Finishing off the Base Phase in your IRONMAN Training Plan

You will now have settled into your first six weeks or so of training for your IRONMAN. Now what? This article will help ensure you stay positive as you start to understand the task at hand and also offers some practical advice for if you are missing sessions.

After the first few weeks of IRONMAN training you will have found a routine that works best from a training point of view. This isn’t just working out which days you will train and which days you won’t. Rather more to do with getting used to prepping your equipment for the next day or week; waking up with tired muscles and heading out the door to do the next session; and working out your logistics on how and when to eat. If not, you will be quite close to getting it sorted and understanding how your body responds.

You certainly will have a good idea of what current kit serves its purpose and what maybe needs an upgrade or needs to be recycled as a bike rag. You will also now have a good idea of things that may make great pay-day personal gifts for yourself!

Generally speaking after these first few weeks, you will have already learned a huge amount about training, and about yourself. In fact, it may be the case that you find your head is more tired than your body!

Is Your Schedule Tricky To Stick To?

You may also have found your mind trying to comprehend the enormity of the task at hand – that's ok; if it was easy everyone would be doing it! You may have missed a few sessions or struggled to fit them in. You may even start feeling guilty about the fact you couldn’t do it or start to feel the whole thing is impossible. Well let’s stop you there.

Firstly, you aren’t a full time athlete! This means that you are totally entitled to have life get in the way. In fact, even the professionals or full time athletes will adapt a plan to make it fit in with their life. Think of a plan as guidance of what you need to do. Of course, Plan A is to do it all perfectly but when that becomes impossible, doing what you can, doing something rather than nothing and trying to keep a level of consistency together is the best way of ensuring you reach the start line in the best possible shape and finishing the race with a medal round your neck. Busting a gut to do it all when sometimes life gets in the way is more than likely going to result in you cutting corners elsewhere (usually sleep) and therefore ending in a situation where you are run down and possibly injured. If you do this a few times in a row without addressing the root-cause of the situation and IRONMAN suddenly becomes a lot harder than it needs to be! 

1 hour of missed training works out to being about 0.27% in your IRONMAN Training Plan

If you are following our general training plan for IRONMAN you will be training a total of approximately 362 hours or about 22,610 TSS (a way of measuring training load) points between now and your race. If you miss one hour of training (that could be about 60 TSS points of moderate training) in the grand scheme of things you lose out on approximately 0.27% of your IRONMAN training.

The planned average hours of training each week is 11:21, so if you missed a weeks worth of training then you would miss out on 3.13% of your training. Clearly we don’t want you to miss out on a week of training but the point is that if you stay consistent and the misses are a lot fewer than the hits, and focus on the process of doing training regularly then a few hours here or there is not the end of the world. The problem arises when you keep missing the same session or you keep on missing training through the week. However, if you are committed to the race, then that is unlikely to be a problem and the missed sessions are a part of training. Sadly, it is almost impossible to get them all!

Needing help to get out the door? Read this article here.

As you finalise your base training, you will begin to see yourself getting fitter, able to go further and generally feeling more mobile. Now is the perfect time to look forward to the next phase as you start building your IRONMAN fitness and the sessions become a little bit more intensive.

Keep it up!