Case Study: 10:30 at Challenge Roth on 10 hours of training per week with Petri Karvinen | EP#150

Petri Karvinen is an age-group triathlete from Finland. In this episode we discuss his build-up to Challenge Roth in 2018, where he was limited to 10 hours of training per week but still managed a very strong 10:30 finishing time. 

• Petri's training approach leading up to Challenge Roth (full distance triathlon).
• A typical 10-hour training week for Petri.
• Focusing on staying healthy, recovering well, and sleeping well and enough. 
• Using STAC's Virtual Wind Tunnel to improve his aerodynamics. 

4:55  -

• I'm 37 years old; I have a wife and a 2-year-old daughter.
• For my career I'm working in sales, and have been doing this for many years. I'm currently working on stopping shoplifting in sales with a Finnish tech solution. 
• My interest in triathlon started when a friend lost a game of Risk in the boardroom, and had to complete a 90km cross country skiing race in Finland.
  
  In August 2010 the same group decided to do a half distance triathlon. I signed up without knowing what it was, but I finished in 5:20. I was immediately hooked.
  
  I had never cycled before, so basically had to start from scratch and trained in the 10 months preceding the race. 
• I basically stopped training after this race, but I still liked the sport. In 2013, I realised that I needed to start properly training, and I signed up for the 2014 Ironman Kalmar. 
• If you're planning on doing a full distance Ironman, do it on purpose, not just to try it. I wanted to just try it and only trained around 4 hours a week, so it hurt a lot! I finished in 12 hours. 
• After that, I signed up for the Haute route 2015 in the Pyrenees, which is a week long bike race covering 1000km, and up to 21km in elevation. It was so much fun that I signed up again in 2016 in the French Alps. 
  
  This was very different to Southern Finland where I'm from, as it's very flat here. 
• Since then, I've been racing at least one triathlon race each year. 

11:39 -

• Challenge Roth is a full distance Ironman in Germany, with a very passionate support crowd - it's a bucket list race for many triathletes. 
• I didn't set a specific time goal, but I knew I wanted to finish better and happier than I did with Ironman Kalmar. I was generally aiming for anything between 10-10.5 hours, but I didn't know how realistic that was. 
• I started training systematically at the end of August last year (2017). I knew I couldn't train 15 hours a week - I was aiming closer to 10 so I knew I needed to make the time count. 
• I started by meeting with my friend, and went through what needed to be done to finish the race well. We created a yearly plan. 
• My second step was another fundamental, as I had been experiencing lower back pain. I started with the physiotherapist to prevent any injuries with running. 
  
  The physio found that my hip sinks when I run. It wasn't a problem of strength, but I was using it wrong, so I had to start exercises to learn to activate my hip in the right movement pattern. 
• I also didn't want to get sick during the training period, so I started planning my sleep and began 'cold exposure'. 
  
  I started taking a very cold shower every morning for 1-2 minutes to stop me getting sick - and it seemed to work as I didn't get ill once. 
• With the sleep, I made sure as much as possible that I could get an adequate amount of sleep, which is difficult with a 2 year old. From there, I decided how much I could train. 
  
  If I negotiated too much about the amount of sleep, it would ruin my training practice the next day. I'd rather sleep than do a bad training session.

19:29 -

• I had a yearly calendar divided into 4, loosely based on the seasons, and it was as simple as possible.

Autumn

• E.g. The fall was strength training, so I was in the gym and doing stair running.
  
  With stair running I had the same 9.5km route, and it involved around 600 stairs. I took it easy, but I knew there were enough stairs to make my legs hurt. 
  
  In the gym I was doing low rep, high weight, and was doing 2 sessions a week during the fall.
• When I cycled, I did a lot of low cadence sessions to build muscular endurance. 

Winter

• In the winter, the focus was on power. On the trainer I did a lot of VO2 max and sweet spot workouts. I was also supposed to do harder intervals with running, but I cut down on this as it was a very cold winter. 
• For the swim, I thought I was doing too little but I then broke my swim record in the race (1:05). I only had one session per week - it was a coached session so it was very effective. 
  
  I knew that if I spent more time running or cycling, rather than swimming, the time effect would be bigger during the race. 

Spring     

• I did a lot of brick training, and focused more on race pace with longer run and bike sessions. 
  
  I basically ran a half marathon every Saturday, and increased the length of other run sessions. 

Summer

• The structure remained similar. I stopped gym work in May, two months before the race, and added that time to the longer training sessions. 
• Closer to the race, I considered my goals and felt 10-10.5 hours was a realistic goal. I felt if everything went smoothly I would be closer to 10 hours. 
• In the end, my lack of experience killed my running - I started too eagerly, and then had to slow down. I also forgot to eat during the run.
• I'm not unhappy with the result of 10:30, but I know there is room for improvement.

25:24 - 

• Regular week from the Spring training period. 
• Monday morning: Gym session
  Monday evening: Swim practice
• Tuesday & Wednesday: Run or bike session
  Faster pace, sweet spot work on the bike, or intervals on the run. 
• Thursday: Run or bike session, depending on the work week. 
• Friday: Rest day. 
• Saturday & Sunday: Long run (1:30 hours - 2:15 hrs) and long bike (2:30 - 6:00 hrs). 
  
  Average length of long bike closer to the race was 3-4 hours, and around 100km. 
  
  In the longer runs, I aimed for race tempo the whole way. 
  
  In the bike sessions, there was usually 1-2 hours of race intensity. 

31:52 - 

• The main factor was that whenever I had a session, I had a purpose for that single training session. 
  ​
  If I went to start a session and knew I couldn't concentrate as much as needed, I would not do that session, as it would have a negative impact. 
• The less time you have, the less you have slack in your training so make it count. 

33:23 - 

• The biggest wisdom I've heard is 'you need to go faster in order to go faster'. 
  
  A lot of low intensity work during the week needs to be there (around 80%), but the rest of the time you need to increase the intensity to get the physical adaptations needed to go fast. 

35:09 - 

• The first thing I did after this exercise was getting rid of the water bottles behind my back and moved them to between my hands. 
  ​
  This was shown as a problem in the wind tunnel. 
• My position changed a little as the recommendation from the Virtual Wind Tunnel was that I needed a 'preying mantis' position. 
  ​
  I tried a couple of positions as I couldn't make the change as aggressive as they suggested as it hurt my thighs, but I'm happy with my new position. 
• The estimated watt savings was significant: the preying mantis position was up to 4%, and the whole setup change was 10-15 watts change. 
  ​
  This was quite a lot when my race watts were 220 for the entire race. 

• Case Study: Sub-9 Ironman on low-volume, high-quality training with Carl Brümmer | EP#145
• Case study: From Blowing Up on a 250 m Swim to Prospective 70.3 Worlds Qualifier | EP#135
• Case study: How David qualified for Kona by training smarter and getting the details right | EP#130
• Age-group triathlon case study with Jordan and Jesse Sorrick | EP#124
  
• Starting from zero: triathlon age-grouper success case study with Katarina Larsson & André Campos | EP#106
• Virtual Wind Tunnel with Andrew Buckrell and Michael Liberzon | EP#47
• Virtual Wind Tunnel - Scientific Triathlon

Connect with Petri Karvinen

Connect with host Mikael Eriksson

Hi! I'm your host Mikael,

I am a full-time triathlon coach and an ambitious age-group triathlete. My goal is podium at the Finnish national championships within the next few years.

I first started the website Scientific Triathlon in autumn 2015 as a passion project to share my learnings with a larger triathlon audience. Later on, in early 2017 I started the podcast That Triathlon Show. 

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