TRAINING PLAN

The race season may be on hold for the foreseeable, but you can keep those fast-twitch fibres firing with this month’s eight-week training plan…

As triathletes, we all instinctively want to get faster. Bur right now, what are we getting faster for? With races on the back burner, some might think it irrelevant to continue working towards a race goal, but I’d argue that right now is when we need a clear focus more than ever. We might not know when we will be toeing a start line again, but we can at least make sure that when we do we’ll be up to race speed!

Creating, improving and developing race speed should be an important element of all triathletes’ training plans, as without the objective of getting faster it’s very likely you’ll remain one-paced and struggle to find that little burst of energy and speed when really needed.

The great thing about the human body is that it can be developed to cope with increasing levels of demand, and as you stress it with more intensive training loads it will (over time) respond by adapting and setting these new loads as ‘the norm’.

This training plan is geared towards an Olympic-distance tri (1.5km swim, 40km bike, 10km run), so if you’re aiming for sprints then you can reduce the overall volume by 20-30%.

All the sessions have an element of higher intensity intervals, which are designed to make you move faster and generate more speed. So this means that parts of your swim (as we can’t access our local pools then either swap the swim sessions with an additional aerobic endurance bike or run, or do a dry-land swim exercise, which you can find here: bit. ly/2QvPLo4), bike and run training in this plan will take you out of your comfort zone.

It’ll help if you can monitor and measure the efforts in your workouts, so take note of things like revs per minute (rpm) in cycling or strides per min (spm) in your runs, speed and power.

A great base point for this plan is to have an idea of what your expected average race pace is over the Olympic distance, then set your targets at speeds quicker than this average pace. Don’t aim way above the average to begin with, experiment with different targets and see what you can achieve.

Over the course of the eightweek plan you’ll become much better at establishing the kind of speeds you can sustain and how and when to use them in racing… when the time comes.