Within the final weeks of training in the lead up to an Ironman, many athletes will begin to ask themselves the question: “Am I ready for my race?” Coach James has a few answers...

This is in fact a question that is not just specific to the Ironman distance, and it’s completely natural to evaluate how well prepared you feel prior to a race of any distance by reflecting on the training you have done. Athletes will ask themselves questions such as: “What are my fitness levels like?”, “Am I at my race weight?”, “Could I have been better with my dietary habits?” And crucially: “Have I done enough training?”

The truth is many age group athletes go into an Ironman distance race feeling that they have not done enough and will base this feeling around their typical hours of training completed per week. In the days leading up to the big race it’s common to hear other athletes talking about the 18, 20, 24 hours of training per week they have been doing. You see athletes posting on social media details of high-volume training sessions and big blocks of training that they have completed.

Of course, sufficient training volume is important when preparing for an Ironman. You need to have spent enough training time building the endurance that you will need to complete a race of this distance, but training volume cannot be the only factor that determines how well prepared you are.

You may well have been hitting your target of 20 hours of training per week, but how effective has this training been and have you been able to balance this training stress with sufficient recovery? Has your training been specific in preparing you for the demands of the race? Has there been progression in your programme over time and through the different stages of your programme? Has there been sufficient variability in your training, including working across a range of intensities to help ensure continued physiological adaptation? Have you managed to distribute your training load effectively across each week and each block of training to facilitate effective recovery between sessions and help to ensure that you are as fresh as possible for the high priority sessions in your training programme?

It’s not just about training hours per week and an athlete who has consistently completed 12 hours per week of well executed training balanced with effective recovery will be better prepared than an athlete who has been hitting 20 hours per week of simply ‘going through the motions’.

The fact is, when you are in the final weeks leading up to your race, there’s little to be gained by worrying too much about whether or not you have done enough, or in fact, what you could have done differently to be better prepared. You have done what you have done and it’s far better to focus on ensuring that the final stages of your preparations are executed as well as possible to enable you to have the best possible performance on race day. Go do the race, then evaluate!