Why We Tell Athletes “Three Years to Ironman”
If you want to race well at this distance, being the tortoise is better
by Chris Bagg
Do you ever wonder how some athletes make the Ironman distance look so…easy? You know these athletes. Even at the end of the race their kits don’t seem to be out of place, and instead of the “rat drowned in its own sweat” look they seem to have simply perspired, as if out for a light run. They cruise across the finish line and accept their finisher’s medal casually, instead of the way that you bent double upon crossing the line and then hobbled in that undignified position to the volunteer, who asked, doubt in their voice, if you were OK.
What’s the deal? How can some athletes seem to handle 8-17 hours of effort look so…achievable? And, more importantly, how can you do the same thing?
Allow us a short digression on our way to answering this question. We’ve always been a fan of Gordo Byrn here at Campfire Endurance Coaching. Gordo has been in the triathlon world…forever. He was an elite amateur in the 90s, won the Ultraman World Championships in the early 2000s, ran the excellent coaching company Endurance Corner for years before happily selling it, and now publishes the “Endurance Essentials” substack, to which we heartily encourage you to subscribe. We have no affiliation with Gordo, so that is not a suggestion we profit from—he just publishes great and actionable information.
In this post, Gordo talks about “1000 Day Pacing,” which he also talked about on the Rich Roll Podcast. Yes, that Rich Roll Podcast.
So what is “1000 Day Pacing?” Astute arithmeticians will notice that 3x365 = 1095, which is definitely in the ballpark of 1000 days. We have long maintained that, if you are starting from zero, it will take you three years to be ready for an Ironman. Gordo is in the same process himself at the moment, returning to competitive endurance sport after a bit of a hiatus. He started his three year journey with a year of what he calls “Basic Fitness,” followed by attention to metabolic improvements, a build to the Ötillö World Championships in 2023, then “work capacity” and the amazing (but relatively short) Alpe d’Huez Triathlon this year before finishing 2024 by building his Ironman run capacity. Next July he will finish his 1000 day schedule with a trip to the great Challenge Roth in Germany.
Knowing Gordo, he will have a successful day at Roth. In fact, when I think of that athlete I mentioned at the beginning of this article, I think of Gordo. Why? Well, Gordo, more than any other coach I know, understands the concept that the more margin for error you give yourself when racing Ironman, the better your day will go.
You cannot live on the edge
Most athletes we work with talk a lot about the “minimum effective dose.” The MED is a good concept, don’t get me wrong, since it tends to cut out unnecessary pieces of whatever you’re trying to do.
But going the MED route for Ironman will usually end in disaster. Why? If you do the smallest amount of training to make your Ironman possible, then there is a significant chance that, on race day, something will push you over the edge: the environment, poor pacing due to a lack of mental fitness or patience, lost nutrition, or a snowball effect where one negative kicks off a cascade of other negatives.
Many athletes have limited time but still want to do an Ironman. We hear this a lot in intake calls: “I want to do an Ironman next year but I only have 12 hours a week to train.”
We’re sorry, Broheim, but the answer is “no,” or, more accurately, “not likely.” Here’s why: an Ironman is an energy cascade, where each leg subtracts some amount of energy from your fitness reserves. An Ironman, paced correctly, is nothing more than an 8-17 hour workout at easy-to-moderate paces and intensity. Please note that “easy-to-moderate,” when continued for one to two full work days is not easy. The intensity or effort is your easy-to-moderate effort, but building the endurance to be able maintain that effort for that long will take years, not months.
At any point in your goal Ironman, you should feel that you have huge margins between the effort that will get you your result and your maximum effort. Why? When you increase your intensity, the “cost” associated with that increase isn’t linear. Let’s look at it from a wind resistance paradigm. As speed increases, wind resistance increases at a SQUARE of the velocity. Been a long time since high school physics? Think of it this way. If you are riding at 20 miles per hour, but you want to ride at 24 mph, you don’t need to ride 25% harder. You’ll need to ride almost TWICE as hard.
The same thing happens with effort, although the math gets a lot hairier. But even a small increase in speed can result in a HUGE increase in effort. Let’s stick with the wind resistance for a moment but ported over to Ironman.
Say you target a 20 mph bike split for Ironman. Nothing too groundbreaking there. You’ll finish the bike in around 5.5 hours, and maybe in your training you discover you’ll need to ride at around 200w in order to achieve that split.
But you feel good on race day and you ride 22 mph. Want to guess how much that will take, wattage-wise?
252 watts, or a 26% increase. Yowza.
If you have trained a “minimum effective dose” of training to accomplish 200w for 5.5 hours, then your body probably can’t handle 252w for 5.1 hours. Sure, you wrapped up the bike in 5:06 instead of 5:30, but when you start walking the run you’re gonna lose a lot more than the 24 minutes you “gained” on the bike. Why did we put “gained” in quotes? Because bike splits don’t matter in Ironman—your total time matters. You blew up, Broheim!
When you train Gordo’s way (or our way), you build yourself a much bigger buffer. Can that buffer handle a 26% increase in effort? Probably not, but what it does do is effectively insulate you from your own bad decisions. You have more margin for error because you have trained a LOT by spreading your Ironman build over three years, developing a deep endurance base and, more importantly, a mindset that knows a moderate, consistent effort is best.
How to accomplish it
OK, ideally you’ve taken the principles from the above and are ready to buy in. What does this look like in practice?
Basic Fitness
This is the first step, and in Gordo’s example he spent A YEAR on this step. Most triathletes I know don’t want to spend a year on anything, much less what Gordo outlines. We believe, however, that this step is crucial and not to be missed. Gordo’s principles are:
All movement is good
Everything counts
There is no “minimum” intensity
Pretty simple! At this stage of the training, we want you to be able to handle 12 hours of movement a week consistently. Even more important: that you enjoy the process. If you enjoy this process, you will have built an incredible foundation of mental and physical fitness. Gordo likes to prescribe five days a week with two hours of movement and two days a week with one hour of movement. In that year of basic fitness, Gordo provides a framework for determining if you’re “doing it right.” That framework is:
Do work: Am I training consistently?
Mostly enjoy the process: do I enjoy my life structure?
Endure: is my work sustainable?
Correct errors: do I have a system for better decision making?
So maybe this comes as a relief. If you want to have a great Ironman three years from now, then you can spend the next year aiming for 12 hours a week at any intensity, in any kind of movement, provided you are consistent, happy, able to sustain the work week in and week out, and course correct when something seems off.
Metabolics
“Metabolics” is a fancy term for figuring out your “no-go” zones for training. Gordo suggests lactate testing, but really any kind of testing will do, as long as you figure out:
Your pace/power/speed at “LT1” or your first lactate threshold or your “aerobic threshold.” Please note all of these terms are kinda wildly subjective.
Your pace/power/speed at “LT2” or your second lactate threshold. The term “anaerobic threshold” doesn’t really work here, since above your second lactate threshold your effort is still a mix of aerobic and anaerobic, but now we’re starting to get into semantics. LT2 is also called “FTP,” or “MLSS,” or “OBLA,” or “AnT,” or any combination of letters.
If you don’t have access to lactate testing, you can estimate these numbers fairly accurately with a simple subjective test:
Warmup VERY EASILY (like, 1-2/10 effort) for 20-30 minutes. If you’re on the bike this will feel silly. If you’re running it will be barely more than a walk.
After 20 minutes, simply start lifting your effort SLIGHTLY every five minutes.
LT1 is the power/pace/HR when your breathing becomes audible. Not gasping, not desperate, but audible.
LT2 is the power/pace/HR when you begin to gasp involuntarily.
OK, now that you have your numbers, you can shape your training thusly:
Spend A LOT of time each week at that LT1 intensity. For those of you who enjoy fads, this is that “Zone 2” intensity that has been fashionable for the past few years but that good coaches have been using for decades. At Campfire, we think that this intensity is the most important one, so instead of “Zone 2” we call it…”Zone 1.” Clever, huh?
Spend SOME time just slightly below LT2. Maybe start with 15-20 minutes per week and slowly build until you’re doing around 2 hours each week. At Campfire we call this “Zone 3” or, simply, “Z3.”
Spend A VERY SMALL AMOUNT OF TIME above LT2. Like, a handful of minutes during the weeks that you do this kind of training, which is seldomly.
As Gordo says, using zones or ranges or metabolic thresholds help us avoid making mistakes. We will never be able to train with 100% accuracy, but if we are in the ballpark of these numbers we’ll make solid progress. How long do we spend here? Probably a year. Gordo uses an 8:1 ratio of the LT1 work (which he calls “Green Zone,” which is a great term for it) to “everything else” work, and a weekly structure of:
Two back-to-back easy days
Two maintenance days (around 90’ total of easy to moderate work)
Two “loading” days of 2-3 hours of work
One long day of 3-6 hours
As with any training progression, you need to employ the concept of progressive overload, which means slowing raising the amount of work over a given period of time and then recovering to give your body a chance to adapt to the new stresses you’ve placed upon it.
Work Capacity
During the next phase of training you begin to look at the demands of your goal event, which in this case is an Ironman. Here is the pattern of work you’ll do:
Ability to simply move for the duration (aiming for a 10 hour Ironman? Can you move your body consistently for ten hours? No? Go back to phase two, Metabolics, until you can)
Ability to do the work required to achieve your goal.
“Work Rate” training (usually called “race pace training” in other places)
The first step is fairly simple. If you can’t move your body for the duration of your event, you need to keep building basic fitness. Go back to steps one and two until you can.
Next, can you do the work required spread out over a few days. If you’re aiming for an Ironman, can you do goal time in training spread out over three days, roughly aiming for your goal times? Maybe that 10-hour goal consists of:
1.25 hours of swimming (achievable in one session)
5 hours of riding
3.75 hours of running
Maybe this looks like:
Friday: 4k swim with long intervals swum at goal pace, easy 45-minute run in the evening
Saturday: 5 hour long ride, predominantly at goal intensity, easy 30-minute run off the bike
Sunday: 2.5 hour long run with 3x(4-5 miles @ goal pace, 1 mile easy)
As you get closer to your event, can you do this amount of work in two days? You get the picture. Shrink the amount of time until…it’s race day and you do the work required in one day.
Time
The fourth framework is called “time,” and what Gordo refers here to is the ability to finish strong. That may not sound like “time,” but what he’s talking about is the time before the hard part of the race. For an Ironman, this is the second half of the marathon. We cannot tell you how many times we have heard someone say “it was going so well until the second 13.1 miles of the run.” Yeah, it stopped going well because you were pushing too early, during the time you should have been going at the pace you trained for.
Always structure your workouts so that you have the ability to swim/ride/run harder at the end of the session. When you do that 3x4-5 miles at race pace, you’ll know you’re doing great when the last interval is the best interval. This is not about running faster at the end! It is about going easy enough in the first half so that you have room to increase your effort in the final part of the session. If you are racing an Ironman, that means things stay very controlled until the second half of the marathon. If you have paced it correctly, you will be able to keep your effort high in the last 13.1 miles of your journey. Note I said “effort.” What you will probably see and feel is that you are able to lift your effort (this is why heart rate is such a powerful tool, because it reflects effort or internal strain well enough) but pace will stay flat. Remember that in an Ironman, your goal isn’t to go fast.
It’s to slow down as little as possible.
And building a body that can do that, over 140.6 miles, takes a long time. It takes years if you are new to endurance sports. If you are experienced and you want to put in a great race?
It will still take two years.