Sérgio Marques Blog

With less than 4 weeks to go, I’m in the final week of my longest block of training I have ever done, PERIOD!!

 

April 15 will be the day of my first race of the season. I have been fully focused on this big race, as I haven’t done a single race…be it running, cycling, swimming or even duathlon.  And there has been a lot of them around here.

 

But the big difference for this year is that I’m doing all my training alone. The past two years, I spent 90% of the  time training with company, my good friend and training partner for a long time Pedro Gomes.  Now, I may have only 10%.  It’s a  flashback to 2003 when I raced my first Ironman (Florida).  It was way outside of the Portuguese race season and, thus, I had to prepare for it alone.  I had a good result there, so maybe this is a good thing.

 

Training alone is, of course, very tough mentally and sometimes I can feel the need for some company, especially when I’m feeling tired.  But it has big advantages, as well.  One of them for me is the need to focus more on workouts with faster overall workouts..average, distance, you name it.  It’s just easier for me to go through a workout alone if I focus on going a bit faster than cruising and chatting.  With going faster, I mean faster in the goal training zone.  Obviously, I’m not doing time trials as soon as I leave home :D.  It is an obvious benefit that training alone also trains your head, an major factor for Ironman racing 

 

Back to the training block…since Christmas, the volume of training has been consistently over 32-33h per week.  If I look over my training diary and just look at the training volume for this year’s weeks, this is what I’ve done:

32:45

33:35

33:28

32.53

33:03

30:10

34:20

40:10

39:00

37:40

37:45(last week)

 

and the updated totals are (through today)

Swim: 347.1km

Bike: 6909km

Run: 1449km

 

It has been a consistently tough year so far for me, as the numbers confirm :P  Through the last couple weeks, I definitely feel a loss of fitness or in another words, I’m getting really tired and some workouts are very tough.  But I’m sure all the hard work will be worth it when I cross the finish line at Ironman Arizona for the third time.  I’m really looking forward to racing, seeing some old friends, and punching my ticket to Kona.