"A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats"
Let's say that if we were to staple you to a bike seat and let a pack of wolves chase you for an hour, you'd average 19 mph. If the next day we took the wolves away but told you ride for 4 to 5 hours, you'd ride at some slower percentage of this 19 mph, simply because you're on the bike longer. Let's call it 17 mph.
If we came back the next week and the week after that with our staple gun and our pack of hungry wolves, your 19 mph 1-hour time trial would become 19.5 mph, then 19.7, then 20, 21 mph, etc. Likewise, your 4 to 5 hour speed would also rise.
By making yourself faster at shorter distances, you also make yourself faster at longer distances, assuming you put some endurance rides on top of this 1-hour speed...which you certainly are with your 4 to 5 hour training rides (without the wolves).
More: How to Train for Your First Ironman
But the opposite is not also true. That is, no amount of riding day after day at 17 mph that will miracle itself into the ability to ride 19 mph on race day. You can get faster, but in our experience the volume method only works when you rack up more than 15 hours of cycling per week, a completely unrealistic volume for 99.99 percent of the readers of this ebook.
Your Bike as a Personal Cool $%* Vehicle
Your bike is a vehicle you can use to do some pretty cool and epic...stuff. Your fitness is the engine that powers your cool vehicle to cool places. But first time Ironman athletes often get so torqued up about building the engine (usually incorrectly) that they miss out on many opportunities to do cool stuff with their cool vehicle.
More: How to Avoid Early-Season Training Mistakes
We recommend you:
1. Put fun events on your calendar: hard, long, up, down, in an epic venue...whatever. If it's challenging and sounds like fun, sign up.
2. Encourage, dare, or pester your friends into signing up also.
3. Train for your cool event, in route to your Ironman.
You'll gain the confidence of challenging yourself and have fun, en route to your Ironman.
More: 7 Ironman Races for First Timers
Sign up for an Ironman.