On Sunday June 27 I won my 18th Danish title when I won the Danish champ at my 'old distance' - the Olympic distance. Every time I compete at the shorter distances I feel that the longer I have been away from this type of competition, the harder it is to perform at my best. You loose a lot of explosivity when going long.

The these recent Danish champs I especially noticed two areas where I can now feel a big difference after switching to the longer distances:

Details concerning the transitions

I have become a little rusty in the transition area on short distance racing. The speed with which I can run in transition and take of my wetsuit is slower than before and this is primarily because I don’t do these races anymore. We usually spend more time in T1 and T2 in an ironman.

Also I have lost some speed in taking on/of my helmet and shoes. At the Danish sprint championships in early June I lost 18 seconds in total in the transition area. I was better at my transitions at the OD champs on June 27, but there is still some way to go before I would reach the lightning fast OD transitions. Well, not that I need them when doing ironman.

Accelerations on the bike

On the bike it is the accelerations and constant difference in pace after e.g. turns that cost a lot of energy for me now. I don’t train the hard intervals with 600-700 watts of pedaling anymore and I can feel an effect in the leg muscles in shorter competitions now. At the Danish OD champs I could get away with biking 95 percent when I was leading our small group whereas in world cups I would go much harder to get some distance to the really fast runners. I am used to pacing along at a more even pace now, so I had to work on the bike to stay in the front going out on the 10 km run.

My swimming was pretty much the same as in an ironman even though the pace of course was a little higher. But I hung on and exited the water without getting into trouble.

Once out on the run I felt strong and I thought that I would go out hard to get rid of the others and show who was the boss.

I quickly reached my race pace and was within 15 seconds on each of the four 2,5 km laps, so I had a pretty steady run. I was able to control it from the front and ran the 10 km in a respectable time of 31:56.

Heavy training

I am still in my most hard training leading up to the first big test of the year, ironman at Challenge Roth July 18.

I think that it is still useful to train and compete at the shorter distances, as the ironman training usually doesn’t reach the same speed as in short distance racing. So my plan is to keep trying to race at shorter distances to get the speed and intensity into the ironman training.

I will blog again before Challenge Roth. Hope to see you there!

Best,

Rasmus Henning