COMPLETER TO COMPETITOR
“I train around 5-7hrs a week for Olympic-distance but it can be a little ad-hoc and with little semblance to a progressive, periodised plan. Advice please!”
Spread out your training time as: swim 20%, bike 50% and run 30%. If you’re very strong in one sport and very weak in another, then shift the load slightly from the strong one to enjoy more time in the weaker sport. Train once daily.
Work out six days per week with one day off. Make two of those days ‘hard’, meaning six to seven out of 10 on the rate of perceived exertion scale. A longish interval is an example. The other four days should be easy and your longest workouts. Separate the easy days by two to three days.
On the two hard days in the last eight weeks before your race, do ‘brick’ (bike-to-run) workouts. Once weekly warm up for 20mins and then do a hard (six to seven effort) 20mins on the bike followed by an easy run for 15mins. On the other hard day, do an easy 1hr ride followed by a 15min run at race effort.
Specificity is key to maximise your training time. One of the most explicit examples of this is on the bike. Too many triathletes train on their road bike but race on their time-trial (TT) bike. That’s a mistake – if you want to race well on a TT bike, you need to train on it regularly. Different muscles are used in an extreme aero position than upon a road bike, even on the drops. Weekly muscularendurance intervals on the
TT bike are perfect.
Recovery workouts are essential to progress. So take it easy. That means you’re better off recovering on a bike or in the pool, for example, than doing an easy run. If you’re going to develop an overuse injury, it’ll most likely be on the run. I want highperforming triathletes I coach to run a minimum three times a week, but one of those might be to improve technique or a short run off a key bike ride.