How do you prepare for a Decaman? (Part 2)
Welcome to part 2 of this blog series. You can read part 1 via the button below.
The training started on the 29th March. We had 20 weeks and 3 days: that is 143 days total- not much room for error!
Thankfully, Danny’s adherence to the programme was superb. I have never seen him so committed to training before. If he missed a session, then there was a good reason for it.
In the 20 weeks and 3 days available for training, he completed (he didn’t upload all of his sessions to training peaks so he actually did more than this):
30 hours and 50 minutes of swimming.
70 hours and 9 minutes of running.
248 hours, 28 minutes of biking.
Training overview
This is an overview of his acute training load (pink line), training stress balance (yellow line) and chronic training load (blue line) from the 29th March, right up to the 29th August.
Chronic training load (CTL) is the average of your daily training load over the last 6 weeks. It is essentially a sign of your fitness. Ideally, you want to see it moving upwards.
Acute training load (ATL) is an average of your training load from the past 7 days. It gives a more acute score of your training load. If it spikes up fast, then training volume/intensity has increased significantly.
Training stress balance (TSB) is a sign of your form and readiness to race. The lower the value, the more fatigued an athlete is. The higher the TSB, the fresher an athlete is.
Nutrition overview
Nutrition is often the most underrated aspect of endurance training. You could be the fittest athlete in the world, but with poor dietary intake and nutritional strategies, you may as well stay at home. With such a high training load during this Decaman training phase, dietary intake is key. With that in mind, Danny linked up with Evan Lynch to take care of his nutrition. Here is what Evan had to say about preparing Danny for this event and fuelling his training.
“Working with Danny was an incredibly interesting challenge, Danny himself is a phenomenally resilient man and made for an incredibly adherent client. ”
We had to ensure that Danny’s carb intake was high enough leading up to the event and during the event was high throughout, with an emphasis on hitting 90g or more of carbs during each race, and heavy carb intakes in the evenings.
A number of key supplements were outlined with Danny to help him get through the training process and manage the Deca challenge, this was not wizardry, simply things that helped Danny stay as healthy as possible whilst helping him stay as strong as possible. The list was as follows – vitamin D spray, high strength omega 3’s, creatine monohydrate and a thiamine and magnesium supplement the week prior to and during the event, to prevent his levels dipping during the event, as a result of the sheer amount of energy he was burning.
We did a sweat test with Danny, to establish his water losses during exercise, from this we gauged his fluid requirements, and it also helped us to gauge pre and post hydration tactics - the nice thing about this event, was Danny had such phenomenal support throughout the process and during the event itself, that carrying bottles and having access to fluids was never an issue.
There will be more info on Danny’s nutritional intake during the Decaman event in part 3 of the blog series.
Base phase
Notice the steady rise in the blue line at the beginning- this was the base phase. The aim here was to build his training load to a level that prepared him for the demands of the first training camp week. We had to take quite an aggressive approach to this training load at this point.
Week 1 of his training
The week before training camp 1. We did some physiological testing this week as well.
Training camp 1
The aim of the training camp was to simulate the Decaman event, without leaving him heavily fatigued by the end of the week. The week was structured with 3 days of race specific training, followed by an easy day and then another 3 days of race specific training. We practiced nutrition, routes, equipment and had him starting each day at 6am.
Notice the crazy spike in his ATL!
His training week for his first training camp.
This was a 32 hour training week. One of the biggest blocks of training he has ever done. The base phase of training in the weeks prior to this were key in preparing him for the demands of this week.
The feedback from Danny after this week was very positive. It really helped his confidence knowing he could handle such a large volume of exercise. His only worry was the running. We had to be careful how we built his running due to his high injury risk. We set a goal of completing 2 marathons during the next training camp week, to subdue those worries.
“The training camps really helped my confidence and made me believe I could do it”
Post training camp
We backed off slightly in the week following the training camp to allow him to recover. This let us push on for the next phase of training. So far, Danny had been maintaining 18-20 hours of training per week. This appeared to be his sweetspot. When he did more than 20 hours, I found that he was very fatigued. Therefore, we didn’t need to continually increase the total training volume. The aim of this next phase of training from the 7th June- 12th July, was to maintain the bike training load, simulate race day scenarios, build swim volume and prepare him for the next training camp.
Disaster struck!
Roughly 6 weeks out from the start date, he stepped up onto a kerb and injured his calf. This resulted in him being in a lot of pain and having calf tightness when running. We stopped training to ensure he didn’t make it worse and he got in touch with his physio Ellevyn.
She started working on his calf and put together a recovery plan. With her rehab knowledge and my experience with Danny, we put together a perfect plan to maximise his recovery and give him the best chance of standing on the start line on the 20th August in the best condition to complete the event.
Believe it or not, the calf didn’t bother him once during the event- crazy!
We have to give all credit to Ellevyn here. Without her input and guidance, we would have struggled.
The second training camp
Once we figured out the extent of his calf injury, we pushed on for a strong training camp. Danny couldn’t run so we planned a large swim and bike training week. We didn’t know how his calf would react to the large training load, so we planned the week day by day. I would drop him a message and find out how his day had gone and then I planned the next day from there. This was when our communication with each other became incredibly important.
Overall, this was another positive training camp week. Not being able to run was frustrating but he completed some high quality swim and bike sessions, that definitely contributed to his strong swim and bike performance during the Decaman event.
Even with the calf injury, he completed a quality week of training. 28 hours in total.
Managing his run injury
After the second training camp, we began prioritising his run training. It was crunch time. We backed off quite a bit with his swim and bike volume to allow him to complete some run sessions with appropriate recovery afterwards.
This was his run training from the 26th July up to the Decaman start date:
27th July- 5km.
28th July- 6km walk.
29th July- 12km.
31st July- 17km.
1st August- 8km.
3rd August-22km.
4th August- 8km.
6th August- 26km.
7th August- 8km.
20th August- 30km.
14th August- 24km.
16th August- 8km.
He swam roughly 3 times per week and biked 1-2 times a week over this period of time. It was an incredibly successful block of run training.
The night before
Packing the van the night before he started day 1. Can you guess how many gels are in there?
Apart from the run injury, Danny’s preparation for the Decaman was flawless. The night before he started the Decaman, we met and had a chat. We both agreed that besides the run injury, the preparation had been perfect and there wasn’t much more we could have done. That’s what you want to hear when you’re about to endure the toughest 10 days of your life.
I hope part 2 of the blog has given you a rough idea of how we prepared Danny for the Decaman. I will post the next blog -part 3- soon. It will detail what happened during the Decaman and what challenges he faced!
Let’s not forget that Danny did all of this in memory of his father, Colm Quigley, and to raise money for Pieta House and Bogside and Brandywell Health Forum. As I write this, his current total is £105,725- how mad is that! The link to donate is below.
