Ironman training hours ...

Hmm, so I had a brief discussion with one of the dudes doing Hawaii this October about training hours (and I must add that it was a brief discussion simply because he was warming up and waiting for the other dudes to show up on the Boulevard for the cycling session ... about 10 minutes after our discussion, I was appropriately placed at the back of the bunch doing my best just to hang on ....)

Anyways, he was just telling me that he had just done one of his big training weeks, coming in with just over 21 hours of training, including a 7 hour 230k long ride. He also mentioned he has no days off ... his biggest junk of time off is from 8am Friday morning after swimming to the 6:30am ride Saturday morning. I told him how crazy he was and that I had felt like I'd done pretty well with about 14 hours that week. He told me that a week of 12-13 hours was "just tickin' it over" for him ... but then, he's had a few years to adapt himself to this (he recently did a 4:14 HIM, he did Hawaii in 2002 and hopes to do around 9:30 there this year ... not exactly in my league).

Just did a tally of my training journal for this week. It was a 'bike' week, which means I go long (150k) on the long ride and add an extra 50k mid-week ride. And, I just happened to switch my Monday night ride (tomorrow's) for a Sunday "recovery" ride in order to get an entire calendar day off, so it was 315k in the saddle altogether. My butt hurts.

That said, I totalled 17hrs (3:30 swim, 9:00 bike, 4:30 run), not including today's afternoon ride, which is technically part of next week's tally.

What a crazy sport this is.