Endurance & Strength
Most Ironman plans do not fail on race day. They fail in week nine, on a sore knee, a skipped recovery week or a long ride with nothing to eat. Here are the nine mistakes I see most, and the fix for each.
Craig ChapinNASM Certified Personal Trainer
You signed up, or you are about to. There is a race date on the calendar, a free ironman training plan open in another tab, and a number at the top of it that looks like a second job. Good. Respect for that number is where finishing starts.
I have spent 20+ years training clients privately in South Tampa. I am not a triathlon coach, and I will say exactly where my lane ends further down. What I know, from the strength side, is that a body breaks down under long training in predictable ways, and the plan on paper is rarely the problem. The same handful of mistakes is.
A full Ironman is a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike and a 26.2-mile run, back to back, 140.6 miles in one day. Most full-distance races give you about seventeen hours to finish. Most plans for it run somewhere between twenty and thirty weeks, and nearly all of them assume you can already swim, ride and run comfortably before week one.
Whatever the brand of plan, it is built from the same four phases:
Lots of easy hours, technique in the water, and the strength work that makes the rest possible. It feels too easy. It is supposed to.
Longer weekend sessions, some harder intervals, and bricks: a ride followed straight away by a run, so your legs learn the change.
The biggest weeks of the plan, with race-pace work and full dress rehearsals of your race-day food, drink and kit.
Usually the last two to three weeks. Volume comes down, a little intensity stays, and your body finally gets to absorb everything above.
A twenty-week plan written for somebody who already runs and rides every week is a very different thing for somebody starting from the couch. If you cannot comfortably run for thirty minutes, ride for an hour and swim a steady half mile today, the plan starts before the plan. The fix: give yourself months of easy, regular training first, or pick a race far enough away to fit it in. A shorter triathlon on the way is a great checkpoint.
Your heart and lungs adapt to more training quickly. Tendons, joints and bones take much longer, and they do not send a warning until something hurts. Running is where this shows up first, because every stride is a landing. The fix: build gradually. Many coaches use a rule of thumb of roughly ten percent more a week at most, and the run gets the most caution. Add one thing at a time: more time or more intensity, never both in the same week.
This is the one I see most, and the one I care about most. Strength work is the first thing cut when the long ride gets longer, because it does not feel like training for an endurance race. But it is what keeps hips level on mile twenty of the run, a back that can hold an aero position for hours, and knees that track straight when you are tired. The fix: keep two short sessions a week through base and build, and at least one through peak. More on what goes in them below.
The easy days get done a little too hard, so the hard days can only be done a little too easy, and every week becomes the same tiring middle. You finish the plan fit and flat. The fix: make easy days truly easy, where you could hold a conversation, and keep a small number of sessions genuinely hard. Many endurance coaches aim for most of the week, often around four-fifths of it, at that conversational effort. An Ironman is mostly raced at a steady, controlled pace anyway.
Training is the stress. Getting fitter happens while you recover from it. Most plans build a lighter week every third or fourth week, and those are the weeks people quietly fill back in because they feel good. The fix: take the down week as written, and protect your sleep the way you protect the long ride. If you are a new parent or sleeping badly for any reason, plan fewer hours rather than the same hours on less rest.
Cyclists ride more, runners run more, and the swim gets two pool sessions and a prayer. Then race morning is open water, a crowd of arms and no wall to rest on. The fix: give your weakest leg a fair share of the week, get coached on your swim stroke if it is the weak one, and swim in open water before race day. Tampa Bay is not a lane line, and sighting a buoy in chop is a skill you practise, not one you discover.
Seventeen hours is long enough that what you eat and drink decides how the day goes. A stomach that has never had a gel at hour five, on the bike, in the heat, will let you know. The fix: treat every long ride and run in the build and peak phases as a rehearsal. Use the same drinks and food you will race with, at the same rate. For personal numbers on carbohydrate, fluid and sodium, a sports dietitian is the right person. Timing your food around training is one of my courses, “Nutrient Timing” (2019), but a race-day fuelling plan for 140 miles deserves a specialist.
In Tampa, the long run in July is a different workout from the same run in January. Heat and humidity push your heart rate up at the same pace, raise the amount you sweat out, and make every mistake above cost more. The fix: go early. Long runs on Bayshore finish before the sun gets serious, and long rides start at first light. Slow down on hot days by effort, not by your watch, carry more fluid than you think, and plan routes with somewhere to refill.
Life will cancel workouts: a sick kid, a work trip, a storm. Cramming the missed ones into the next few days is how a missed week turns into an injury. And a pain that changes how you run, gets worse during a session or is still there the next morning is not something to push through. The fix: let missed sessions go and pick the plan up where it is today. Swap a run for a ride or a swim when something is sore, and see a doctor or physical therapist about pain that does not settle within a few days.
Strength work for an Ironman is not bodybuilding, and it is not another cardio session. It is short, it is heavy enough to matter, and it targets the places long hours break down. Thirty to forty-five minutes is plenty.
What I build into it:
Two sessions a week through base and build, then one shorter session through peak, and the last heavy session well before race week. Put it on a hard day or after an easy session, not the day before your long ride. Form comes before load, every time. Two of my courses sit right here: “Avoiding Common Fitness Injuries” (2017) and “Good Knee / Bad Knees” (2017).
If you have never lifted, start with the basics on the strength training for women or strength training for men page. The case is the same: strength is the most trainable thing about you, at any age.
This is an example of a build-phase week for an age-grouper with a job, about eleven to fourteen hours. It is not a prescription; your plan, your weak leg and your schedule decide the real one.
Notice how little of it is hard. Two or three sessions carry the intensity. Everything else is easy, and the strength work sits where it does not wreck the weekend.
Plenty of people do their first Ironman after 40, and plenty do their best one. The rules shift a little: recovery takes longer, so a lighter week every third week often works better than every fourth; muscle fades faster when nothing asks for it, so the strength sessions matter more, not less; and old injuries need to be in the plan rather than discovered by it. I wrote more on what changes in the women-over-40 guide and the guide for men over 50.
First things first: everything here starts after your OB or midwife has cleared you to exercise. That is usually around six weeks, and later after a cesarean (C-section) or a difficult delivery. Until then, resting is the training. Clearance to exercise is not the same thing as being ready for an Ironman, though. Running is impact, and long rides load the pelvic floor. A pelvic floor physical therapist is worth seeing before the miles go up, and leaking, heaviness or pain are signs to stop and get checked, not to push through.
Then rebuild in order: deep core and pelvic floor, then strength, then impact, then distance. Sleep will be short, so plan fewer hours and a race further away. My postpartum personal training page walks through the order I take new moms through, and it is the same order whether the goal is a stroller walk or a finish line.
Plainly: I do not write swim sets, bike power zones or run paces. For those, use a triathlon coach or a good published plan. What I do is the strength side, and it is the side most plans hand you as a two-line note.
I have been NASM certified since 2004, and I train every client myself, in person at Empire MMA and Fitness, 5006 S MacDill Ave in South Tampa. Sessions run Monday – Sunday, so a strength session before work fits around a plan that already owns your weekends. Private sessions are $60 for 30 minutes or $120 for 60 minutes, and the packages and prices are published. Book your free first session and I will call you within 24 hours to set the time, or call me on 813-310-4323. Training for the same race as a friend? If they come in for a session, you get another personal training session free.
Start Here
Tell me about your race, your training week and the joint that complains, get a body-fat reading and a fitness evaluation, and leave with a strength plan that fits around your swim, bike and run. There is nothing to buy at the end of it.
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