Right off the bat I must apologize for the lack of recent posts. Especially since this blog is specifically about training for the Ironman 70.3 Hawaii, a.k.a. "Honu." What can I say? Life has been crazy busy, and what time I have to devote to this sport all goes to training; not enough time left over for writing. Admittedly an out-of-balance condition. I hope to do better.
This is going to be a race report, but given how little I wrote about the lead-up I will try to expand a bit and include more about getting to this point.
Let's start with the result. About the same as last time, my first attempt in 2016. A DNF. Just missed the bike cutoff time. As similar as the results are, these two races were worlds apart in how I felt. This year felt much better than 2016. The results do not show this, and I doubt the data will, either. All I can say is in 2016 when I got to my bike in T1 I felt so tired, so completely drained after an hour swim, that riding anywhere seemed impossible. This year, I was tired, but not nearly as much. I was ready to ride. Same at Hawi. Last time I was falling over tired and bonky at the turn-around. This time, tired but still feeling good. Once again on the way back past Kawaihae, on that steep climb that kicks up just before the junction, last time I could barely make it up that hill. I was borderline delirious, way behind on fluids and nutrition. This time it was hard but I felt OK.
Another difference between the two races was timing. In 2016 the cutoff times were based on last swimmer entering the water. On the bike I was only monitoring bike time and did not have enough brain function to add that to my swim + T1 time, and I wasn't sure when the last wave started, so I just kept going until a van pulled up and said I had to stop.
This year, each athlete had their own cutoff time, based on when they started their swim. I used the "Multisport Time" field in my Garmin FR 935 to track my overall time. It displays the elapsed time from pressing start, even through transition and as the activity changes. Nice feature.
As I came down from Hawi toward Kawaihae I could see my bike cutoff time -- five hours and thirty minutes from my start -- getting steadily closer. At one point I had enough brain function to calculate that to reach the bike finish from there in time I would have to average 20 m.p.h., and since that was not possible I knew my day was done. That is why, when I got to the next aid station at the 270-19 junction, I just got off and announced I was abandoning. No sense beating up my legs any longer. I had considered riding on, but I doubt I could have gotten as far as the fire station when the course would close and I would be picked up anyway. Like last time.
Why were my times so similar? It may be because I followed the same training plan. The plan I use is by Joe Friel, the well respected master coach and author of the Triathletes Training Bible. He also wrote Fast After 50, and my plan was specifically designed for older athletes.
A term often kicked around in discussions about training is "specificity." The idea is to do workouts that closely resemble the demands of the event you are training for. The Honu bike course is exceptionally challenging in that it is never flat, and it includes some long steady climbs that feel as though they go on forever. To me what is more challenging than the long, steady climbs are the rollers, where you just get settled into climbing mode when up goes your cadence and you transition to descending mode. For example, below is my ride data from T1 at Hapuna Beach to Kawaihae. The gray shaded line is elevation, always going up or down. Not just rising and falling, like Kalanianaole Highway. This is more like going around and around Diamond Head.
Friel's training plan included a lot of bike tempo intervals, which I did on Ford Island where I could blast along unimpeded by traffic. Very race-like conditions provided the race is on a flat course. Toward the end of the build phase I did switch out the interval workouts for sessions on Pineapple Hill. I suspect I should have started that earlier and done more.
On the plus side, Joe Friel's plan got me to the start line without injury. This is something we often hear, how an athlete struggles to perform because every time they train hard they get injured. It is surprisingly easy to train too hard, especially at my age. Looking back at the race I find myself thinking that I should have done a lot more. Swim every morning. Run every afternoon. Bike every ... well, you get the idea. We age groupers frequently admire pros for having nothing else to do but train and imagine how great it would be to train all day. The truth is, there are limits to how much stress a body can absorb. Too little and there is insufficient improvement. Too much and the body begins to break down. The older we get, the narrower the gap.
I recall one specific example of thinking I should do more. After one of my Pineapple Hill days, when I spent the usual amount of time Friel allotted the the bike that day, two and a half hours, I felt as though I should have done two more laps. Even one more. And, after the race, my thoughts returned there. Here's the catch. A race like this takes everything you have. It takes at least a week to get back to anything resembling normal capacity. In that same manner, a really hard workout will demand several days of recovery time. Whatever boost to strength and endurance that workout produced will have evaporated. Better to do consistent smaller efforts, with each workout building on the last.
I cannot imagine doing a long course triathlon without support. The role those in the sport call "Sherpa." I give my wife Pattie a lot of credit for supporting me in my quest, not only the day-to-day intrusion of time away doing workouts, not to mention a lot more laundry, but especially the work and stress of traveling, cooking, and keeping me on schedule. I have to say that the meals on this trip were outstanding. One that really stood out was the Sunday steak dinner; no better meal anywhere.
Time for some numbers. Before moving on, let me share with you some data as it stood on race day.
Which brings us to FTP. In the last couple months I was concerned that my FTP was falling. It went from a high of around 160 last year down to 130. I was pleased to see it jump up a bit after Pineapple Hill, almost to 140. I knew I would lose a bit during my taper, and I was accustomed to associating what I felt with what I saw on my power meter, so for the race I left my zones based on an FTP of 130.
What I learned doing Pineapple Hill in May was that I could sustain a climb at a cadence of 50-60 RPM at power zone 6.0 - 6.2 and heart rate mid zone 3. Not all day, but for reasonably long time. Respiration and overall feel were right for HR 3Z. If I pushed the power to high 6Z my HR would slowly follow, all the way up to threshold. I knew that to have any hope of finishing the bike I had to keep HR below threshold, preferably smack in the middle of 3Z, with a some recovery time sprinkled in.
I have heard that when HR and PWR zones are set correctly they read almost identically under sustained efforts. Riding at PWR 2.8Z should produce HR 2.8Z plus or minus 0.1 - 0.2. That works for me on flat ground, but on hills I usually see this split. To put it another way, vigorous hill work will raise FTP, but that increase will not necessarily transfer to riding at speed on a flat course. I suspect this has something to do with the contribution from slow twitch and fast twitch muscles. Sprinters can't climb and climbers can't sprint, and it is not all about weight.
Back in 2016 at the very start of the bike I was shocked to see my heart rate up in 5Z. This time I expected as much, and was not surprised. Last time I practically walked my bike up from T1 trying to get my HR down. This time I just watched the power numbers while giving myself a little rest whenever the opportunity arose.
A funny thing happened to me this year on the swim. I got a cramp. I rarely get a cramp swimming, and when I do it is always a calf. I lost about two minutes treading water while waiting for it to relax, wondering if I should wave over a life guard and abandon. Another swimmer stopped to see if I was OK -- talk about good sportsmanship!
Here is the Garmin map of my swim. Keep in mind that a Garmin has to estimate your location in the water, because it cannot receive GPS signals while underwater and it only comes up out of the water a fraction of a second during the recovery.
Let's assume that the buoy turn points are well defined, in which case the thin red line represents the ideal swim course. The thick blue line is the route I took. My number one goal was to compensate for my tendency to turn left. My second goal was to stay outside the main swim lane. I started in the third wave. I had a thousand swimmers behind me, all faster. I did not want to be kicked and clawed, and I did not want to impede anyone.
Overall I did rather well, much better than some past races in which I would have ended up out at sea. I actually over compensated at the start (marked with a white arrow). I think I was sighting the first lane marker buoy after the turn, thinking that I would end up at the turn buoy. Well, eventually I did. I don't think my correction was that extreme (90 degree left turn?!), probably a Garmin tracking error there. On the back straight I alternated between drifting left and swinging back into the swim lane. Eventually I got what seemed like way too far out (second white arrow) and made a big correction to swim a straight line to the turn buoy. I was so far out I was sure I would miss the swim cutoff time (1:10 from my start).
I kept going, harder than ever. That plus fatigue plus worry about being off course is what triggered the cramp. All I could do is tread water and wait it out. Once that settled own I did OK. I even managed to beat my 2016 time, and I didn't fall on my face getting out of the shore break.
Below is my swim data. Just as we entered the water I could feel my heart rate was too high, so I spent a few seconds getting settled. I spent most of the swim at a HR between 138 an 140, just below my threshold. I don't know how well these correlate, but it sure felt like I was going hard. You see my HR rise as I struggled to get back to the pack, and again even higher on the way to the beach, going all out to try to make the cutoff. I clocked my swim time at 1:06:32, three and a half minutes to spare. Whew!
Back in 2016 I went as fast as possible through T1. This time I decided to be a little smarter. I took a cup of Gatorade at the aid station, sipping it as I went up the path. I took plenty of time to wash the sand off my feet. I even dove into a porta-potty. Lately, when I do my swim-bike-run workouts, I need to pee after the swim. I decided ahead of time to follow that pattern regardless of how I felt, because more than likely I would not feel the need, which might come back to bite me later.
At the start of T1 my heart rate was 151. We're talking zone 5b. Sprinting. It came down a bit, reaching its lowest point of 124 while I was in the porta-potty. By the end, after running the bike to the mount line, it was 139. Grinding up the hill to the Queen K and onward I saw my HR in 5Z and my PWR varying between 3Z and 6Z, exactly as expected. Over the first hour the HR gradually began to make sense, but it often lingered longer in 4Z than I wanted. Again, I went with power, but moderated somewhat by heart rate.
A race report would not be complete without mentioning nutrition. Back in 2017 I was a Hammer fan. I especially liked the idea of carrying my own fuel in a concentrated form. For Honu that year I did what I had done for several long rides and marathons, mixing Hammer Perpetuem in a highly concentrated dilution, one bottle good for four hours. That means I always had to drink water from a second bottle and would need to get that refilled at the aid stations. To supplement that I took one packet of Scratch Labs gels and one Bonk Breaker. I ate the gels as soon as I could after the swim, and saved the bar for after reaching Hawi. I thought my stomach would complain less if I ate during the downhill. What I learned from the results was that this was not enough calories, and my system takes too long breaking down the relatively complex maltodextrin Perpetuem uses for fuel. I also do not recommend eating while descending at 30 m.p.h.
Hammer pings sugar-based fuels as wrong for endurance athletes. Infinit argues the opposite, that sugar based fuels are the easiest for the stomach to convert into fuel. This year I gave Inifinit a try and really liked it. I have a run mix and a bike mix, with more electrolytes in the run mix.
For Honu the on-course sports drink was Gatorade. Seeing as how Gatorade is a lot more like Infinit than Perpetuem is I decided to start the bike and run with a reasonable stash of my drink, then switch to their's when mine ran out. This worked way better than the Perpetuem method, where every drink required lifting two bottles. The race also provided small Cliff bars, and I did eat one, but I carried three Bonk Breakers and ate two. This time I did not wait to get started eating solid food, one more reason why I felt so much better this year.
Something TrainingPeaks started last year are awards for best efforts. For the bike segment of this race I got seven peak performance awards, all first place best performance of 2018.
Best 5 sec HR, 146 BPM
Best 1 min HR, 145 BPM
Best 5 min HR, 144 BPM
Best 10 min HR, 141 BPM
Best 20 min HR, 139 BPM
Best 60 min HR, 137 BPM
Best 90 min HR, 136 BPM
So, yeah, I was working hard! But still not fast enough.
Some unanticipated issues made life a bit crazy earlier in the year, but as you can see from my Performance Management Chart below, by March I was back on track an making steady, consistent progress. This about as perfect a PMC as a coach could ask for. The only problem with it is the numbers are too low. The blue line in particular; a peak CTL of 62 is just not high enough to take on a race like this. According to this table on the TrainingPeaks site, training for an HIM should hit a peak CTL of 80 - 115.
Another number that is useful here is TSS. This is a score calculated from whatever data is available for a workout (power being the preferred metric, and without that, heart rate). Longer durations at higher effort levels produce higher TSS scores; an hour at threshold will score 100, as will two hours riding at moderate intensity. TSS scores for individual workouts are useful, but the data becomes more useful when viewed as a weekly measure. The result should track the rise and fall of your training plan periodization while showing a smooth, steady climb to the level required for the event you are training for.
Below are my weekly TSS scores starting in April through race week.
This is a good looking result, but apparently not enough. That same TrainingPeaks article on recommended training volume suggest a weekly TSS score of 700 - 1000. I can't tell if those numbers are minimums, or, more likely, what is required to win your age group.
If I were to start now at 700 per week I would run myself into the ground and possibly end up with an over-use injury. This is something runners often get wrong, suddenly increasing their weekly mileage because they are inspired to get a PR at their next race. What I need to do over the coming months is gradually increase my weekly TSS until I can sustain something closer to 700. Remember, time is a factor. I will be focused on higher intensity, but to get a significant increase in TSS requires putting in more time. Where will I find it, and when will I rest? This is the dilemma every triathlete faces.
Threshold heart rate can go up significantly when starting from a sedentary lifestyle. In my case, after several years of serious training, I cannot expect it to rise much higher. The real battle at my age is to minimize the downward spiral. The best way to do that is with high intensity interval training combined with strength training. On the other hand, FTP -- the power produced at threshold HR -- can be increased with the correct training. I was doing a lot of that last year, when my FTP got up near 160. To be successful at Honu I need more. In the coming weeks I will develop a training plan to focus on this.
Regardless of what your threshold heart rate is, or what your FTP is, the power you make has to move your body. At Honu, on the bike, that means moving uphill. Climbing. There is no easier way to improve climbing performance than to lose weight. This is an endeavor I have not been successful at. At six feet I think my ideal weight is 165 to 170 pounds. For more than a year my weight has been 185 or higher. Why spend all that money on a light bike only to strap on ten pounds of extra weight? I don't have any events coming up, so this is a good time to drop some pounds.
If I pause a moment, step back and think about it, what we do -- everyone who gets out there and moves -- is quite remarkable. Here is a memory from the race that really brings this home. I was at the Hawi aid station, refilling my Torpedo hydration bottle with Gatorade. The middle-aged volunteer who handed me the bottle asked where I was from, how my race was going, hesitated a little, then asked me my age. When I told him I am 68 he nearly fell over. I guess it never occurred to him that old guys like to do crazy things, too.
wow Gary lots of data. Good job oon your level of effort and feeling better this time even though uour results were the same. Awesome
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