# Riding with Power: The IRONMAN 'Cheat Code' | Ep 496

An episode of [Oxygenaddict Triathlon Podcast](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/951501034), 3 Jul 2024, 16 min.

Audio: https://anchor.fm/s/ea99f7d8/podcast/play/88734525/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2024-6-2%2F382223786-44100-2-08afce7a6a5d1.mp3

Join Coach Rob Wilby as he dives into the world of power meters and how they can revolutionize your Ironman race. Learn the critical role of pacing with power and why a great bike leg shouldn't compromise your run. Discover the importance of TSS - what it is, how to use it and what to cap it at for your Ironman bike leg. How to utilise TSS with Best Bike Split to generate accurate bike predictions & intensities that'll enable you to maximise your bike-run potential Mastering your power numbers in training and racing really is akin to having a cheat code - especially in longer distance races. * * * * * * * * SPONSORS * * * * * * * * Like what you heard in this show? Join hundreds of other age group triathletes making the most of their limited training time, training with Team OxygenAddict! http://team.oxygenaddict.com - The most comprehensive triathlon coaching program for busy age groupers. Join the Team Oxygenaddict waiting list and be the first to find out when a space becomes available: https://team.oxygenaddict.com/waiting-list * * * * * * * * * * * * precisionfuelandhydration.com Precision Fuel & Hydration help athletes personalise their hydration and fuelling strategies for training and racing. Use the free Fuel & Hydration Planner to get a personalised race nutrition plan for your next event. And then book a free 20-minute video consultation with a member of the PF&H Athlete Support Team to refine your strategy. Listeners get 15% off their first order of fuel and electrolytes with Precision Fuel & Hydration. Simply use this link and the discount will be auto-applied at the checkout. * * * * * * * * * * * * Watch on youtube Listen on Spotify Listen on Apple Podcasts

## Transcript

[0:03] Hello and welcome to the Oxygenating Podcast.
[0:05] We're brought to you every week by our sponsors, Precision Fuel
[0:08] and hydration.com. You can personalise your
[0:11] fuelling and hydration strategy so you perform your best with
[0:14] 15% off your first order of electrolytes and carbohydrate
[0:18] fuel. Decode Oxygen 24 at Precision
[0:21] Fuel and hydration.com Welcome to the show, everybody.
[0:24] I'm your host, Coach Rob Wilby, and every week we bring you an
[0:28] episode of this podcast to help. Motivate and inspire.
[0:31] You for your triathlon goals for this season listen a couple of
[0:34] quick things you could do for us before we jump into today's
[0:37] episode if you do like this episode, please consider
[0:41] following us on Spotify or apple podcasts and also if you're
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[0:47] would really help out the growth of the show it helps the show
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[0:54] Podcast players and on YouTube. So we'd really, really
[0:56] appreciate that. And secondly, if you're looking
[0:59] for help and advice with your. Triathlon training.
[1:01] Please consider getting in touch with us.
[1:03] You can read all about what we offer at Team Oxygen.
[1:06] Addict.com. And then you can e-mail us at
[1:08] Help at Oxygen Addict. Dot com.
[1:11] Or there's a link in the show notes to book a call with me or
[1:14] one of the coaching team. We can discuss how we can best
[1:17] help you out with your triathlon goals for this season.
[1:21] On this episode I'm going to be talking to you about how you can
[1:24] best use your power metre to give you the best chance of a
[1:28] really good run off the bike Iron Man.
[1:30] And the really good news here is that if you learn to use your
[1:34] power metre correctly, it really is like a cheat code for Iron
[1:37] Man. It really can give you not a,
[1:40] there's no guarantees in life, but a guarantee, I think of the
[1:43] best possible chance of having a really good run and taking loads
[1:46] of the guesswork out of whether or not you're going to have
[1:49] enough energy left to have a really good run at the end of an
[1:52] Iron Man. So the first thing I want to
[1:55] stress to you here is there is no such thing as having a good
[1:59] bike like at Ironman and then a poor run.
[2:02] There's no such thing. And if you hear people talking
[2:04] after a race and saying, I had a fantastic bike split and then it
[2:08] all fell apart on the run and nothing worked out the way that
[2:11] I thought it was going to. Well, the reality for most
[2:14] people is they rode too hard on the bike.
[2:17] Similarly, for people who experience, let's say, gastric
[2:21] distress, if they find they've got to go to the bathroom or
[2:24] they've been throwing up when they get onto the run,
[2:26] oftentimes that is a problem in the pacing of the bike leg and
[2:31] going too hard relative to their fitness and threshold rather
[2:34] than something more nefarious than that.
[2:38] And that's something that a lot of athletes who've made a
[2:40] mistake for going too hard find really, really hard to hear the
[2:44] feedback of. You're probably responsible for
[2:47] This problem is something that a lot of people they either don't
[2:51] want to admit to themselves or they're looking externally for
[2:54] solutions. I think that is really a reality
[2:56] for a lot of athletes who've come to us and had these
[2:59] problems. Once we've put them through our
[3:01] programme and put them through our preparation and they know
[3:03] exactly what numbers they're aiming for on race day, those
[3:06] gastric problems go away. Those problems are the good bike
[3:10] and a poor run go away, and it all starts with knowing how hard
[3:16] you can ride on the bike safely and still be sure that you're
[3:19] going to be able to have a good run off the bike at the end of
[3:22] it. And that's ultimately what a
[3:23] power metre is really, really useful for at Ironman distance
[3:27] racing. The way we go about this,
[3:30] there's a bit of maths involved in this and you have to use some
[3:33] software to do it. But even for those of you who
[3:36] are quite technophobic, we can give you some really good
[3:39] guidelines here. You can practise in training and
[3:42] at the very least I think what people will realise is there is
[3:46] a reasonable level of effort that you can do in an Iron Man
[3:50] relative to your own fitness and still expect to be able to run
[3:53] well off the bike. And the first takeaway here is
[3:56] that reasonable level of effort is probably quite a lot lower
[4:01] than you think it is or you'd like to admit to yourself.
[4:04] And part of the problem here is, well, not the problem I guess.
[4:08] But the challenge is Instagram and professional athletes
[4:12] sharing their power numbers, posting their bike splits,
[4:14] posting their power numbers afterwards, posting the
[4:17] percentages of their FTP they rode at.
[4:20] And then normal people age group is looking at those numbers and
[4:23] thinking, well, if Joe Skipper or Lionel Sanders is riding at
[4:27] 8081 of FTP for their Iron Man, I should be able to as well.
[4:32] And and there's no problem with those guys sharing the numbers.
[4:35] I think it's fantastic. It gives us a really great
[4:37] insight into to what they're doing at the very top end.
[4:40] But here's a very big caveat. Most age groupers are almost
[4:45] all, we'll say almost all, I really mean all age groupers are
[4:49] not professional athletes. They are not Joe Skipper, they
[4:52] are not Lucy Charles Barclay. They don't have the same
[4:56] Physiology and background. And so you have to expect,
[5:00] expect and accept it's going to be different for you.
[5:02] You have to set those sites lower.
[5:04] And in lots of cases, honestly, it's quite a lot lower than you
[5:08] think it's going to be in order to preserve your ability to run
[5:12] well off the bike. OK, so that's the first caveat.
[5:16] I remember years ago doing an Iron Man and talking with the
[5:19] guy before the race and him telling me what bikes but he was
[5:22] going to do. And I knew the Bolton course
[5:24] really well. And I said to him, you know, I'd
[5:27] be really careful riding that fast and that hard on this bike
[5:30] course. And it's a really tricky bike
[5:33] course and you want to save yourself the run.
[5:35] And he kind of shrugged his shoulders and said, you know,
[5:38] I'm fit enough to go and do this.
[5:39] What ended up happening was he did ride the bikes, but he said
[5:42] he was going to, which was about 30 minutes faster than me.
[5:45] And I passed him with about 5 miles to go in the marathon and
[5:48] he was walking and eaten by about an hour.
[5:51] The reason being I think he was fitter than me on the day and he
[5:54] should have beaten me and beaten me well because he'd used his
[5:58] more of his fitness on the bike leg to get that sub 5:30 that he
[6:01] wanted on the bike at Bolton that year.
[6:04] He blew himself up totally for the run and ended up having a
[6:07] horrible overall experience in the triathlon.
[6:10] And it came down to that ego of wanting to do a particularly,
[6:14] you know, a particular time on the bike.
[6:17] And I think that's a big challenge for a lot of athletes.
[6:19] If you have your eyes set on a particular time on the bike, if
[6:23] it's whatever sub six hours, sub seven hours, sub five hours,
[6:27] whatever that number is, there is no way that that is leading
[6:31] you to good decision making for you to have your best run off
[6:35] the bike. What we should be doing is
[6:37] working the maths and saying what I want to do is ensure at
[6:40] all costs at a really good run off the bike here, no matter
[6:44] what the time says on the clock at the end of the bike leg, it's
[6:47] irrelevant if I have a fantastic run and I feel awesome at the
[6:51] end of it. And honestly, your memory of an
[6:54] Ironman will largely be determined by your memory of the
[6:57] last 10 miles of the marathon, not by the time on the clock on
[7:00] the bike leg, for sure. O, in order to give you a feel
[7:06] and a reading for how hard you can reasonably expect to go on
[7:09] the bike and still run well, we're going to set a Test cap.
[7:13] O talked on previous episodes about TSS.
[7:16] That sounds for training stress score.
[7:18] That's just a way of quantifying how hard you're going over what
[7:22] period of time. At S score of 100 is riding at
[7:27] threshold for an hour. And usually for a lot of people,
[7:30] we're looking at around 50 TT points per minute give or take
[7:35] for a sort of steady ride at the weekends.
[7:38] So that's kind of the area we're looking at for an Ironman bike
[7:41] leg to give you some kind of feel for it. 40 to 50 points an
[7:44] hour. We're going to set a TSS cap of
[7:49] 208 T points for your bike leg. This is regardless of who you
[7:54] are and how fast you are. And this is where you can go
[7:58] away and do some research here. You can go and look at the power
[8:01] files from the pros who share their numbers and you'll see
[8:05] their TSS scores on the days they run really well off the
[8:07] bike come in at around this number.
[8:10] OK, So 280 TS points on the bike and we can be pretty sure or
[8:16] very sure that you're going to be able to run well and run
[8:19] close to your potential, if not at your potential come the
[8:23] marathon. If everything else is equal,
[8:24] fueling's gone, well, all of those things.
[8:26] OK, so the next thing to be aware of is that T cap means
[8:32] that people who are different speeds are going to have to be
[8:35] riding at different percentages of their FTP.
[8:38] So if we take a use Joe Skipper or Lionel Sanders as an example,
[8:42] getting very close to four hours for the bike leg, they could be
[8:46] riding at 8082, maybe even 84% of their FTP because they'll be
[8:51] finished with the bike leg in four hours.
[8:54] For an athlete who's, you know, slower and might be taking seven
[8:58] and a half, eight hours on the bike, they can't be riding at
[9:01] the same relative percentage of FTP because it's going to be
[9:05] twice the training stress that the pros experience.
[9:08] So that relative percentage has to be lower.
[9:11] And as a rule of thumb for most age groupers, we're going to
[9:14] advise you to be in the 60 to 70% of FTP range come Iron Man
[9:21] race day. So faster athletes, those down
[9:24] close to an under five hours at the towards the 70% area, slower
[9:28] athletes down towards the 60% area and possibly even lower
[9:32] than that. If you need to be.
[9:34] The key is you have to preserve your chance of running well off
[9:37] the bike at the end of it. So we take our TS cap of 280
[9:41] points and we then go and we go to best bike Split.
[9:46] So software package that's online and it's free to use.
[9:48] There's no affiliation to us. Just go out and Google it and it
[9:52] can do some maths and you tell it all kinds of facts about you,
[9:57] what your threshold power is, how heavy you are, what kind of
[10:01] bike you riding and what you're roughly what your aerodynamic
[10:06] drag is. And it's got ways of working
[10:07] that out if you don't know it. And it can then predict what
[10:11] time you're going to do on the bike given your 280 TS budget if
[10:18] you like. And it will then tell you what
[10:20] percentage of FTP you can afford to ride that overall in terms of
[10:24] normalised power for most people to get that number.
[10:27] And they go, oh, that's quite a bit lower than I thought it was
[10:30] going to be. And that's OK.
[10:32] We encourage all of our athletes to do this with the ethics we
[10:35] coach. We do it a minimum of five weeks
[10:38] out before race day. They do it before their first
[10:40] racing weekend. And then they can go out and
[10:42] they can practise these things in training and they know
[10:45] they're going to be able to deliver it on race day.
[10:47] OK, so 280 S points, use best bike split to predict your bike
[10:53] time. And then it can then give you
[10:55] what your bike time will be, what your percentage of FTP, and
[10:58] you can even play with the numbers, some of the sliders and
[11:00] best bike split and work out the effect of what would happen if I
[11:05] went from a road bike to a time trial bike.
[11:07] What would happen if I put race wheels on?
[11:09] What would happen if I put a skin suit on?
[11:11] You can see in real time the numbers going up or down and the
[11:15] effect those things will have. And again, if you the kind of
[11:17] athlete who's never experienced that and hasn't experienced
[11:22] having a skin suit or an aero helmet or race wheels, that's a
[11:25] really good way to simulate the effect it's going to have.
[11:28] Because people are often mind blown that those things combined
[11:31] can make twenty 30-40 minutes difference to an Ironman bike
[11:35] time just on the correct equipment choices.
[11:38] OK, so once we've gone away and we've worked out what percentage
[11:43] of FTP is likely that we're going to be able to ride for,
[11:46] how long we have to ride for on race day on the course we're
[11:49] given. The next thing you have to do is
[11:51] the hard work. You have to go out and you have
[11:54] to do your race simulation rides over similar terrain that you're
[11:58] going to race in on race day at similar percentages of FTP that
[12:02] you're going to produce on race day.
[12:05] And then your body will get used to putting out those kinds of
[12:08] power and your brain will get used to putting out those kinds
[12:11] of power and you'll know how it feels well before race day.
[12:14] Now, like I've said, we'll definitely be coach.
[12:17] I appreciate if, if our athletes are listening to this, this will
[12:20] be old news to them. We do this in our racing
[12:22] weekends. We do it in our race planning
[12:24] document. People who've been on our Iman
[12:26] preparation webinars have had access to those.
[12:29] If you've not had chance to use them yet.
[12:31] Do it well in advance if you race because the more prepared
[12:34] you are for this, the more times you can go out and practise it
[12:38] with the less guesswork involved, the better prepared
[12:41] you're going to be. And honestly, come race day,
[12:44] what I want is loads of emails from listeners telling me how
[12:47] good a run they had on race day, even though they might have had
[12:50] to ride a bit slower than they thought they wanted to.
[12:52] And what a great experience it was to be able to run the whole
[12:55] marathon rather than walking the last 10 miles like so many other
[12:58] people you'll see have to do come race day.
[13:01] And this all comes down to preparation.
[13:03] There's there's no secrets here. We give away all of this stuff
[13:07] and I know my business advisor said to me loads of times that
[13:10] they think were wrong by doing this, by telling people publicly
[13:13] how to do this. I think all ships rise with the
[13:17] tide. The more athletes we've got out
[13:19] there who get good advice and who do good races, will it be
[13:23] brilliant if some of them became coached athletes for us in the
[13:25] future? But what I care about is more
[13:28] people having good experiences at races.
[13:30] OK, so I really do think coming back to the start of this
[13:35] episode, if you know how to use your power metre correctly, it
[13:39] is like a cheat code for Iron Man.
[13:41] But you have to be aware of what you need to do ahead of time.
[13:45] You can't just turn U with a power metre on race day and
[13:47] expect it to be a magic fix for everything.
[13:50] It all comes down to the kind of practise and preparation and
[13:54] frankly the number and the quality of the rides that you've
[13:58] done in training relative to what you'll be expected to do
[14:01] come race day. OK, then that brings us to the
[14:06] end of this week's episode. So here are some discount codes
[14:09] and deals for you. I've got Precision Fuel and
[14:11] hydration.com. Use the code Oxygen 24 for 15%
[14:15] off your first electrolyte. Order.
[14:17] And over at teamoxygenaddict.com I think we've got the most
[14:21] comprehensive triathlon coaching programme for busy age groupers.
[14:24] If you've enjoyed what you've heard today and the advice has
[14:27] helped you out, well, great stuff.
[14:28] I hope that's helped put some of your fears at rest and I know
[14:31] from some of the calls we've had, it's helping raise the
[14:34] right questions in the minds of people as to whether their
[14:38] current coaching relationship is working for them If you're
[14:41] looking for a change or if you're looking for high quality,
[14:44] proven coaching for Iron Man or 70.3 Triathlon this year.
[14:48] You can just. Check out the details of our
[14:49] coaching packages on our website at teamoxygenaddict.com and then
[14:54] if you're interested, there's a link in the show notes below.
[14:57] You can join our waiting list and you'll be notified if the
[15:00] slot becomes available. And at that point you'll have a
[15:03] chance to book a call with us and see if you'd be a good fit
[15:06] for joining the team. So although we don't have slots
[15:08] available at the moment, we'll make those call appointments
[15:12] available to people as and when we do have athletes who and
[15:16] their coaching packages during the season if and when that
[15:18] happens. So remember there's links in the
[15:20] show notes so you don't have to remember them.
[15:23] Till next week. Have a great safe training and
[15:25] racing week. I'm coach Rob Wilby and you've
[15:27] been listening to the Oxygen Addict podcast.
[15:30] See ya.

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