Hacking my IM plan
Hi coach R,
I had to completely stop training for about 1 month after a car accident and a broken arm. Have started back since about 3 weeks now but I realize that I have lost a lot of speed and not so much my endurance (VDot dropped from ~46 to ~40).
I'm racing IMMD in 12 weeks and wanted to know how I could hack my training plan (intermediate) to focus a little bit more on speed and maybe a little bit less on endurance.
Thanks
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Comments
Welcome back! A month off is a long time. With 12wk until your Ironman, there really isn't much opportunity to build speed vs endurance, because you absolutely need to be building endurance for your Ironman, especially after having to take a full month off. My recommendation is to follow the IM plan as is.
That said, what you "could" do is maybe knock ~30' off the prescribed Saturday and Sunday rides, and ride a bit harder in those rides. And take about 15-20' off the schedule long run and run a bit harder there as well. You can do this for the next 4wks, but once you get within 8wks of the race, you need to go back to doing the full IM schedule, as written.
That looks good on paper but in practice...you often can't have it that way. IOW, you asked me how to get faster. You do that by riding and running faster, and dropping the volume so that the combination of Faster + Longer doesn't dig you into a hole = prevents you from doing downstream workouts.
Long run and Sat. ride went fine (at the higher speed) but Sunday was very very hard, could barely keep my HR in Z2... Probably the Thu. ride and Sat ride were too hard.
Thank!
Yep, I've learned that if I want to get faster and my choice is between murdering myself for 3.5hrs or less than murdering myself for 4.5-5hrs, the 3-3.5hr solution is the one that WILL make me faster. Murder + 5hrs = a hole that I need to be careful with.