Athlete Series: Base Phase Recap

In my last post, I introduced you all to Kelly, one of my long course triathletes that has given me permission to document his training for the world to see! If you didn’t read that post, make sure to check it out here.

Since Kelly’s A race, Ironman California, was cancelled race morning last year, he has had a long time to prepare for his first Ironman race. It is again his A race of the season. After the typical end of season rest period, we went back to base phase training. Base for Kelly started in February and finished up at the beginning of June.

Annual Training Plan

I set up Kelly’s Annual Training Plan (ATP) in the traditional way. This means his ATP is based off of weekly training hours and fitness level versus Training Stress Score (TSS) like I had done in my lead up to Chattanooga 70.3. I probably need to do a post comparing and contrasting the two methods, but suffice it to say for now that I think for triathletes, the traditional way is probably the best way.

The Training Schedule

While he works from home, Kelly still works a fairly typical 9-5 job and needs to be near his computer or phone during that timeframe. So his weekly training load is set up like most athletes, where shorter workouts happen during the week and the weekends are made for the long ride and the long run. Since Kelly was okay with doing two workouts a day, a few days a week he has an A.M. and a P.M. session. Max training hours for Kelly are approximately 12 hours* a week.

His weekly set up looks something like this:

• Monday: Swim/Strength

• Tuesday: Quality Run/Recovery Ride

• Wednesday: Swim

• Thursday: Quality Bike with a run off

• Friday: Aerobic Run/Swim

• Saturday: Long Ride

• Sunday: Long Run

*during his biggest volume weeks we’ll try to stretch those training hours out just a bit more.

Base Phase for Ironman

Base phase training for Ironman looks just like base phase for any other distance triathlon. Mainly aerobic work building the foundation for harder sessions later on during the training phases. The main difference is the weekly volume. Remember the key to being able to go long and strong is to build a foundation that focuses on endurance. Kelly had a lot of longer sets in the pool, more aerobic endurance focused and tempo type sessions on the bike, and a mix of tempo, hills, and aerobic sessions for the run. All of these sessions were designed to increase his aerobic endurance and aerobic capacity so we can layer on more intensity in the upcoming weeks of his training cycle.

The above photo was a fairly typical training week. You’ll see that he was higher on his weekly hours than normal for this recovery week. This was due to some adjustments we’d had to make the week before in his training schedule.

Moving Forward

Currently, we have moved Kelly’s training into the Build Phase. After talking with Kelly about his goals for this phase of training, we have decided to do a more heavy bike focus training load. As he moves into a few weeks where he’ll have some prep races, this will help boost his power for some of these shorter events. In my next post, I’ll dive into that a bit deeper and take a look at how that plays into the rest of his training.

Okay, that’s wrap for this post, and as we keep getting deeper into the training, I’ll try to dive deeper in the posts!

-Happy Training