ironguides own Balazs Csoke recently won Ironman Korea, earning not only his first victory at this distance but also a spot for the 2012 Ironman World Championships. His coach Alun “Woody” Woodward talks about the training program that has brought steady progress for this pro athlete.
Balazs has made steady progress over the last 2 years with a very consistent training program, always working on developing his weakness while building on his strengths. His goal when he came to ironguides for coaching was to qualify for Hawaii, which has come about now with his breakthrough win in the Korea Ironman. Through the last 2 years Balazs has come to realize he has the potential to be a world class athlete and win some big races—goal posts are always moving!
HAWAII
As a pro Balazs had to achieve a Top-50 world ranking in order to qualify for Hawaii, and that meant a lot of racing and travelling. This placed a different demand on his training as recovery became of extreme importance to cope with the travel. Training blocks could not really follow a weekly pattern—instead we moved to a 4-day cycle that was built around his fitness requirements and travel plans. Just to give you an idea of a pro’s life, below is some of the travel associated with Balazs’s quest for Hawaii.
RACES & TRAVEL 2010/11
NOV 2010 – Florida 70.3, Cozumel IM (Mexico)
DEC 2010 – Zurich (Switzerland) – home
JAN 2011 – South Africa training camp, Chile 70.3, South Africa 70.3
FEB/ MARCH – Training – Zurich – Singapore – Bali (Indonesia) – New Zealand – Singapore – Zurich
APRIL – South Africa IM – St Anthony’s Tri, Florida (USA)
MAY – Ironman St. George, (USA) – Ironman Texas, (USA)
JUNE – Italy 70.3
JULY – Korea IM
Fitness Requirements
I have known Balazs for several years now and have always seen world-class potential in him. Once he started to believe this too and came to me for coaching, we got to work on developing his potential. The first step was getting Balazs to forget all that had come before: to forget that he needed to hit certain mileages every week in order to be good; forget that he needed to ride with a high cadence at all times; and, lastly, to forget all the times people had told him he couldn’t bike with the best and run with the best. The most important thing I saw in Balazs was the engine—if you have the engine everything can be trained!
Swim
Balazs has spent his whole life swimming and always swims at the front of races. The focus of training was never to improve the swim, but simply to ensure endurance was there and speed was maintained. So in a 4-day block we would incorporate one endurance session of 4km, 1 extreme short speed session and 1 open water session working on strength.
Bike
This has been the main area of focus so far with Balazs. The goal was to take his bike performance from 5 hours to 4:30 so that he is in a competitive position going into the run. Balazs has a natural affinity with endurance as through years of extreme endurance training he had not seen much progress in his biking. Using our training method we focused on teaching Balazs to ride hard and strong. This was done by using shorter sessions incorporating time-trial efforts and over-gear hill climbs. The endurance element was maintained with a 5-hour ride taking place every second block.
MAIN POINTS
– Change riding style from spinning to big gear riding to take advantage of Balazs’s natural strength
– BIG GEAR hill work was the main focus
– Remove a lot of volume to make way for speed and RECOVERY
Run
Again, on the run endurance was never a problem for Balazs—efficiency and speed were the limiting factors. We developed speed with a lot of short intervals and a lot of intervals run at tempo pace. The main focus early in the year has always been on developing 10km speed and then building on this into his Ironman races. I think a lot of mistakes are made by athletes when they see endurance as the limiting factor in Ironman marathon performance—the main factor is almost always lack of speed over shorter distances and, aside this, lack of swim and bike strength! As a result of the shorter speed-based interval work and then building endurance on top, we have seen no injuries in the last 2 years, something that had plagued Balazs’s his running in the years before. We always hear that you need base before speed to minimize injury risk, but I think this is the single biggest mistake made by athletes today.
CONCLUSION
Mapping out a plan and then getting to work with a goal 2-3 years away has proved very successful for Balazs. He never questioned the training and simply followed the plan in a very consistent manner. Communication was always great, especially in travel times so training could be appropriately adapted. Balazs has continued to get faster and stronger as time has passed. We have not seen any plateau in performance and he really has shown the brick by brick improvement that is The Method.
We wish Balazs all the best for the remainder of his season: Cancun 70.3 and then Hawaii Ironman.
Alun ‘Woody’ Woodward, Certified ironguides Coach – UK/Hungary
http://www.ironguides.net