Holding Tempo

More tempo work on the agenda tomorrow, but rather than being in the pool like this morning, the tempo work tomorrow will be out on the bike with the crew from Front Runner.

The idea behind the tempo session coming up tomorrow is similar to the idea behind the Red Mist Swim Smooth session from this morning, long aerobic efforts to help increase fitness. Making the engine bigger. The session tomorrow is a particularly tough set called a Wave Tempo ride which is made up of numerous 10 minute efforts done back to back at varying levels of tempo intensity. It should be a testing morning out, but one that will bring physiological benefits.

While the physical benefits of spending a bit of time in the tempo zone may be kind of obvious, there are other benefits to doing some sessions in this zone that are more psychological.

One of these psychological benefits is that these tempo sessions give people a great opportunity to do some race practice. The tempo intensity zone is almost exactly the pace you would aim to hold for something like a Half Ironman. A lot of pace zone models for the bike define the tempo zone as between 75% and 90% of FTP. Similarly the general recommendation for 70.3 pacing is that you ride somewhere between 75% and 85% of FTP. As you can see these two zones are very close, therefore, by training in the tempo zone you are almost guaranteed to be working somewhere near race pace.

I always say that by the time you reach race day, race pace should not be a surprise. In fact, the race pace of a 70.3 or an Ironman is low enough that you are able to spend large portions of your weekly training at that intensity. This means that by race day you should know exactly what race pace feels like and you should also be confident that you can hold it for a long time. If you get to race day and you have questions over whether race pace is sustainable then I would say that you have either overestimated your race pace or you have not spent enough time doing tempo work during training.

Riding at tempo pace during training can sometimes be a bit of a challenge, particularly for shorter efforts, as it can feel a bit too easy when you first start. Of course after a couple of hours it feels anything but easy, but the temptation when people are doing 20 or 30 minute efforts is to push the pace up, nudging into the Threshold pace zone. Of course if somebody is doing more than one effort and they go to hard in the early ones then what usually happens is that they then fade away in the later efforts and are unable to hold the planned pace zones. This then devalues the entire session because rather than spending an hour at tempo for example, they instead spend 30 minutes in the threshold zone and then 30 minutes struggling along going steady, which isn't really the point.

For this reason it is important for people to be a bit strict on themselves when they start a tempo effort and make sure they don't go out too hard, but instead hold back and save that effort for later in the piece. This is also great practice for race day when everyone is excited and the temptation to take off very quickly is strong.

These are all the challenges that face the Front Runner Tri Team tomorrow and hopefully they will prevail. If they do it will be a session that brings them another step closer to having a successful day out at the coming Ironman WA 70.3.