Long distance success ?!

Hello everybody,

yesterday I finally watched the ZDF Hawaii video. I have to say, great cut, great coverage. Makes you want to exercise again. The video can also be downloaded from the Internet:

http://www.megaupload.com/de/?d=G88J63WB

about 325MB in size. But definitely worth it!

It has been seen time and again recently that top short-distance athletes do extremely well in their Ironman debuts. The latest example would be Andreas Raelert. This year's Ironman winner Craig Alexander also came from the short and middle distance before he finished second in Hawaii last year. The same thing happened a few years ago when Jan Raphael made his IM debut in Florida and Vuckovic also achieved his best results shortly after starting his long-distance career. All of these athletes have one thing in common, they are bomb runners with a very well developed tempo.

That brings me to two hypotheses:
1. Speed hardness is also important for a long distance. The missing training units in the extra long area can be made up for in a relatively short time by short-distance athletes before their first long distance.
2. Even short-distance athletes have enough basic stamina for an Ironman, but also have the advantage of "relative freshness".

To explain the second point, one can take the last two athletes mentioned as an example. After their initial successes, shortly after switching from the short to the long distance, their relative performance decreased again. I dare to predict that the performance of the former will also decline again in a relatively short time. Formerly very good short-distance athletes have successfully established themselves in the Ironman circus. Then they evidently tend to imitate the training regimes of this scene, that is, “a lot helps a lot”. As a result, however, they lose their "freshness" and train themselves in the well-known "permanent state of fatigue" in which the top professionals on the IM track are in abundance. As a result, performance often degrades. Of course there are exceptions here and my hypothesis does not always apply, especially with athletes who can tolerate a lot of volume.

Nevertheless, the assumption that you have to train more and more ultimately leads to a dead end. You can always increase the intensity, but at some point you can't. Above a certain threshold one even becomes "slower" by increasing the volume. Especially age group athletes, who in principle have much less time available for training, can use their valuable training time more effectively through “short distance training”. Two months before the long distance, the training can be scaled up in terms of scope, in most cases this is more than sufficient. You hardly lose any basic speed and can count on a successful competition.
See my buddy Steffen, with his 8:52 hours in Kökn this year.

With months of basic training, with increasingly longer units, where should the speed come from? Two months before? At this point you would even have to reduce the scope again to be able to cope with such intensive training.

skin in!

krelli