The 5 Biggest Ironman/70.3 Mistakes To Avoid

Welcome to another episode of the Get Fast podcast brought to you by Trivella Coaching, where we help triathletes and cyclists like you train smarter to race faster. You are joined as always, by your hosts, Australian Ironman champion and four times Nationals Masters cycling champion and a lot more accolades, Gerard Donnelly. And I am Jordan Donnelly. In today's episode, we are talking about the five biggest Ironman preparation mistakes you might be making and what you should be doing instead. Before we get into the episode, if you want to get our expert secrets cheat sheet, that is the cheat sheet of the very best tips and advice all the experts that we have on our podcast give all put into one simple document. You just need to go to getfastpodcast.com that is getfastpodcast.com and you can download that cheat sheet there to help you train smarter and race faster. All right, dad. For today's podcast, we are talking the five best biggest Ironman preparation mistakes and what you need to do about it.

What a great topic, Jord, but it must be said there are more than five mistakes. We could talk for a few hours on the things that I've witnessed over the years, but we really want to concentrate today on five key factors that are only specific to Ironman, because some of these things would be controversial if you were doing Sprint, Olympic, and even up to 70.3. So we want to hone in on the five common mistakes rather than, you know, the 20 other things that I've seen people do that haven't helped contribute to a good result on race day. And after all, that's what we're after. We're after having a really good experience on race day, and we want to talk about the things that will help you prepare so that you actually get to the start line and then have a real fun day.

Yeah, absolutely.

And if you can have a fun day in an Ironman, I'm not sure about that.

Yeah. When I came to you and said, I want to talk about five things that people are doing wrong and what people need to know if they're going to prepare for an Ironman, and you kind of looked at me and said, well, I could list a hundred in terms of preparation. There's so many things you need to go through, right down to what to eat, when to eat it, what do you do the night before? You could just go on forever. But yes, we said, all right, well, let's just talk about five things that people need to get right in their overall preparation to make sure that they're. These things are going to have the biggest impact on their preparation. So that's what we want to start with. So take us through. Take us through. Number one, what is.

Okay, look, number one. And let's just point out at the start, these are mistakes we're going to point out, but what we're going to do today is actually give you the right advice as to how to avoid those mistakes. So number one, this is probably a little bit obvious, but you've got to allow enough time in your preparation for an Ironman. And if you come to me and ask to do an Ironman and it's eight weeks away, the obvious reaction for me is you're almost too late. So there has to be some sort of understanding of what your previous experience is before I make my mind up about how much time you've got. So if you come to me as a novice and you've never done an Iron Band before as compared to you come to me and you've done 10, then I would have a different answer. So starting your preparation too late is a very general thing to say and it also depends on the athlete's experience. So let's just say if you've come to me as a novice, I would say in order to run a marathon properly you would need at least 26 weeks. So why would that be any different in an Ironman when you're going to have ridden 180k before it and swam nearly 4k. So for a novice person, 26 weeks is the minimum time that I think you need. Anything above that is a bonus. But you know, 26 weeks sounds a long time. Half a year. But gee, it's a, you know, not, it's only 26 weeks of long runs or 24 weeks of long runs because you take out the taper and um, and especially the long rides. You, if you haven't ridden past 100k, you know, in training, you need to actually progressively develop your training to achieve comfortably a six hour ride by the end of the preparation.

So what is your ideal? Even if someone's done an Ironman before or they've done maybe a 70.3, but they've never done an Ironman, they've had a lot of experience in triathlons but never done an Ironman. What is your ideal? Six months is minimum. Would you personally prefer an athlete to come to you for 12 months?

Yes, 12 months is the ideal.

So if someone comes to me and says I've just finished busso, I'm not happy with that result.

I want to.

Know what I did wrong in my training. How can I improve my result?

I'll go, fantastic, have a couple of weeks off and then we'll start the basic training program. So you've got at least a year under your belt.

Yep. So how, how early is too early?

Well, I suppose that's a question we talked about later is how long can you hold form for? So we're not trying to achieve our best results in, you know, let's just use say the race is December and we're starting training in the start of the year of January. We don't expect to be in race form in January, February, March, because we can't hold form from March through till December. So we want to progress ourselves. And it's not about getting yourself in tip top shape initially. It's about just creating that base foundation so that when you get closer 12 weeks out, then you can start really ramping up some intensity and reducing the volume. You don't want to be doing, you know, four weeks out from an ironman. You don't really want to be doing six or seven hour rides. But because people come to me so late, that's what we end up doing. And that is a huge mistake because you go in with too much fatigue, you want to go in there fresh and all your base stuff should be, you know, and that comes back to.

The question not allowing enough time. So if you actually did do that.

Then you know, you could have had probably six months of five or six, you know, one per month, six hour.

Ride under your belt from January through.

Till July or August.

If our race was December.

Yeah.

So come, come race phase that we.

Call from base to, to peaking to.

To racing, you've got all the miles behind you and it's a matter of then improving your, your functional threshold power, improving your running pace. So, so come race day you're actually going to with a higher power, you're going to have a higher average speed.

Yeah. So that's pretty much the starting point is starting with enough time on your belt and then not trying to peak so early that you're trying to hold form for a long time coming into the race.

Exactly.

Good. So take us through point number two and this is one that you say a lot to people when they come to you.

Yep.

And look, it seems pretty minor but.

A lot of people when they get to the race, they still haven't swam in. Whether it's a lake or an ocean, wherever the race is, they've only swam in the pool. And I think that's a major error.

The feeling in a pool, in training, or even in a time trial in the pool compared to getting out in the open water, it is. The anxiety levels are completely different. You haven't got the end of the pool to hang onto the lane ropes. In the open, you're surrounded by deep water, you can't see the bottom. There's so many things that you don't want to increase your anxiety enough of having to do the race, adding that component. This is the first time I've ever been in the water in the ocean, sorry, not in the water. So you want to eliminate that by regularly swimming in a similar course that's going to be in your race, whether it be in a lake or in a river. And if your race is in a lake and not in a ocean, there is a huge difference. The salt water in the ocean is going to give you more buoyancy than a lake or a river is. So you need to swim specifically in the event course. That's what your race is made up of. So that might seem obvious, but I guarantee many people I coach, you know, get to their first triathlon, they still haven't swam outside a pool or they.

Have, but they haven't enough. Is that correct?

No.

Lots of people have gone into races without swimming outside a pool, and people might shake their heads at that and laugh, but that's what people have done. I've done plenty of swimming training in a pool, but I just haven't exposed myself to the conditions of waves with wind and thousand people bumping into you. So, you know, I really recommend doing some swim races outdoor. That would be really good if you can. If you can't get into a race, get a couple of buddies to swim side by side with some directional boys. They're really good things to do and they're fun.

Yep. Yep. So when you. When we spoke about probably the biggest swimming mistake of overall preparation, you were torn between saying you've got to swim in the ocean because that is imperative, as well as, don't spend too much time swimming.

Yep. So I would break it up into. You know, we've talked about this many times on other podcasts, but the amount of time spent swimming should reflect the.

Amount of time and the percentage in the race. And as we know, you know, if you're.

If you're a.

Let's just pick if you're a 9 hour or a 10 hour and 11 hour, you may swim 1 hour, you may ride 6 hours, and you may run 4 hours. So already we've sectioned it out into percentages. So I don't recommend you spend more.

Than 40 or 50% in swimming when it's dominated by bike riding.

You need to be fit in the.

Water, you need to have swum outside and you need to have had some intensity. So I would recommend people, if they can, do a pool session with a squad, if you can, or if not, on your own, in a pool and an ocean or a lake swim. That would be the two key sessions that I would be doing. And people go, oh, that's a little bit underdone. But the aim in swimming is to be fit enough to get through the course so that you can ride and run comfortably and not be exhausted. So swimming fitness is important. So endurance in the pool or in your ocean swims. So you don't want to be doing, you know, massive amounts of 50s and 25s and hundreds. You want to be swimming some 1k reps and 1500s and something that's going to give you endurance fitness so that you're not tired for the bike and run.

Absolutely. So that takes us to the bike. One of the big mistakes you see is just generally not being fit enough on the bike.

Yeah, people underestimate 180 kilometres.

You have to have done a lot of good quality endurance rides.

And I don't mean in a pack riding for six hours where your pressure on the pedals might be, you know, 50% of your FTP, you want to replicate and gradually build, because we know that between 70 and 75% of your FTP is what the age group is will ride at. So if you're spending a lot of time in a bunch where you might be averaging 60%, it's not replicating what's going to happen in the race. Um, so the endurance factor in bike riding for the Ironman is a key component. Of course, we need some intensity and that's what we'll talk about later with running and riding, the comparison. But definitely the intensity on the bike is far more easily achieved than it is in running. And you need to do some intensity, but not in your endurance rides. You want to use that for pressure on the pedals, similar to the race intensity that you're going to have on race day, which is between 70 and 75% of your threshold.

So where do you see this popping up with people? Because when you describe it like that, and you say you need to be able to have the Fitness to ride 180k on race day, how often should you be riding that in training?

And it goes back to our initial Question, how much time have you got? So if we have 12 months, that would be great. To have a build up of one four to six to seven hour ride each month, that would be really advantageous. I would say you would need lots of strength work. So I would be telling people to go to some undulations all the time, stay away from the flats. But then you would look at the course profile of your race. Is it a pancake flat race? Well, even if it is a pancake.

Flat race, you're better off having lots of strength in your legs to finish off the race. In the last 40k of 180k, when you get to 140k mark, that's when.

People either ride strong home or they fade.

And that's directly related to the amount of endurance strength training they've done in their preparation. So it's a long winded answer. But the fitter you are on the bike, the more you can sustain the same tempo throughout the whole 180k rather than fade. And you know, execution of your power numbers is another topic which we'll spend time on another day.

But really getting yourself fit enough and getting yourself into some hills to give.

You some strength, staying away from pack riding. You don't ride a triathlon ironman in a pack, so don't do that in training.

And that gives you a false sense of security when you've ridden six hours in a bunch. And as we said at the start of this point, you don't get the pressure on the pedals because there's so many periods where you know if you are on the front of that bunch, awesome. Because you're hitting the wind, you're getting everything everybody else is getting. 30% drafting effect behind you. Don't want to be one of those people in the bunch getting the drafting effect. Sure, you're getting time on the bike, but it's not pressure on the pedals which is improving your fitness.

Yeah. So you talk about pressure on the pedals a lot. What does that exactly mean?

Yeah, the great example is if you're indoor training compared to outdoor training, people get off their indoor bike after two hours going, oh my legs, compared to two hours outside. What's the difference? Well, outside you've got no flat road. Basically in the world there are deviations in the road, whether they're 1 meter drops or half a meter rises. There's release and pressure on the pedals as you go over highs and lows of the road. So you're getting all these micro fractures.

Of rests as the Bike dips down a meter drop. Whereas on the Ergo, if you don't pedal, nothing happens. So you have to have constant pressure.

So that's why pedaling indoors on an Ergo is such a good fitness tool to use. If you can sustain that, maybe outside into a headwind or up a climb, where you can keep the pressure even against the hill or against the downhill. And that's a real art, is understanding how to keep the pressure on the pedals outside.

And. And that's where we use the lap power button a lot in our training, to make sure that people can look down and focus and see, my lap should be 180 watts and I look down and it's 160. Because we're going downhill. Well, that's your signal to go. I need to put more pressure on the pedals to get it back up to 180, even though it's a downhill section. Whereas on the Ergo, the pressure on the pedals is. I look down, I'm holding 180. If I hold. If I hold 90, cadence, it's 180. If I hold 90 cadence, it's 180. That keeps repeating itself. So the pressure on the pedals, I think that is the difference between outdoor and indoor.

Yeah. And we often see that a lot with you. When you're riding in a group, you get over a crest and down the hill and you'll put 20 or 30 meters in everyone. And people are going, what are you doing? Pushing away? And you're saying, I'm just going the same pace.

Yes.

Yeah.

And it's like cruise control in a car. If you're driving beside a car who doesn't have cruise control and you've just got it set on 100 kilometres an hour, and the car will still go over the crest of a Hill at 100Ks an hour. But the natural reaction of a person driving manually in a car is as they get over the top of the hill, they release the pressure on. On their accelerator.

It's the same thing. So the car's showing an even speed, but the guy beside him is looking at the guy going, why do you keep going forwards and backwards on me? And it's just holding constant pressure. Yeah.

So that takes us to the last two points, which are more about running, which you really find vital. What are the last two mistakes here?

Yeah, well, look, this is crucial because.

People love riding their bikes.

I don't think people are in love with endurance training.

For running, there's a small percentage of marathoners who absolutely love running. And I was one of those runners. But in a triathlon, most people dread the run, especially the marathon.

Um, it's the key part of the race. And, you know, our number four is not doing enough running off the bike. You know, I see people doing lots.

Of training for their running, and they've never ridden before it. What.

What is the key component of the triathlon?

Ride, then run.

It's not.

Ride, have a rest for half a day, then go for a run when you're feeling better. So you need to practice the component in the race, in your training. And that's the biggest mistake I see.

People do in their run training is not getting off the bike and then running. And, you know, in our program, we have lots of little runs off the bike.

When you've done a hard intensity session.

On the bike, we have an easy.

Run off the bike twice a week. We have the weekend where we do.

An endurance run off the bike, and.

Then we do another short run where you've done a long endurance ride. So we reverse those two. There's only one day during our program where they run fresh only once.

And that is probably the reverse of most programs. Most programs are probably running fresh, doing running sessions without being off the bike. They might do one quote unquote brick session, which is ride, then run.

And look, our program's quite controversial, but.

You know, our experience has shown that most people who run through our program are the better runners at the end of a triathlon.

And why? Because when they get off the bike, they've done it in training that many times.

That's what feels normal, running off the bike.

People who've just done a lot of.

Running training get off the bike and then think, well, they are actually fit runners, but they're not fit runners off the bike. And there's a huge difference there. So they get off the bike thinking, I'm nailing this, and they think, what's wrong with my legs? It's because they haven't practiced it. So it's foreign to them and they run poorly.

How many times someone said that to you? I'm a really good runner. I can run this time, but for some reason, I just can't do it in a race.

Yeah, and a lot of the times we try to. Every now and then, we do some specific time trialing on the bike, swim and run individually. But then I'll put them together and show people their 10k time trial against their 10k time trial with the bike and see what the difference is. A hard Bike session, then run 10k off the bike and see what the difference is between a fresh 10k.

Because you would almost say to people, I don't care what your fresh 10k is.

True.

Because you're not ever going to do that in a race.

No. And we've got to a point where, and I tried to do this in my career, was to get my 10k off the bike as close to my 10k fresh as possible. That told me I was a good.

Runner and that was one of my.

Goals all the time, is how close.

Can I get this to my fresh 10k?

Yeah. Yep. And I think this is when you said this one. I know I've said this a lot with all these mistakes, is I hear this, say this a lot. But when you read a lot of articles online or you see a lot of the advice given out there, it is, you need to do more run sessions off the bike. And when these articles are saying do more, they're asking people to go from zero to one because people aren't doing any. And so they're saying you need to do one, whereas we're saying you should be doing three or four.

Doing four. Three almost weekly and four every odd week off the bike, plus one fresh. So we're doing five, four or five runs off in a week, and we're doing probably four runs and two swims. And that goes against most coaching models, models that I've seen, which I think are just not. Not specific enough.

Yep. Yeah. So our last point, our last big mistake is a point on running, and it's on the same notion, it's almost an egotistical mistake, is that athletes are running too hard in training. Yep.

Look, running too hard in training being the. The last point that we're going to make, what do I mean by that? Does that mean you just go out and run easy all the time? Well, no. You've got to look back at what we do on the bike. The bike is where we get a lot of our intensity, where we get our cardio as high as we can and really lactate ourselves and train over threshold and really work ourselves hard, because the risk of injury on the bike is far less than when you run.

That's the number one point.

So when you run anyway, cardio is stimulated higher than a normal bike effort. So you don't have to run very hard to stimulate your cardio. So the reasons we try to do lots of good running training is to get general musculoskeletal system because you are supporting yourself when you Run whereas on a bike the bike's supporting you. Weight bearing compared to weight bearing, weight bearing activity. So that's really key and stimulate our cardio. So there are two things we were trying to achieve in running but unfortunately the harder you do that and the more you do that, the higher the risk of injury is. So what are we trying to achieve here? We're trying to achieve an endurance marathon runner here.

And you know to do repeated four.

Hundreds for an ironman marathon runner is going to a risk injury because you're running too fast and B, it's actually not specifically related to to the event. So you would want to be doing sessions where you are actually running 5k reps, 3k reps where you can run at a steady pace that can be over your marathon pace, but it's not.

At your race pace.

And every now and then you Throw.

In a 10k or a 15k or.

A half marathon so that you get.

Some race specific intensity. And a lot of those races I get our guys to ride first and then get off and get go and do the race. So they're getting a feeling of running off the bike like 0.4. So running too hard in training.

I see lots of athletes who are really good runners because they run with.

A running group and they run four times a week with the running group.

And they can run a fantastic 10k, no doubt about it. But that put them into a triathlon.

And they keep coming back saying I'm.

Running so well in training, but I.

Can'T replicated in the race.

But you're not replicating it in training, you're replicating something else. You're replicating fresh running. And that's one of the things we Talked about in point 4. It's the same thing here.

So where do I get my intensity if I'm saying to everybody you're running too hard in training? Well, where am I getting my intensity? I'm saying you're going to get it from the bike and you're going to get your endurance and musculoskeletal fitness from running with less intensity as a runner.

And there are some sessions that you will advocate for some intensity.

Yep.

So our Wednesday sessions normally steadily progress, as you know very well in our plan, from steady state to tempo to some hill strength runs to some monofart leg and that that repeats itself. So, so we do gradually once the body is fit enough, then we expose it to some faster running. But we only do that once a week and all the rest of the time we're actually trying to do some run just to get time on our feet, just to build the musculoskeletal system. I keep going on about. And the stronger you are being weight bearing running, the less chance you have of recurring injury.

So I guess for both those last running points, it is a bit of a, it's a confidence thing, it's an ego blow because you, it's fun to run fast, it's fun to run fresh, it's fun to feel good. It's not fun to try and slug it in a running session off the bike and do long slow stuff consistently. So that's why it's very tempting to go to a running group and, and feel like you're running really well. But as you're saying, if you want to race well, it's not the best thing for you.

Yep. And on that point a lot of the guys who come to me have said, you know, yeah, I do lots.

Of endurance runs, you know, and I'll.

Say, okay, run me through what your last five long runs were and how long ago they were. And they'll say, Yeah, I ran 18K, I ran 22K, I ran 24K. And then they stopped speaking. And I think is that as far as you've gone in your last preparation? Oh yeah, I think I might have done 130k. Well, there's still 12 more k to go. And I don't advocate that everybody in training runs 42k, but I definitely advocate that you should be building each week in each month with some breaks in between. Just like I talked about with the bikes. For 12 months you do one six hour, you need to be doing one per month where you're running definitely close to your marathon time.

Not hard, not with intensity, but just.

Time on your feet and you have to build up to that. And that's why, you know, if I'm coaching individual marathoners, depending on how, how much training and how much racing they've done, they really need to be starting off, you know, 18 months if you're a novice. So we really want to. Most people in an average age group would probably be between 3 hours 30 and 4 hours 30. That's the marker that we're coaching people at. If you're running under 3 hours 30, you're going to be a really competitive triathlete in your age group and most likely get in the top 10. So really it's important that you have lots of months build up where you.

Can run, you know, two and a.

Half to three to three and a Half hours to four to four and a half hours. And you can't just do that on a base of 20k. You have to progressively get to that point. There's so many examples of the people I coach who have done trail running, 100k trail running where I've had them doing six hour runs and they've built up to it to a six hour run. You might start laughing six hour runs and then gone in the afternoon and ran two hours. So they've ended up doing an eight hour run in preparation for a 15 hour 100K Blue Mountains. And they've hardly had any intensity. Just the things I spoke about before with tempo, some monofart leck, some hill repair. And just by doing this endurance run they have smashed their PBS in 10k, 15k, 21k, 42k without really training with intensity. And it is so obvious to me how this endurance run has contributed to such good results in other shorter distances.

That's fascinating. I think that's a good place to finish. I think there's five pretty key lessons people need to take. And I think the overarching principles of all these five come down to what you always talk about. And it's the Trivello motto and it's plan, prepare, perform. And if you do not have a proper training plan or racing plan, you are not going to go so well in your race. And all these things are about making sure that you are well planned and well prepared.

Yeah, and look, we've just talked about the Iron man mistakes, but we haven't really touched on what you should be doing in the race. And that's something from another point, another topic. But to understand your numbers in training all the way through to your race day and then executing those numbers in race day is one of the key things. Even though we're not talking about as one of the five mistakes now. But people going into a race without a race plan from their training, you know, that's one of the points that could have been in this slot here. But we, we want to talk about that later. So that's really something that, you know, don't, don't think that, that I don't think that's important. I think it's almost the key thing for the race preparation. We're talking about other things here. We're talking about actual training, training, preparation. But in the training, if you don't understand your power numbers and your running pace numbers, come race day, it's like going into an exam without doing any study. So you get to know all your pace for running, get to know all your power on the bike and you also get to know what swim pace you can swim at so that you can predict what your session is going to look like for any given day or week and then you can implement that into the race.

Absolutely. So if you want to know those more specific examples of what you should be doing in the swim leg, bike leg and run leg, you can check out our videos on that and we have videos on what you should be doing and the mistakes in those specific legs. We hope you enjoyed today's episode on the five biggest Ironman preparation mistakes and what you should do instead. It's a really broad topic but it's important that if you are looking to step up to that Ironman level, you get these major things right. They're going to have a big impact on your total preparation. That's it from us. Thanks for listening to this episode. Tune in next time.