Doing your first middle-distance having moved up from Olympic-distance

TRAINING GOAL | PUSHING THE EFFORT OUT, NOT GOING HARDER

Having raced an Olympic-distance, you’ll be familiar with its all-out efforts. The middle-distance is a similar effort but held for longer, so the challenges come from sustaining those efforts and learning to back off just a tiny bit. The race is not won by who can go hardest but by the one who slows down the least – your short-course experience may interfere with that.

From 40km in an Olympic to 90km in a middle, you’re more than doubling the bike leg, so extending out the long bike ride to three-four hours through the season is easily doable. Equally, swim sessions won’t need much tweaking as an extra 400m (from 1,500m to 1,900m) is almost negligible in a training session, and the training and intensity of racing are very similar.

Running is slightly different, though. Most Olympicdistance athletes will run further than 10km in training, so the step up (to 21.1km) is less than people realise. Nevertheless, the last 5-6km must be where you focus. This may mean making your long run a little longer. However, trying to get used to the second half of that run can be done effectively by running off the bike on tired legs.

Next, nutrition. For Olympic racing, your inrace strategy was probably modest at best, focussing on pre-loading more than fuelling. So, for the middle, you must create a robust plan to allow you to race for several hours, and this has to be practised before the race.

For most Olympic-level athletes, stepping up to middle distance is manageable. If you’ve been training for a while, just three to four months of tailored training would be adequate to take your Olympic-distance skills to middle-distance lengths.

So to conclude, most of your prior training will be appropriate for middledistance racing; you just need some specific tailoring and a good handle on fuelling strategies.