Henry Schultz wrote:
I doubt it will be easy no matter how much I train, but I appreciate your advice and everyone else who think I can do it. On these 7+ hour days should I be doing them continuously or with a short break to eat and stuff (around an hour or so maybe) in between. Also I'm still in school obviously so doing anything over 4-5 hours isn't really possible on week days because my school doesn't get out until after 3pm. Right now I usually swim before school and then bike and/or run after school.
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Don't listen to all these people who have less adventerous spirits than you do. It is only an Ironman. All these old guys like to tell young people they CAN'T do something. Well I think you CAN and can do well.
When I was 18 I packed up my bike, loaded it up with camping gear and and saddle bags, jetted off to Germany, and biked south through Switzerland and the French alps doing a 2500 km loop in 21 days. Most days that I rode I did 160km because I was in France around the time of the Tour de France and that was a "short stage" so I figured if the pros can do that every day, i should too. This was in 1984 before there was any internet to read anything. i just picked up some cycling magazines and read what the pros were doing and figured it can't be that bad. Before that I barely biked in my life other than my parents would not drive me to soccer and baseball games so I got around on a beater bike,
I was on my high school track team and practices were 90 min (not continuous) and i . After I came back from that bike tour after 1 month of running I ran my first marathon. It was awesome until it was not. Went through 10km, 20km, 30km at 45, 90 and 2:15 respectively and it just felt easy, until I broke down walking from 32 to 37 km then I realized I was a 3:20 and could get the 'silver medal' if i ran faster and got coke at the side of the road from a spectator and suddenly had legs to run 5km in 20min....then realized the finish line was 200m further and just lost it and walked it in at 3:43. I said I would never do that again !!!
The longest run in my life 8 days out before that marathon was 10km or whatever I ran in an overtime soccer game. Weekend before marathon ran 15km and felt if I could do that and could do back to back 200km biking days, then a full marathon would not be that hard (well it wasn't until it was).
I told myself I would never do a marathon, and next year I did a super hilly and hot half Ironman . I crossed the finish line of that and said, I would never do that again too. That half Ironman was in Brattleboro Vermont (if any of the old timers are around you know how hard it was and I went 4:54). All of this was just on youth and general fitness doing team sports, track, lifting weights etc
I am 58 now. On the other side of those adventures, and have done 25 open marathons, 31 Ironmans and still do olympic, halfs and swim races.
I think in the time of my youth, we did not overthink it. We just figured it out as we went, because there was not information out there. Just put one foot in front of each other, hammer your buddies, and blow up trying, get up the next day and repeat it over and over and over. I remember one of my rides with a friend and he said he read that Eddy Merckx did 200km per day on a bottle of water and banana, so that was what he was going to do. The problem was we decided to throw in a 4km swim in a lake in the middle with no wetsuits. I had 4 granola bars and a stopped for a few bottles of coke (you could not get Gatorade in stores that easily). In any case around 192km into the ride (incluive of a 4km swim), my buddy was so low on blood sugar, he almost crashed into a guard rail on a bridge over a river and luckily bounced off and did not fall over (YIKES). We literally had zero training information and just read legends in magazines and figured they must be good ideas.
Unlike us you have the strength of youth (which we had) but you have information, so you can do this safely.
In any case for you 1 hrs swim, 5.5 hrs ride, 30 min run days, I want you to do them on a weekend but without stopping. The reason is you are a 55 kilo male athlete, and I have found that super lightweight lean guys don't do that well at Ironman relative to their FTP W/kilo and their 10km speed, and I suspect this is due to not enough built in storage on the body for a 10 hrs day, so you have to race at a low enough threshold that you are fat burning (like 3W per kilo bike pace) and and figuring out how to absorb sugar and salt through your gut while you heart rate is moderately elevated. Anyone can digest a turkey dinner sitting down, but putting say 1500 calories through your body in roughly 5:15 on the IMLP course which you should be able to do easily at your FTP is the hard part.
I've personally raced IMLP 12 times so kind of know the lay of the land. Your lightness will help big time. So will your youth until it doesn't. The key is going to be to race in fat burning mode, and taking in enough calories on the bike and run part 1 so you can race the final 21km of that run.
If you swim every morning and bike/run evenings on weekdays, you have plenty of training to do an Ironman with one long workout on the weekend. Keep swimming a lot. Every strong Ironman athlete has a big swim background. You just can't replicate the volumexintensity in the other sports during this formative period in your life. I wish I was put in a swim program by my parents, but we did not have the means for that.