SBR Utopia Season II - OPEN (Page 93)

Just my unscientific 02, but I think if you spent the "offseason" riding consistently with roadies, and concentrated on one other sport (run or bike), when you switch over to more tri type specific workouts in the spring you will be a monster (or more than the monster you currently are....)

And funny enough, I had the opposite happen on my first Trek road bike.  Spec'd with 105, but delivered with Ultegra FD and RD.

Question for everyone, but certainly looking for Marc's input on this one.

After all my back and forth, and asking how to improve my cycling, swimming, etc., I've decided to give a marathon a go.  After spending a few weeks in the Hokas I feel reasonably confident that I can get through all the training required for the marathon.  But to not go overboard, I'm going to follow a 24 week plan, maxing out at 55mpw.  Marathon is in May, and I'm just going to continue to follow the BarryP approach till mid-November and then transition to the actual marathon plan.  I am definitely intimidated by the number of km, but figure it's time to try the marathon distance, with a goal of a BQ time (3:15 or better for me).

So, my question - is it unreasonable to hope to make any gains on the bike during this same time period, or should I accept that I just need to try and maintain (although I've barely been riding lately).  Either way, since most of my time will be spent on my trainer, what type of rides/workouts should I focus on week in/week out.  With the amount of running in the plan, I don't wnat to sabotage myself on either front.

The reason I singled out Marc was because he followed the 100 runs in 100 days challenge, but I know he was still riding.  All thoughts and ideas appreciated.

Neil, I think it's possible to still get in some cycling while marathon training but it's going to be tough.  Especially if you have a BQ goal.  I also did the 100/100 challenge but only made it to around 45 days.  Then I got sick, and figured I would go back to 5-6x per week once my streak was broken.  It was great for my running, and I was still able to ride 2-3x per week, but I wasn't running marathon training volume or intensity.

I was doing 3 rides per week, 3-4 hours with a mix of threshold and VO2max and I think I ran 5-6 (usually 6) days per week but nowhere near 55mpw.  I just took a quick look and through March the most I did was 55 km in a week.  That resulted in pretty good improvements in both run and bike.  I think if I was going to run 50% more than that I would have had to back off on the bike

I wasn't in the challenge, but getting 97-99 runs in the 100 days hasn't been unusual (and so has that mileage for periods of time). Might have hit 100 somewhere, but the consistency is plenty high already. And yes, it's entirely possible to continue making cycling gains. How much depends on balancing some things, but basically done how Marc and Arend described. I rode more because I had the time, energy, and willingness to do so, but the stronger efforts were the more important part to make sure of.

I'd be fairly confident that you'll be better off by having improved your cycling now. It doesn't take as much to maintain or regain it, so even it if does slide a little, you'll still be ahead of if you hadn't done it. How much you maintain will depend on how things play out, but this was definitely a good thing.

Now I'm feeling bad that I singled out Mark when the rest of you were running so much - not sure how I forgot about Arend in his -30C Ninja gear.  Also shows how woeful my running has been up till now.

Ok, so it's established that you can do both.  Next - how do you balance out the efforts?  Recognizing that most of the bike work is going to be VO2 and Threshold type efforts, how do I fit those around longer and/or harder days of running.  I keep thinking back to previous discussions of keeping easy/rest days as such, and saving the harder work only for hard days - but that seems like too much on the hard/big days.  Here's an example of a week (week 18/24 to be precise). 

Monday - Rest (following 27km run Sunday)
Tuesday - 13km Easy
Wednesday - 14.5 km w/ 5x1000m @ 5K pace
Thursday - Rest
Friday - 17.5km Easy
Saturday - 8km Recovery w/6x100M strides
Sunday - 27km w/22.5km @ MP pace

Neil - first thing I would do is switch all the runs to miles, just so I would know how far I was actually running without having to do a lot of math. Plus, it would make it seem like I was not running nearly as far, so would be less daunting, maybe? . But on the other hand it would make my average pace slower.... so maybe that would be counterproductive? Other than that, I got nothing.

I think I recognize your name, but I'm not sure....nice to see you posting Rusty.

Thanks for your thoughts as well.  When you say traditional marathon training, I'm assuming this may be a higher volume than I'm targeting, but like I said, even maxing out at 55mpw is daunting.  I ran last night with a 28y/o KQ guy who is currently prepping for a marathon this month.  His weekly volume is 80 miles this week, which just boggles my mind.

I don't have anything to add, but I did want to see if anyone has input on this part.

With respect to keeping the hard days hard and the easy days easy, what kinds of things should you be thinking about?  For example, say you do a hard ride on Thursday followed by a hard swim on Friday, is that two hard days back-to-back?  Or is it one hard day of riding followed by an easy (off) day of riding?  And one day of easy (off)  day of swimming followed by one day of hard swimming? 

Also, what's considered hard?  I'm currently trying to build my run volume up from nothing....all of my runs are in Zone 2, but I wouldn't necessarily call them "easy" for me...

Nicole - a long time ago Jason shared a real key insight with the group re: just exactly what a "day" really is. Hopefully he will say it better than me, but suffice it to say that if you consider a "day" simply as a 24 hour period (as opposed to a morning, noon and night) it changes the game as to how you can structure back-to-back "hard" days and still have an"easy" day sandwiched in there. Hopefully he will chime in on it!

For the record, I don't every really think about off days or easy days, instead I think about "recovery" days, i.e. what do I need to do to recover well. Recovery needs are obviously different from individual to individual based on a host of variables, but an example for me might be that after a "hard" ride or run day, a swim that includes a lot of "hard" kick sets (ugh) provides much better "recovery" than an easy swim or off day.

Here's the "plan" to get me to the beginning of the actual marathon plan.  Sorry Rusty - I think metric.  Makes me seem faster on race day, except in the water where I'm never fast anyhow...

Long runs on the treadmill...I'm dreading this as a possibility, but know it's a probability.

Ha Ha! Yeah, somehow in my 8 months of laying about I have lost the ability to simultaneously work productively and post on BT. I am working on it, but I may have to simply give up on the "work productively" part....

Oh, my "traditional" marathon training was nothing like an elite runner - I have proven to be rather fragile when it comes to big volume running that I could never successfully get over 55ish MPW without suffering some sort of injury, no matter how I worked up to it. So the swimming literally took the place of some of the running workouts with a goal toward getting the same or more of the cardiovascular load as the planned run.

For me, a typical week is:

Monday - off or easy run
Tuesday - AM bike,  PM hard run 
Wed - AM swim, PM easy run
Thurs - AM bike, PM hard run 
Fri - AM swim, PM easy run
Sat - long ride, possibly short easy run
Sun - Long run (which can fall under the category of hard if it's long enough)

The swims are usually hard but rarely affect me the next day (they might if I tried to swim again).  Bike is always hard in some way or another.

Yeah, that has also proven to be a pathway to injury for me as well for some reason. Whenever I see Fred putting in day after day of "Hospital Treadmill" runs in I honestly have thought to myself that maybe I should get my own hospital treadmill - that way I wouldn't have to go very far to get my knees replaced.... Like I said, I think my legs are made out of glass compared to you guys....

Yup.  I've embraced my inner snow ninja for this reason.

We could train on the same schedule it seems.  ;)

Oh man, are we getting to that time of year where you all start complaining about snow again?