I'm reading two Ironman training books right now. Be Ironfit by Don Fink and Going Long by Joe Frield and Gordon Byrn. Each of them has some really good stuff to offer anyone training for this kind of distance. The Ironfit book is much more readable and usable though. I like the training schedules, and I'm basing my own schedule loosely on the ones in the book, from here on out. The book is very straight-forward and includes almost everything you need to do to get from triathlete to Ironman.
Going Long has some genuinely great nuggets of information, but you have to plow through pages of acronym-infested, almost-undecipherable text to get to them. The authors have the unfortunate habit of acronymizing too many real words. Do we really need to call "breakthrough" workouts "BT" workouts? And what about ATP, ME, LT, TT, and all the other acronyms? By the time they're done shortening everything, I keep having to page back and forth while reading to remember what everything is called. Couple that with many nearly-incomprehensible tables of data (and this is from a former engineer who loves her Excel spreadsheets and tables of data!) and the book becomes signifigantly less useful than it should be. It's worth a read though, or at least a skim, for the good information that's buried beneath the chaff.
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