_ This is not part of the series. I’m just tacking it on here because a friend asked me to write one and I don’t know where else to fit it. This is for those who want to take on the ironman journey.

Couch to Ironman is not common.

I did what you would call “Couch to Ironman” or “Zero to Ironman”. It’s a very common thing on Youtube once the algorithm catches you. I admit to falling for it it to a certain extent. People tell you about their couch to ironman journey while omitting or downplaying their athletic background.

In reality, most people that line up for ironman start line (probably 99% of people - though I don’t have any evidence of this) are avid triathletes. a lot if not most have done it before. It’s highly unusual for someone to do an Ironman without having done a half ironman before or at least any triathlon. Going from not having done any of these to doing a full ironman is what’s called starting from zero.

But that’s not really true. Nobody on the start line is starting from zero.

Growing up playing any organized sport even once a week is a huge advantage. Going to practice multiple times a week for many years is a huge advantage. not only does it give you a good foundation for your aerobic and musculoskeletal systems, it makes you mentally accustomed to training for 6-10 hours per week for years.

But even those who didn’t do organized sports per se, It’s extremely rare for unfit people to to take on the challenge. People who claim to be unfit have been very fit before but lost their fitness due to a sedentary period. Getting back in shape is an order of magnitude easier than getting into shape.

I also didn’t start from zero. I grew up in a country where young boys play football every chance we get. In high school, I did about two years of martial arts which was far from organized but it was really intense training. That came in handy because I knew what hard meant. I also when to the military where we did sports. I also competed in 3 cross country events. I did horrible, and I didn’t get fitter doing it, but that’s the point. It’s not zero. I also did a couple of kayaking events where I did ok, and a half marathon where I did pretty good for somebody who hated running. After the military, I had long periods of sedentary life and was at times very unhealthy and even gained significant weight. I was up to 93kg at a point (I’m 75 now). But even then, I would occasionally go to the gym and I played basketball at times. I had a few periods of 2-3 months where I would do it consistently. So barring 2 or 3 years, my entire life was fairly active with varying level of sports.

So going into this thing, I was far from fit and miles away from ready to start training for a marathon, let alone an Ironman. My friends would be happy to tell you that my participation in any football event was more ceremonial as I couldn’t do two consecutive attacks. I was totally aerobically unfit. Even with my history of training before, I was never really either fit or strong as any man my age. I was probably around or below average for people with an active lifestyle. But still, my point is that It’s not zero. The first day I decided to try and see if I can do this, I ran for an hour like it was nothing. Most people can’t do that. IT’s not zero. A month in, I ran 90 minutes relatively easily.

So yes, I was in no position to start, but it’s not zero, and it never it because nobody is crazy enough to do this. It was too hard and I should have done it over two years, not 14 months. My message is: if you think you are really at zero, don’t be fooled by all these people claiming they are the same level as you. They’re not. They are probably hiding years of athletic background to fir the story they’re trying to tell.

Finishing an Ironman and racing an Ironman are different sports

When you decide to do this, 99% of training programs involve a measure of intense training and easy training. Intense stuff is your hill climbs sprints, and stuff that leaves you gasping for air. Easy stuff is the stuff you do most of the time, for a long time.

I’m no expert here, I’m just telling you what I observed by experimenting on my own training. I discovered that above a certain level, somewhere along the way, there’s really no need to do the intense stuff quite as often, or even at all. If you’re only trying to finish this thing feeling ok, and you don’t care about time, you can just drop it and replace it with longer easy sessions. When I did that, the training became a completely different sport.

That point for me was around being able to swim 2k in an hour, run half a marathon in 2 hours and cycling about 80k flat in about 3 hours, all in easy pace, meaning with a Z2 heart rate. You might still want to keep some, but there was really no need for 12x 1minute hills, 4x4 threshold, or long threshold holds, or sprints in the pool.

I did two training blocks. the first one, called base, was to get in shape, learn swimming and get strong enough to support the training. That was about 8 months. The second one was proper Ironman training and it took about 6 months. Sometimes around the start of the second block, I dropped the intense running, because it was running me to the ground. Two months before the race, right around when I has the crash, I dropped most of the intense bike work and focused on race pace instead. I didn’t do any intense work in the pool in the second training block.

With the benefit on hindsight, I should have probably halved the number of intervals or the duration, not drop them entirely. But also with the benefit of hindsight, I can see that I didn’t need them at all given that I accomplished my goal.

Over about 5 months, I saw my running speed decrease slightly from week to week. I think I lost 1 full minute from my projected 5k time (which is a lot) and about 10-15minutes from my projected marathon time. I was so slow in swimming and cycling that kept getting faster with long easy sessions.

The most consequential sessions that I did for the entire block was those 4 weeks of doing 12x 1min hills. Those changed me as a person. The second most consequential were the 6 threshold sessions I did in the spring. Those also changed me as a person. To be able to hold extreme discomfort like that is a skill for life. Those sessions surely protected my knees and ankles by making them stronger. But once they served their purpose, they were just risk with little upside, given how little I care about time.

Doing Z2 work only was such a different sport for me. It’s one that I found very maintainable. I didn’t have a lot of energy to spare, but I did have time. So if Im running with an easy pace for 90 minutes instead of doing a 45min workout with 8 hard intervals, that works for me because I can recover from the 90 minute run, but I can’t recover as well from the.

I am very proud of the decision I made to cut these intense sessions. There’s a point where sticking to the plan needs to come into question and I never know where that point is. This time, I trusted my mind and my body and it worked.

Most of the challenge is not about the workouts

An Ironman training block will take anything between 8 to 15 hours of training per week for 6 to 12 months. This can be drastically more or less depending on the starting point the the goal time. But unlike running a sub-3-hour marathon or a 100k, training for 10h takes a lot more than 10 hours. With running, it takes 5 minutes to get ready and no time after. With cycling and swimming, it’s very different. combining the three ads another layer of complexity

Cycling takes a lot of time

Cycling, particularly is very time consuming because you have to get in your kit, go out the door, reach your cycling route and do your workout while having to worry about wind and rain much more than you would when running. You also struggle with traffic, poor road conditions, not having the right elevation profiles etc… All of these can be alleviated, but they take so much preparation and time.

Cyclists ride for much longer hours. But because cycling is their only sport, their sessions can be longer so they benefit from the efficiency that comes with that. Riding 2x for 2h is not equivalent to 1x 4h. The former has twice the logistical and mental overhead. I only did 3 rides per week, and on average, I’m adding about 20-30 minutes per ride to get in kit, take the bike down and up the stairs, on and off the trainer, … I admit that I’m slow at this because I never cycled before, but you’re not going to be much faster either. That’s at least an extra hour per week. Add to that

• Bike maintenance (believe me, there will be maintenance). Lubing, cleaning, pumping, charging are the start. But nobody told me about the misaligned break disc, gear indexing, sealant top-up, and the long hours of playing with the bike fit to get it right and the disassembling and reassembling after flights.

• Fueling is a fun topic when you ride for 2h. You basically get to injoy your favorite snack guilt free. When you’re getting into 3/4h+ it’s not fun anymore. If you’re doing 5/6h (which I only did about 6 times), it becomes a chore. You need to plan water and calories and salt because you don’t wanna bonk 10k from the next town. It’s not funny at all. If you add to that the baking July sun in Tunisia, then it’s a very unfunny topic, even dangerous.

• Speaking of planning, route planning take so much time even if you have all the expensive computers and strava route planner. So many things to take into account.

• Riding the same route is boring. Riding newer routes takes time. Route discovery is an independent topic that also takes a lot of time. Even the perfect route might turn out to be a failure in practice because of traffic, poor roads, construction work, or even because it’s an ugly area where you don’t want to ride. Strava does a great job, but you will still discover that a certain segment is not for you and it will ruin a lot of sessions

• Punctures, crashes, mechanical issues will happen. They take time

All of these make your plan to cycle 6h in a week take more like 7h of cycling and 2-3h more on everything else. Riding indoors makes this a LOT more efficient for various reasons. But I personally found it more mentally taxing. 1h indoor is hard, but anything more than 90 minutes is definitely happening outside.

Nobody swims at home

Most people don’t have a 25m pool at home. So you will have to go to the pool. 3h of swimming per week are more like 5-6h if you count commutes and showers. And you can’t start running or cycling right after if you live somewhere cold. If you’re open water swimming with a wetsuit, that’s another thing that takes time. Putting on that wetsuit and washing it takes time.

Planning is the invisible time sink

Most people will have a triathlon coach or they will get a training plan somewhere and follow that. But in any case, you need to adapt the plan to your life. If you are running 5h per week, you can easily move that around in your schedule. But if you’re doing a 12h week, it gets a whole lot more complicated because it squeezes the slack out of your schedule. As I discussed already, 12h are more like 18 to 20.

I’m very lucky to only have my work and training. So I have plenty of time. But, there are so many other considerations that you never think about before.

For example, I can’t do my interval session before work. It just destroys me so I have to do it after. On the other hand, the only time I can cycle is very early in the morning before traffic kicks in. When I was in Tunisia during the summer, all sessions have to end before 8 (except the long ride which can’t). After a hard session espetially at the pool, I need to fuel immediately otherwise I discovered that I don’t recover well. But then I get a huge food coma for like an hour so I can’t work immediately after. this means that I have to start my day at 5:30, finish swimming at 7:30, and I can only work at 10. 4h30 just for one session!! Nobody tells you that. I started to plan my day around it so that hour after eating is when I do my chores. But this is what I’m talking about, you just have to keep adjusting and it takes time.

If you live a perfectly monotonous life, it will be easier because you can keep following the plan once you figure out what works. But a lot of us have movement in our schedules. Sometimes you’re working late, sometimes you need to travel, sometimes you get sick etc… Every time anything happens, the plan needs to adjust. It takes time to sit down, and plan the week. If you plan it wrong, you’re either losing a session or there’s something else in your life that you lose: you don’t find time to cook so you eat like shit for a week, you don’t find time to do laundry so you’re washing the same clothes everyday which takes time. You don’t find time to shop or decompress for a day… it adds up.

Ironman is not really about fitness

As I said, most people who do this are already fit. Even I, starting from what I would call “somewhat unfit”, I was resting on a small mountain of lost fitness that I needed to regain, as I discussed already.

My perspective on this is probably infuriating. But I really believe it from the bottom of my heart. If you’re one of those guys that plays football or beach volleyball or basketball 3 times a week at a moderately high pace, if you’re a crossfitter who does a few sessions a week, then finishing ironman is probably not that hard for you. Finishing under 11 hours will be the challenge of a lifetime for most people and you probably won’t manage, but doing it in 14h… you’re really not that far in terms of fitness

I just finished this thing and I still am not as fit as many of these guys. Even aerobically, I can’t keep up with the most average runner in a half marathon, let alone a 5k. Forget about keeping up with a crossfitter. I can outlast them in an 8h contest, but that has to do with something other than fitness.

The fitness component to an ironman is tremendous, make no mistake about it. But it is dwarfed by the mental component. I’m not talking about the mental game of race day, but that of the 6 months before it. That’s where failure happens.

On the ironman start line, the announcer said something I thought it’s just motivational talk. He said: “The real challenge is getting to the start line”. A couple of veterans on race day said the same. Yes, you need a lot of fitness to get to the start line, but it’s not the poor fitness that will keep you away or prevent you from finishing. It’s the relentless training schedule. Will you be prepared every day? Will you stick to the plan, will you adjust down when you’re burning out, will you keep on top of nutrition and recovery. All fairly simple and not too hard. But they just never end. They just keep coming and coming and getting a little worse every week as the volume increases.

So I think that Ironman training (for those trying to finish, not race) is not about getting fitter per se, but it’s about two things:

• Specificity: Learning to perform these sports for long duration. Sounds a lot lie fitness, but I think there’s a difference. Once I did my first 80k on the bike, I didn’t feel like I’m fitter three months later when I did 140. I just got used to it more. It’s technical competence.

• Collecting evidence that you can do it. Doing an ironman seems impossible, so we get you to do a quarter, then half, then the full in three days, then the race. Yes you get fitter in between, but there’s a worldview that changes, a limiting belief that leaves.

Now that I’ve done it, I see this. Most of the people I mentioned can probably do it in a few months. The body is not far in terms of fitness. It just takes longer to get the mind there.

I bet I can do it again, finish faster with much less training, not because I’m fitter, but because I know what it feels like.