It’s finally time to see if the worked paid off!

After 7 weeks of training it was time to perform fitness test again and compare them to my first tests 2 months ago.

The swim was absolutely amazing. My times for 400 and 200 meters all out went down from 6:52 and 3:17 to 6:31 and 3:10. This puts my new training speed at 1:41 min/100m which is an improvement of 7 seconds for 100 meters. To put this into perspective, only improving my swim by 7 seconds per 100 meters equals to an overall improvement of more than 5 minutes over the Ironman distance.

The bike was equally exciting! My new FTP stands now at 265W which with is an improvement of 12W over my performance from 2 months ago which has me at 3.45 W/kg (a 10% improvement over 2 months). This puts me deep into the good territory and serves as a guiding light for the future. How much did I save over an ironman distance? A general rule of thumb here is that everything stays the same you gain 0.5sec/km for every 5 Watts you save. In my case that would equate to 1.2 sec/km which is around 3 minutes over the Ironman distance. However, since I also lost some weight (around 4 kg) in the same period, the improvements should be bigger.

The final piece of the puzzle was the run. I improved my time here from a 4:34 min/km to a 4:16 (!!!) which is almost 20 seconds faster! Over an ironman distance this would give me a 12 and a half minutes faster time.

It’s not that simple but all in all, over the course of two months, I have reduced my Ironman distance time by around 20 minutes. And it’s only December!!!

The remaining workouts were a mixed bag of bad and worse. I tried working out the evening we arrived back home from our trip while my wife told me to do it in the morning. Stubborn me wanted to get it out of the way that night so I started running at an easy 5:30 pace which I had to reduce to 5:40 and eventually to 6:00. Then just 30 minutes into my 1 hour run I pulled the plug and called it a night because I was just to exhausted to train. The last workout of the week was a simple 1 hour 30 minute ride at an easy pace but the schedule just didn’t fall into place and I didn’t want to do another late night training session which I’ll cut short. I simply skipped the workout and will continue with the planned work for week 9.

*estimated by my scale

My weight dropped slightly while the other body composition parameters stayed the same. We are now moving into Christmas (overeating) territory so it’s going to be especially difficult to keep it all in line but that’s just something that I’ll have to deal with :)