Monday, Wednesday, and Friday: organized group swim at high intensity and weight training at high intensityWhen it comes to triathlon training, there are a few broad topics that can be helpful in your quest for improvement and efficiency. In today’s world of trying to do too much, we often lose our ability to focus on what’s important, dial it in, and execute the correct game plan. To have the correct plan, you must recognize and then be able to correct any limitations. I have strongly believed for many years that in order to get faster it’s a matter of doing harder work, not more work, and by that I mean quality over quantity.
As an athlete, it’s important to recognize your limitations and start the training season off slowly. You will want to build up your training volume and intensity gradually. Athletes tend to push themselves with unnecessary volumes at inappropriate times, which isn’t beneficial for positive performance outcomes.
Winter is a time for most of us to start getting back into shape and rev up our fitness for the season ahead. It’s very early in the training cycle, and you are months away from your biggest race of the year. This time of year many athletes plan a schedule that is usually too intense with too much volume. Instead of getting fit, many of these athletes miss workouts and end up with inconsistent weeks. What they should be doing is trying to maintain consistency in their training week after week. Here’s what a typical overenthusiastic triathlete’s training week may tend to look like:
Monday, Wednesday, and Friday: organized group swim at high intensity and weight training at high intensity
Tuesday and Thursday: spin class at high intensity
Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday: running
Saturday: long spin class at high intensity or a group ride with significant work
Sunday: group run, with a lot of hard running
At this pace, after about 3 weeks, the athlete ends up with a cold, can’t work out, and all her so-called fitness is gone. Does this sound familiar? If so, then how exactly do you change such a pattern of self-abuse? There are actually two critical steps in creating a more productive weekly plan:
Step 1: Create a schedule around the hard/easy concept, where after every hard day, an easy day or an easy 36 hours follow. If you are deeply fatigued, you can take two easy days or a complete day off. Sounds easy enough, but athletes have a tendency to overdo it. Trust me, I have been there!
Step 2: Apply the repeatability factor (i.e., how many days in a row can you repeat what you are doing?). Even though you are training day after day, it doesn’t have to be all low intensity—and it shouldn’t be. You can add some higher intensity aerobic workouts, some faster swims, and some strides on the run. It all comes down to asking yourself whether you could repeat the same workout tomorrow. If you can’t, then you should back off.
Here’s an example of two athletes and how different their training plans are: John and Bob both attend the same spin class on Thursday. It’s a 90-minute grinder, and the teacher is one of those in-your-face instructors who yells at you for not maxing your heart rate. Bob is all about getting the most out of his 90 minutes. He hammers himself into the ground, his heart rate is through the roof, and that night he is sore and can’t even sleep. As a matter of fact, he can’t get his workout in on Friday or Saturday because he is so wiped out. He goes out to run on Sunday, but it’s at a slow pace, and he thinks, Wow, I really pushed myself on Thursday. I’m getting more fit.
John, on the other hand, knows he has to recover for Friday night’s organized group swim, and he still has the group ride on Saturday. He has ensured that his training plan has purpose and that he knows what needs to be done. Because of this, he caps his heart rate at five beats over the top of zone 2, which is where 85 percent of his training should be targeted. John goes high into his aerobic zone and even bumps his heart rate into zone 3, which is more of a tempo effort, on some of the climbs, but he quickly recovers. After the spin session, he is still ready to face his other workouts later in the week.
Let’s assume this same scenario takes place over 6 weeks, as these athletes are working on their build phase, with John hitting most if not all of his workouts and Bob missing three workouts a week. Who do you think is going to be more fit? Bob, who blows himself up whenever he can work out, or John who rarely misses a workout and just keeps grinding the workouts out, week after week, month after the month? Your money should be on John because his consistency over time will keep his aerobic base and fitness level growing. When it comes time to add some race-specific workouts, his body will be ready to absorb those harder efforts because he has built the foundation to do so. His ability to be smart enough to know how hard he can go each day, week in and week out, will allow him to keep repeating his training cycle without any major hiccups. Bob, on the other hand, is in trouble, and his improvement has stagnated for another season. Of course he will wonder why. After all, he pushes himself very hard in that spin class, and he can get his heart rate very high. He just can’t seem to put in any consistent weeks of training.
So, to get the most out of your training and the time you spend doing it, here’s what a triathlete’s typical week of training should really look like:
Monday, Wednesday, and Friday: masters swim where Monday is hard, Wednesday is easy, and Friday is pacing
Monday and Friday: weight training with high reps and low weight
Tuesday and Thursday: spin class where Tuesday is cadence and form work and Thursday focuses on big-gear strength and low cadence while keeping the heart rate down
Saturday: long spin class or a group ride (keep the heart rate down, well below the top of zone 2) and run for 30 to 60 minutes after the bike
Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday: running where Tuesday is an easy run for 30 minutes; Wednesday is a long run of 75 minutes or greater, keeping the heart rate in zone 2, not above; and Friday is an aerobic day, where the athlete keeps the effort easy. Sunday is going to be another long run of 75 minutes or greater.
It’s not uncommon to hear a triathlete talk about how she is very strong in one or two events but seems to be weak in the third. The question becomes, how do we change this pattern? How do we take the swim from being a weakness to something respectable? How do we do the same for our bike or run events if they are our weakness? It’s not easy to do, but it’s possible. In my early 20s, I worked in a big city, took the train to work every day, and trained for triathlon about 6 hours per week. Even in this less-than-perfect training environment, I was able to improve my fitness and my weakest link. From this experience I learned about something called sport rotation. Although I found this training theory by accident—because the weather dictated my training schedule—it worked for me. Riding my bike outside in the winter months wasn’t an option. Swimming year-round with a master’s program was out because I had to drive 30 minutes each way to get there. Time was a limiting factor for me.
Taking a closer look at some of the world’s best endurance athletes, we see that they usually run or swim twice per day. Even cyclists ride for a few hours, refuel, and ride some more. When these athletes train, they are focusing on one sport at a time. If you have the desire to get better, you should think about implementing sport rotation in your season. Letting your body focus on one event at a time will help it adapt more quickly and improve technique and endurance. If you continue training the way you are now and you aren’t improving, then what do you have to lose by trying this approach?
If you are interested in using sport rotation (some coaches call such programs run camps, swim camps, or bike camps), then my suggestion is to focus on one sport for 3 weeks, take an easy week, and then repeat the cycle. If you focus on one sport for 2 months, then a complete rotation would take 6 months. After 6 months you can return to a more balanced approach. If you live in a part of the world where you have all four seasons, let the seasons dictate your schedule. It would look something like this: Around November 1, you start your run focus. By early January you would start your swim focus, and by early March you would be starting your bike focus. You don’t have to make it that rigid—everyone has off weeks, colds in the winter, and life that gets in the way of training. It happens.
To set up a sport rotation cycle, first look at your training in terms of time and frequency. You want 50 to 75 percent of your training time to be focused on that sport. Let’s take running, for example: If you currently run 3 days a week, work yourself up to 5 or 6 days per week, even if that 5th or 6th day is only a 15- or 20-minute run. This employs the component of frequency, and it will help you run better the more you are on your feet. In the other two sports, you would still train two times per week (e.g., one drill session in the pool and on the bike plus an endurance set for each as well). Since the focus is on the running, the nonrunning workouts are just maintenance or skills sessions (drills).
After a 2-month cycle, switch to swimming, working at a higher frequency by increasing your time in the pool. During this swimming focus, you would train running and cycling two times per week, with the focus on drills and endurance. Then, when you move into the cycling phase, cycling becomes the focus, and the goal for the other sports is to maintain fitness gains and continue to work on skills and endurance.
Most important, become a runner during your run focus. Run with people who are better than you. Watch how they train. Swim with the swimmers during your swim focus. Become a fish. Watch the fast swimmers swim. Watch their form and see what you can learn. On the bike, become a cyclist during your focus months. Ride with a group. Learn bike-handling skills. Learn to ride in a pack. During these focus months you can learn a lot, you can improve a lot, and you can take your fitness levels to places you haven’t been before. Don’t become a slave to training. Use these ideas as a guideline, but not the end-all for your training. I have tried this approach with many athletes, and even in situations where we did only a 3-week block of focused training, there was improvement. So, if you really want to improve that weakest link, spend some time focusing on it, and in a few weeks, you may just turn a weakness into a strength.
One of the great parts about being a triathlon coach is being able to brag about how your athletes improve. I take as much pride in my athletes’ success as in my own. We have seen quite a few athletes improve over the years, and in this section I wanted to touch on how these athletes got faster without doing mega volume or months of base-building work. Once athletes are experienced enough, they can do without the mega base mileage. I firmly believe that at least 6 weeks of base work is important no matter what your experience level is. After that, though, I like to see some harder work brought into the training program.
Dr. Max Testa is considered one of the best cycling coaches in the world. I had the pleasure of listening to him present at my USAT Level III Coaching Certification class in 2005. Dr. Testa made quite an impression on me, and I walked away with the tenet that “strength equals speed” etched into my mind. The stronger you are, the faster you will race. The stronger you are, the more watts you can push on the bike, the faster you can run up a hill, and the faster you can swim. Getting stronger requires doing more hard work than you are currently doing and improving your aerobic base, or zone 2 speed. Note: I did not say work harder, but do more hard work. There is a big difference there.
Taking this point even further, it’s helpful to see what strength coaches think about strength and endurance. Mike Boyle is the premier strength and conditioning coach in this country and maybe the world. Alwyn Cosgrove is an Olympic-level strength coach of triathletes, boxers, soccer players, and others. It is Alwyn’s belief that maximal strength levels should be achieved before endurance or energy system development. Says Cosgrove (2005), “If we haven’t built up appreciable levels of power, speed or strength, then what the hell are we trying to endure? A low level of power? A low level of speed?” Conditioning coach Mike Boyle once pointed out that “It is significantly easier to get an explosive athlete in shape than it is to make an in-shape athlete explosive. The first will take weeks; the second may take years.”
Does that make any buzzers go off in your head? If you don’t have speed and you go out on a long ride, what are you learning to endure? Riding slowly? Riding at a low level of power? Do you see how riding long, slow miles at 16 miles per hour (26 km/h) is only going to make you good at . . . riding at 16 miles per hour? For example, wouldn’t you rather build your base speed up to 20-plus miles per hour (32+ km/h) in training so that when you add endurance you can do your long rides at 19 to 20 miles per hour (31 to 32 km/h)? Even better yet, learning to push 400 watts in training will make pushing 200 watts much easier. A 200-watt average in an Ironman race such as Arizona or Florida will net a 160-pound (73 kg) triathlete a 5:15 bike split. Being stronger means going faster.
Let’s look at a real-life example of this: Starting in 1989 and continuing for the next 6 years, Mark Allen dominated the Ironman World Championship. He raced Olympic-distance races all the way up until August, when he would start his endurance training for Hawaii. He did this for many years. Racing and training hard for months let him build up his strength and speed so that when he added his endurance, the speed was already there. As Mike Boyle says, “It is significantly easier to get an explosive athlete in shape”—and here was our future Ironman world champ racing his butt off (becoming explosive) to win Olympic-distance races before he started his training for long-distance racing. Boyle continues, “The first will take weeks; the second may take years.” Exactly! If this athlete already has the speed, all he has to do is add some longer-distance training and then he is ready to race long and fast. By the way, this same athlete also won the 1989 ITU World Championships after Ironman Hawaii. So, it wasn’t as if he was racing Olympic-distance races just to race them.
I give many of my athletes up to 6 weeks off from any structured training after their final race of the season. They are free to do whatever they want in this time. When they come back onto the program, we usually give them a few easy weeks to get used to the training again, and then we’ll start off with a little bit of hard stuff. This may mean a short tempo run of 10 minutes or even some short threshold efforts on the bike.
If you work hard all season to peak for a race, then take a month off, then spend 4 months building a base, what have you done besides having gone backward with your training? For every month you take off from training, it takes about twice as long to get back those losses. So if you take 1 month off from training, it will take you 2 months to get your fitness back.
Athletes work so hard to make improvements, so why let it all go to waste and let all that strength and power disappear? I am all for time away from training, and in no way am I advocating hammering your body 52 weeks a year; what I am saying is that if you want to go fast you need to get strong, stay strong, and work on getting stronger. Riding and running long and slow for months will make you neither stronger nor faster. Training with a plan and a purpose will get you stronger and faster. After all, if you need proof of this theory, you can look at our athletes’ results, year after year. If you want to get faster, forgo the endless hours of low aerobic training and add some harder work to your early-season training.
The most commonly asked question of any triathlon coach is “How do I get faster?” Pretty simple question but there is no simple answer, unfortunately. My typical reply is “How much time do you have to train? And what are your strengths and weaknesses?” These two factors will determine how the training should be structured. So much is made of intervals, tempo workouts, using new equipment guaranteed to make you faster, and so on. What it really comes down to is the basics: how much time you have to train and what you do with that time. As my former coach, Rick Niles, says, “It’s not how much you train, but how you train.” That is one of the most important things to remember in setting up your training plan.
In 2008 I took the head coaching position with the University of Colorado triathlon team. This is a team steeped in history and success. Ten national titles in 12 years led to a 5-year drought of watching other teams walk away with the big prize. The team was stuck in the old-school way of training, which was lots of volume, not much swimming (twice per week), and hardly any race-specific workouts. During my first week, I added 
O2 workouts, time trials, and more swim workouts. Gone were the long rides and runs without structure. In their place were shorter, harder rides; lots of climbing on the bike; weekly run workouts at goal-race pace; and running off the bike twice per week.
One of the senior members of the team came up to me after the first month and said, “Mike, what you are doing is completely different from what we’ve been doing the last few years. We usually do a bunch of long slow distance and then add in the fast stuff before nationals.” Without trying to sound pompous, I replied, “I understand that. But if what you’ve been doing hasn’t been working, maybe we need to flip things upside down and see if we can’t shake out a different result.” I didn’t know if it was going to work, and I was pretty nervous it might not, but I was going to give it my best effort. As I viewed it, we didn’t have anything to lose. It took 18 solid months of training like this and a little psychological warfare with some of my resistant charges before CU was able to recapture the title of “champions.”
One of the first things I did with my team was ask the athletes to fill out and return an athlete profile, with such information as best times for 5K and 10K runs, best swim times, best bike times, their favorite sport to train, how many times a week they train in each sport, and so on. I wanted a profile of each athlete so I could help everyone as best I could and create a schedule specific to them and their strengths and weaknesses.
The following matrix (see figure 18.1) came about from that season. It was something that helped me realize how easy it is to individualize training based on only a few factors:
There are only so many hours in a week to train.
Every athlete has a weakness.
Every athlete has a strength.
It takes at least four sessions per week to see improvement, as two or three sessions per week is more along maintenance work.
In the matrix, the strength is listed as well as the weakest sport, and from there you’ll know how to break up the week in terms of how many times you should train in each sport (frequency) and duration (volume). Before using this matrix, ask yourself the following key questions:
How much time do I have to train?
What is my strength?
What is my weakness?
We typically focus our training around this matrix until about 12 weeks from the A race of the season. This gives our athletes more than enough time to get into race shape with race-specific workouts and race-specific efforts. But don’t get too caught up in trying to hit every hour, every week. What you are striving for is consistency. If you are a weak swimmer and need to work on swimming, then get in the water four or five times per week. There is no shortcut for hard work. Hard work doesn’t mean you have to “go hard” all the time. Hard work is defined by doing the work, week in and week out. I’ll repeat it again: You don’t need to hammer all the time to be working hard. You just need to be consistent with getting the workouts in. The key to success in anything, be it work, training, or life, is consistency.
If you gain only one thing from this chapter, I hope it is how to organize your training and how to make your workouts count rather than full of wasted miles and tons of volume. Sometimes in coaching we call this high-volume strategy “checking the box,” meaning you didn’t want to do the workout, you didn’t enjoy it, but you got it done, and you’ve “checked the box.” The problem with this type of training is it’s mentally draining and often doesn’t serve a specific purpose.
I promise that if you can create a training plan that is based on the hard/easy concept, considers the repeatability factor, addresses weaknesses, and has strength work sprinkled throughout, you’ll have an effective plan that will lead you to improvement in a safe and timely fashion. These are concepts I’ve used for more than two decades of coaching and racing, and year after year with athletes of all abilities I see the proven results time and again.
