Please sir, I want some more...

I think that having done the training for the Ironman has made it much easier, both physically and mentally, to tolerate the training load of my preparations for the Marathon. That seems like an obvious thing to say but it isn't really. Doing bursts of high speed running is quite different to plodding along for hours on end, even if both are assigned the same number of TRIMPs (TRaining IMPulses, or a way to equate duration and intensity across sports). Even so, I'm doing far fewer TRIMPs a week than I was doing in the build up to the Ironman - last week I knocked out about half as many as I was doing a week during the month of April, for example. To be fair, running is a high impact activity which employs a very high percentage of muscle mass and so it would be infeasible for me to try to match workload TRIMP for TRIMP; in Triathlon training, riding gives you a break from running and swimming from riding to some extent To give you some idea, the equivalent number of kilometers a week in running (at low intensity) would be 240, which would put me up there with élite Marathon runners! In terms of time, I'm doing 8 hours of training a week compared to up to 25 for the Ironman - that's the advantage of including more high intensity work, which counts for more TRIMPs.

I'm currently in week 9

Having said all this, I told my coach that I was finding the training load quite comfortable and so he has upped the ante. He told me that the new programme is what other athletes that he trains and who have better times than me are following. He also told me not to do any funny business...