The Definitive Guide to Your First IRONMAN
The IRONMAN. 2.4 mile swim, 112-mile bike, followed by a marathon. It’s known as one of the world’s great tests of endurance. Every athlete that toes that starting line in an IRONMAN will carry the memories for the rest of their life. But how should you go about approaching your IRONMAN journey? Unfortunately, many athletes struggle so much during the lead-up that the final experience falls flat from their expectations, both from a performance and emotional standpoint. There is a common misconception of what it takes to be successful in an IRONMAN, and these misguided beliefs leave athletes fit but fatigued (or, worse yet, injured) during their preparations for the event. As a result, the journey itself becomes a monkey on the back rather than an enriching experience, and by the time race day arrives, most athletes are desperate for it to be over.
It shouldn’t be like this! Let’s break the mold of traditional IRONMAN preparation and develop your ultimate guide to IRONMAN training within the context of a time-starved life. We want you to thrive, not just survive. You should love the journey as much as race day, and draw massive health and emotional benefits as you take on the challenge.
Let’s go through the prescription:
Framing Success
An IRONMAN is a massive undertaking, and framing what success means to you is your initial step to setting yourself up for a positive experience. So first, I will outline what success should look like, then pave a road for you to get there.
Success is:
Arriving fit enough to achieve your desired result but fresh enough to execute on that goal.
Nailing a training journey that is enjoyable, rewarding, and enriches your health, not damages it.
Recognizing that the journey is where you’ll glean the real insights into who you are.
Too many people finish their first IRONMAN but allow their health to suffer. This is not the only way. Let’s change that.
From the big picture it’s necessary to break up your initial approach to the event into three buckets: race choice, broader (life-based) components of success, and components of training success.
Race Choice
You must be mindful of your strengths and weaknesses. For example, if you don’t do well in hot environments, maybe, don’t choose IRONMAN Cozumel for your first rodeo.
Remember, your family is part of this journey and event with you. Take them somewhere they’ll enjoy!
Don’t think you can just take the odd weekend away from work or your life commitments. An IRONMAN event can often be a weeklong exercise in organization and travel. Plan accordingly.
Global Components of Athlete Success
Purpose: Identify and hold on to the purpose behind why you’ve chosen to undertake such an enormous task. Purpose is a far stronger motivator than metric goals; it’s tangible and meaningful.
Smart Program: A reasonable and personally tailored training program is essential for success. Your training must fit into the responsibilities of your daily life.
Education: To glean the best results from your training prescription, you must understand why you do what you do. Education is a must; you need to know the why behind each session.
Community and Support: The most successful athletes lean on their peers and family for help when the going gets tough. Not only that, but sharing in the beauty of the journey makes it that much sweeter.
Components of Training Success: The Purple Patch Pillars of Performance
Endurance Training: It’s of the utmost importance that your training plan allows for flexibility and integration into your routine. It’s not a good program if you can’t adhere to it!
Strength Training: At Purple Patch, we are adamant that our athletes participate in a yearlong strength regime. It has benefits ranging from performance enhancement to injury prevention.
Nutrition: Your diet is your fuel; all your hard work goes out the window without proper adherence to healthy nutrition and adequate hydration.
Recovery: The final piece of the puzzle. While training breaks our bodies down, proper recovery allows us to create adaptations and get faster.
From day one you should be approaching training from a holistic point of view. No single thing will bring you success. It is the mix of good habits that results in progress.
Debunking Common IRONMAN Myths
In recent decades, IRONMAN has become a global phenomenon, and there is no shortage of media or coaches who will tell you have to train a specific way or simply won’t be successful. Take a step back, think about why you’re doing this and remove yourself from the noise. Now, I will debunk a few training myths about this famous long-distance event. Always remember IRONMAN training should make you a healthier person, both emotionally and physically.
You Don’t Need 20 Hour Training Weeks to Be Successful
Instead of saying to yourself: “I need to train for xx hours this week or it’s all a waste,” go about it the other way around. Take a look at your work, family, social, and sleep schedules, and say to yourself, “Where can I fit in training around all these essentials?”
By obsessing over hitting a certain number of training hours, people often neglect the equally important supporting habits of sleep, nutrition, and recovery and end up sabotaging their training anyway.
Think of why we train. Training is specific stress designed to facilitate physical adaptations. The body continually adapts, but adaptions can be positive (fitness/strength) or negative (fatigue/injury). To progress performance, an appropriate level of stress is necessary over a period of weeks and months.
By getting the balance between training, life, and recovery correct, we consistently improve fitness thanks to positive adaptations. This way, we are fit and also fresh to perform in life and racing.
Don’t Chase Miles
Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need a super long run and/or a super long ride every single week. An over-reliance on these extra long sessions will not only create unnecessary fatigue but also a massive strain on your other weekly commitments. Who has 3-6 hours every weekend to go ride off into the sunset?
Recognize that long sessions are important and schedule a handful of weekends with the time and headspace to undertake these big workouts.
On busier and more stressful weekends, there is no need to feel guilty that you didn’t have time to get out for that big run or ride. (Leave that for the golfers!)
Not All Workouts Are Created Equal
Every workout serves a role, but, for a time-starved individual, it is paramount to realize that some sessions can be skipped and truncated if necessary.
You should have a dynamic approach to training. Look at it this way: there are two types of workouts, key sessions and supporting sessions. Key sessions push the performance needle while supporting sessions serve as recovery, preparation, and general fitness stimulants.
If work or life gets in the way, skip a supporting session, or truncate a key session, where you just complete the meat and potatoes of the workout.
In a similar vein, no workout is absolutely essential and a disaster if missed. A well-built program should allow for incomplete or half-completed sessions. And, don’t try to make them up on subsequent days, please.
A truly well-built IRONMAN training program is structured over a period of many months, not weeks, and relies on its make-up as a whole for success, not one or two ‘essential’ weekly workouts.
The Roadmap for Your IRONMAN Journey
I’ve given you a lot of background and pointers on approaching your IRONMAN preparation and training. Let me go into a little more detail concerning the actual process. A peek behind the curtain, if you will.
Firstly, and of utmost importance, don’t take a short-term lens. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither are you. When targeting an IRONMAN race, one should aim at least a year in advance. There’s no point rushing a journey like this. If you want to get everything out of it, you must embrace a long-term point of view and dive headfirst into the performance lifestyle.
Phases of Training
Build the Athlete: Before we even begin to think about serious endurance training, I like to emphasize low physical stress movement for 2 to 3 months. For a veteran athlete, I refer to this time as ‘Post-Season.’ Post-season consists of focusing on technique, strength training, and a gradual building of miles to create muscular resilience.
Add Some Stimulus: Following this, we move into the preparatory phase, also lasting 2 to 3 months, just before the racing season begins. This period aims to add a little stimulus and spice to the mix. This is where speed and power are developed. Traditionally, we take a step back from heavier lifting in the gym during this time and emphasize core work.
Early Season Racing: If possible, I find it immensely beneficial for my athletes to participate in a few ‘easier’ and shorter races at the beginning of the season. This can include anything from sprint distance triathlons up to 70.3 distance events. Getting race experience is a perfect way to get the body used to some much harder efforts. Additionally, it allows us to dial in our racing tactics and nutrition plans. This phase lasts between 6 and 10 weeks.
Race Prep: For 10 to 16 weeks before your IRONMAN event, we focus on race-specific efforts and prime the body with short, sharp stimuli to keep the fitness but avoid fatigue. During this phase, planning is vital. Consistency is king, so mapping out big weekends and easier ones will be a key to athlete success.
My magic words for IRONMAN prep are: consistency, progression, and specificity. Training must be integrated into life, not dumped on top of it.
Before we wrap this guide up and I want to emphasize a crucial preparatory aspect:
Supporting Habits
Strength Training: Important for injury prevention and to blast through performance ceilings. Heavy lifting in post-season and more mobility/core-based and explosive work during racing season.
Post-Workout Fueling: A simple but oft-neglected habit. Protein is essential for muscle synthesis and physical stress reduction. Carbs are necessary for refueling and daily brain function—most endurance athletes under-fuel.
Recovery: Without recovery, fitness gains are impossible. A helpful regime to follow is that you should embrace 2-3 days of easier training every two weeks. Warning signs of overtraining include dropping performance across sports for more than a few days, losing motivation, and extreme fatigue. Keep an eye out.
Squad Triathlon Training
Squad is the triathlon training program designed for the time-starved athlete. Developed by IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon, the program is tailored to exceeding success expectation for athletes with a busy lifestyle. Train smarter, not harder, with Squad