I finished reading Chris McCormack’s book „I’m here to win“
(in fact, I listened to it as an audio book). I can’t say it was the best book
ever, but I found some helpful pieces of information in it as you would find in
any book. The one thing I’d like to talk about in this post is the amount of
training such an exceptional triathlete did at the beginning of his career and
leading up to his 2 Kona Ironman world champion titles in 2007 and 2010.
Let me start with the numbers which I translated from miles
to kilometers:
The training volume for the years missing in the table was
not mentioned in the book. For better visualization, I created this chart:
I will not start with the first noticeable thing, i.e. the
increase in bike mileage, but rather chronologically to try to understand the
progress.
1997 was the year of the first ITU Olympic distance world
title. Besides the steady increase in bike mileage over the previous years, it
is noticeable that there was an increase in swim volume exactly in that year.
Due to the scale of the chart, this is better to be seen in the table which
shows an increase by more than 40% versus 1996. This reflects the importance of
a strong swim in the draft-legal Olympic distance. Being in the lead pack as
the bike leg begins is crucial.
2002 was the year in which McCormack started to seriously
race the Ironman distance and did his first attempt in Kona after having won
Ironman Australia. In that year, McCormack’s bike volume continued to increase
(27%), but it is noticeable (from the table) that the run mileage had an even
bigger jump (44%). Increased run mileage is vital to survive a marathon after the
long bike leg and it was sufficient to even win some Ironman races, but not the
toughest one in Kona at high temperatures.
Finally, the key to winning Kona was, not even more run
volume, but rather an increase in bike volume such that Chris’ legs were still
relatively fresh after 180 km of biking and ready for a fast marathon.
What I would have been interested in is the amount of hours
Chris trained, but this was not mentioned in the book. So, I estimated it. I
divided the training kilometers by the average speed that I guessed Chris might
have had in average. This was 3.5 km/h for the swim, 33 km/h on the bike, and
14 km/h running. I hope I’m not too far off with these numbers, but I have no
clue (for sure my numbers would have been much lower). With these speeds as an
estimate, this table shows the number of hours of training in each discipline
and the total per week:
The numbers and curves underline my above mentioned
conclusions. The additional piece of information I read is the total number of
training hours per week which had to increase to 23 in 1997 before a
significant win at the Olympic distance could be achieved, and then another
increase to above 30 hours with the start of Ironman racing at top level.
So, how many hours a week do you average at? And, what is
your goal?