5 Reasons Your First IRONMAN Falls Apart (And How to Avoid Each One) | Ep 606

So number one, I had an amazing bike leg.

My bike leg was much faster than I expected it to be and I felt fantastic.

And then I had a horror show on the marathon.

So honestly, there's no way to coat this nicely for you.

You rode too hard.

If you've had a much, much faster bike leg than you expected to, and then you have a bad marathon, you've ridden too hard.

And honestly, the mantra I want you to live by here is there's no such thing as a good bike leg followed by a poor marathon.

It meant it wasn't a good bike leg.

It means you've made a mistake and gone too hard.

Now, the reality of this is the maximum that you can ride your bike at and still run well is well under your limit of what you could ride the bike at.

And the grey area between those two speeds isn't something you can consciously feel.

Even if you're riding with a power meter sometimes, you have to do the maths beforehand to work out the correct power and pace for you to ride at to be able to ensure you're still going to be able to run a really strong marathon off the back of it.

What we do with our athletes is we work backwards from a training stress score budget of 280.

So no matter how fast or slow you go, that's your budget, a TSS score of 280.

This is really useful if you've got a power meter because it can be really exact.

If you're riding by heart rate, you can still use heart rate TSS and backwards work from that, but it isn't quite as useful.

you're going to have to use the training peak software in order to calculate tss that's the first thing with all of this and what we've found is if you get your ironman bike like within a 280 tss you can then run really well and if you go over that you're not going to be able to run really well so you've got a budget of 45 tss points per 30k ridden that's the way to think of it So if you're going out with a power meter riding, you need to do the maths and work out, okay, so I'm riding at X number of watts.

That gives me 45 TSS points in my allotted 30K.

That's the average power I'm going to be able to ride in my Ironman and still be able to run well.

Now, I'm not saying for a second you couldn't ride harder and faster than this.

You absolutely could.

You smash yourself to bits on the bike leg, but you're not going to be able to run well.

Years ago, I'm taken back to a friend of mine who went out and did Ironman Lanzarote.

And he said, I really wanted to break.

He wanted to break 530 on the bike leg from memory.