It’s already been quite a year for Olympic gold medalist and WTCS world champion Kristian Blummenfelt and, based on his latest YouTube video, there’s more to come when he competes at Ironman Cozumel on the weekend. Before he travelled to Mexico for the race Blummenfelt did a three-week training camp in Sierra Nevada, Spain, taking advantage of the near-perfect weather conditions and the chance to train at altitude.
In the video, which you can see below, Blummenfelt and his coach, Olav Aleksander Bu, take on a 28 km “long run” that includes seven 10-minute efforts at the Norwegian’s lactate threshold. The run ended at 2,500 m altitude.
In the video Bu explains not only some of Blummenfelt’s full-distance goals, but explains some of the science behind the training he’s had Blummenfelt do.
“The aim is to take the world championship next year in Ironman,” Bu says. “On the road there we’ll do a few Ironman [races], not many, but a few. It means we have to learn at a record pace. Ironman has different demands than Olympic distance has, and different [demands] to a half Ironman. We’ll maintain the characteristics that we think are important to raise the bar one more step in an Ironman, and that’s basically by trying to maintain a fairly high VO2 Max, but also at the same time bringing fractional oxygen at a race pace as close as possible to the VO2 Max, which will allow Christian to run, or swim, bike and run with the same glycolytic demand that others are doing at a slower speed. Glycogen stores are the biggest limitation.”
Blummenfelt’s much anticipated full-distance debut will be even more interesting after his countryman Gustav Iden’s 7:42:57 debut at Ironman Florida last weekend. Will the Olympic champ manage to top Iden’s record-setting pace?
