What It Actually Took Me to Get Ironman Fit

Here’s the schedule

For around four weeks, I tried to average 5 km swimming, 50 km running and 200 km on the bike.

This was the schedule:

The interval session on Tuesday was the one I failed to do most often. In hindsight that setup might not have been ideal. Running 30 km on Monday and then expecting myself to do a hard interval session on Tuesday was obviously going to be hard. I probably should have moved the 12.5 km Monday run to Tuesday and done the interval session with fresher legs.

That four-week block got me into Ironman shape. If you already have a decent base and can sustain something around this volume for four to six weeks, I think you can get yourself fit enough to finish an Ironman.

I would not recommend it though.

Training for a full Ironman sucks

I don't mean this in the usual “you need to sacrifice your social life” way. The problem isn't really that you don't have enough time to do anything else. The limited free time you do have, you're too exhausted to do anything with.

You want someone massaging your legs half the time. You're constantly tired. Your mood is atrocious. You don't want to go out, you don't really want to see anyone, you're just rather miserable.

It's not that you look at your calendar and think, “Unfortunately I don't have a free slot for dinner on Tuesday.” You look at your phone and think, “Nope, I don't want to see anyone.”

For a couple of weeks your life is basically working, training, eating and lying around trying to recover enough to train again. I am very happy I did a full Ironman once. It was a great project. I don't think I need to do another one.

Half Ironman is, in my opinion, the much better distance. It's still a proper race, it's still difficult and you still need to train for it, but you can do all of that while remaining a relatively normal person.

The Ironman itself was actually less bad than I expected

The funny thing is that the actual Ironman wasn't nearly as horrible as the training.

I did mine in Klagenfurt. Here’s roughly the recap from the notes I took right after the race.

The start was annoying because it took forever. They start people in waves and I think I got into the water almost an hour after the official start of the race. Once I finally started swimming, I felt really good. For the first 2 km or so my technique was good. The difficult part was mostly sighting. In a pool you have a line underneath you. In an Ironman you're looking up and the next buoy is somewhere approximately in Slovenia.

The last 800 metres my technique completely fell apart and I was basically just wobbling through the water, but I came out with a time I was really happy with.

Then I got on the bike and did exactly what you're not supposed to do: I went too hard. For the first 20 km or so I was pushing around 200 watts and still doing something like 35 km/h, which felt amazing.

At kilometre 30 my knee started hurting. By kilometre 100 I was already pretty fucked. There are two laps in Klagenfurt and there is a decent climb in it. The first time I went up it pretty aggressively. The second time I was dragging myself up there wondering why I had done that.

I also had stomach problems for the first half of the bike. At around kilometre 80 I took a quick bathroom break, which was probably the single best tactical decision I made all day. My stomach was basically fine afterwards.

The last 40 km of the bike I stopped caring about speed and just rolled towards transition.

And then I had to run a marathon.

At the beginning my watch was claiming that my heart rate was 170 while I was jogging around 5:20 pace. I felt completely fine, so after a while I basically ignored it. The first 10 km were great.

At around kilometre 15 I had this very distinct moment where I realised: Oh. I'm going to finish.

From there until kilometre 25 or 26 I was running around with a gigantic grin on my face. At kilometre 30 I started getting properly empty and slowed down, my pace dropped to around 6:30, but I never really had a moment where I thought I wouldn't make it.

And then I finished. I was insanely happy and super proud.

It was honestly less bad than some Half Ironmans I had done before.

Why? In a Half Ironman, you're pushing. You're racing. You are trying to get everything out of yourself, and when you get to the finish you're completely destroyed.

A full Ironman was different for me. I wasn't really racing anyone. I was there to enjoy the day, survive it and get to the finish. You're going slower, you're eating constantly, you're stopping when you need to, and somehow that made the whole thing significantly less horrific than I expected.

The weird thing that happens before every race

What did get worse, rather than better, after doing a few of these races was the start.

I get violently nervous before an Ironman now.

I don't mean normal pre-race nerves. I mean crying, shaking, completely unable to control the reaction. And what's strange about it is that rationally I am much less scared than I was before my first one. I've done this multiple times now. I know I can swim the distance. I know I can ride the bike. I know I can run afterwards.

But after a few races I realised that my body also knows exactly what is about to happen.

It remembers that this is going to be a very, very long day. It remembers the hours of exhaustion, the stomach issues, the pain, the moments where you're completely empty and still have a ridiculous amount of distance left to cover.

I’ve traumatized my body and its screaming at me “please dont do this”.

So you're standing there knowing you're about to voluntarily put yourself through five, six, ten or twelve hours of something your body remembers as horrible, and you also know that you're probably not going to let yourself quit.

Then you get into the water and, weirdly, most of the nerves disappear.

A few things I learned along the way

1. People are way too scared of the swimming

   People are always afraid of the swimming part of triathlons. It's the shortest part, and it's really not the hardest part. Just learn how to swim. I learned by watching YouTube videos and going to the pool twice a week for three months. You get direct feedback from the water because you can feel whether you're gliding or fighting it. Just get into the pool.

2. You're probably running too fast

   Get a heart-rate monitor and stop caring about pace. For easy runs, the only thing I cared about was keeping my heart rate below around 135–140. Your Strava might look shit and some 70-year-old might run past you. Who cares. Build the aerobic base.

3. Find friends for the long bike rides

   Find people to train with, especially for the long bike sessions. Riding 100–120 km alone every Saturday gets old very quickly. Spending four hours talking shit with friends makes the whole thing significantly less miserable. No need to be an endurance recluse!

4. Don't train with headphones

   You're going to spend a lot of an Ironman alone with your thoughts. Get used to it. Long sessions have troughs where everything suddenly sucks, and then 20 minutes later you're completely fine again. Learning to sit through those moments is part of the training.

5. Be ready for the cold-water panic

   Putting your face into cold water can make your body completely freak out. Your breathing goes crazy and suddenly you feel like you're drowning, even though you know how to swim. People genuinely quit races in the first few hundred metres because of this. Know that it can happen, calm yourself down, and keep swimming.

6. Train your nutrition

   Maurten gels and especially the drink mixes worked really well for me. Train with them and get your stomach used to them, because during the race they're basically all you're going to eat. Do not try to figure out nutrition for the first time on race day.

7. Change your running shoes

   Change your running shoes every 400–600 km. You're spending thousands on the bike, race entries, wetsuits, hotels and everything else anyway. Don't cheap out on the one thing taking thousands of impacts against the ground every week.