was a position change, but not major.

So my 2009 plan is done and ready to go. Training officially begins Dec. 1. Decided to run a little less this year and swim a little less as well. I moved those hours to the bike. Overall training for the 48 week period will be 1,100 hours, which averages out to just under 23 hours / week.

Bimodal pattern again this year with 2 builds, the first for Ironman Couer d'Alene on June 21 and the second for Ironman Florida on November 7 (unless there is a surprise race added on October 10 in Hawaii). With 4 weeks between HI and FL, I would plan on racing FL as 4 weeks is enough recovery time. After IMCDA I am planning a similar recovery pattern as I just had for IMFL. 1 week with little to no training, next week with some light training in each of the three sports, and the following week with increased training. The 4th week after is a normal training week. This works well with when my kids will be with me as I won't have much training time anyway. I am planning 2 early season Half Ironman's (1.2 M swim, 56 M bike, 13.1 M run) and an international distance (.75 M swim, 25 M bike, 6.2 M run). All early season race will be taper free. A taper is when you reduce your training down in the 2 -3 week leading up to a big race. Your body recovers from all of the hard training and you race a lot faster. Each time you taper you cut into your total number of training hours, so you can't do it for every race otherwise you will not be training enough, so I only taper for the Full Ironman races. I am only planning a 2 week taper for IMCDA vs. the typical 3 week. Your performance isn't quite as fast as it could be for the non taper races but racing makes you faster in general. "Gotta go fast to be fast."

Max early season training week will be the week of June 1 at about 35 hours. Max workout calls for 10.5 hour bike followed by 52 min run. I will probably pare this back to a 9 hour ride and 52 min run which will be something like 155 mile bike and 7 mile run. It's a monster training session for sure as it will be only 1 minute less than it took me to finish IMFL.

Of course all of this is subject to change as there are many factors involved and there is a lot of time between now and then. Gotta stay healthy. Next week I do a ramp up week at 60% of my week 1 volume. CAN'T WAIT TO GET STARTED TRAINING!!