Aaaaa the quest for lazyness AND still be made of Iron LOL!

Well, I suppose if anyone thinks a 10-hour training week is laziness.

The other side of the coin is, "am I doing enough?" and, "Where and how, can I make meaningful improvements?"

On close inspection I have seen that I have only begun to train, at most, ten weeks out from the race, and my times show it.

Nothing less than 10 hours counts. I do 10 hours of recreational sports anyway.
I think the training begins at the ten-hour-week mark.

PoC
minimalism is passé

Geoff, training for IM should start 16 weeks out from race. All else is base.

PoC, can you add a little background to see your IM training in context? I'm suspecting a lot of base exists behind that training (ie you're starting at a level that is already capable of completing an ironman). are you suggesting 10hrs a week for anyone (incl. total beginner)?

BBB You're right. In this kind of anecdotal study, you can't be wrong. That said, your goals are/were geared at breaking 11 hours, which is another level of difficulty of challenge. I am fairly certain that you can't break 11 hours on less than 10 hours of training per week - no matter how far out you start!

Ironmom - you're right too - same reason: you're doing it!

It's possible your gender difference may be offset by my age difference and our data may coincide.
For the "visually" impaired heh, my first graph was a straight line through the four points I plotted of my IM training over 4 years where the points suggested that the more weeks of at least 10 hrs training you had under your belt the faster your race time would be - not exactly controversial, But then, I considered that the graph might be a curve. IF the curve flattened out going to the right as I think it does (race time on the Y-axis, # of weeks of 10hrs+ on the X-axis) - that would mean that there is a limit to how fast you can go on 10hrs per week, again not very controversial but interesting, if it meant that 90% of triathletes, say, could never break 12 hrs (say) on X hrs per week.

It might be applicable to a group of athletes sharing like ability OR it might be very individual.
My guess is that like most athletic performance it would apply in a Gaussian fashion to everybody within two standard deviations from the mean. Freaks being excepted :)

Would it be useful? I dunno. Percy Cerutty, the famous Aussie track coach used similar data graphing to select those athletes with the potential to be Olympians, so there may be some use in it.

If the graph is successful, maybe someone contemplating an IM has some data about training time commitment wth which to make an informed decision. If they looked at BBBs blog they might be intimidated by thinking they couldn't do it unless they have 25 hours a week for 10months :eek: to commit, but my experience (I may not be typical) suggests you can do IM on very little training (according to BBB NO Training! 'cos he thinks I'm a slacker.)
Anyway it's a bit of fun.

Tr-Ac - I have been a games player all my life - before triathlon, basketball, rugby, tennis, volleyball, I played them all. I did my first marathon in 1989 at age 37, first OLy tri in 1993 at 41, 1st IM at 51 in 2003. Never had any track ability, although I can swim like a fish (a big fish, heh) Nowadays I just play BB during the winter and train for that, come April or May I start riding the bike and doing the odd 10K then Victoria Day long w/e when the lakes warm up I get serious about IM - that's about 10 weeks out. So 10 weeks x 10 hours = 100 hours of training for IM and I'm good. My PR=14:38:49 about middle of the pack.

kb1dqh - You're right too. The David Black school of short but intense training helped him beat David Bedford who held the world record at 10k back then, BUT, a big BUT, is the terrible risk of injury at IM distance. By terrible, I mean the risk is high when you go longish but very intense that you will get injured and that would be a waste of a lot of money and effort and time so BASE, LSD is definitely the way to go.

This input is good folks. Any more?

PoC

then you're going to love stats. How about "ordinate" and "abscissa" and "mean and standard deviation"

Ooooh, the fun!
:)

Ironmom, seeing biketms quote of your post gave me pause. Maybe the foot injury was a manifestation of the graph's predictions. Maybe it was a result of pushing that 12 hour barrier on ONLY 13 weeks of 10hrs of training per week. I wrote about the risks of injury when pushing limits with inadequate training. Yours is only one data point and there may be other mitigating factors but it's a thought.

PoC

No, my foot was dislocated by another swimmer who grabbed it in the very rough ocean swim. Had nothing to do with a training injury. In fact, my hubby commented that even with my injury, I was limping far less on the day after IM than many other athletes. And I noticed that even with my foot injury, I was *passing* people on the last half of the run (not a typical experience for me), which suggests that my training was more than adequate to see me through the race, although my time was slower than I would've liked, due to the injury.

For the record, even on such a "skimpy" training schedule by most Ironman standards, I felt very very strong through the whole day. I would think that may be due to a couple of factors: One is years and years of triathlon base, meaning that I wasn't starting from the same point that many athletes would be starting their IM training from, and the other is that possibly many people enter the IM *overtrained* and not undertrained. Perhaps fewer "smart" training hours is a better plan than more mileage. I dunno, just some thoughts.

Depends on genetic ability? Yes, of course it does, you're right.
That potential is exactly the thing that graphs like this are supposed to uncover. Sub-10 is a freaky accomplishment though.
A Div 1 NCAA swimmer might be outside 2 standard deviations and thus be a "freak" like Michael Pheips.
Then the graphing may not apply to him/her.

Actually I doubt you CAN BE a Div. 1 swimmer on only 10 hours a week.

Interesting. Those injuries may be indicative too.
It's only when you ask questions like these that you turn up significant results, stats, etc.

As you say, most folks don't have Div. 1 or equiv. background - those are the elite. And yet we/they have questions about training and expectations. I think the data are coming. It has been 25 years of IMC now and there have been tremendous changes in technology and training knowledge in the sport of triathlon.
Only a generation ago 140.6 miles of swim, bike, run was thought impossible. Soon it will be science.

btw, if these people are freaks, I wanna sign up!

From the left: Amanda Beard, Michael Phelps, Jenny Thompson and Natalie Coughlin

cheers,
PoC

OK, I looked at my Trifuel log and found the following:
1) Using the "16 weeks out" approach, I averaged only 7 hr/week.
2) During that 16 week period I had only 3 weeks over 10hr, the longest of which was 14.5. Now having said that, I did have an early season injury that just never really healed(IT BAND) and therefore cut down on my run training considerably. But I did finish, albeit in 14 1/2 hours. Definitely not the best way to go about training.

Well I was curious JT.
I plotted your data - averaging 10 hrs/wk and your 14.5 hrs time and..
it fits the curve.