Endurance Nation | Triathlon Coaching, Ironman Training, Half Ironman, Beginner Triathlon

photo credit: smith_cl9

Every year we watch thousands of athletes compete on the Ironman and 70.3 race circuit — after all as coaches we travel to most of the major events on the race calendar. Race day is special not just for what happens, but because it’s the culmination of months of training and focus.

While race day is all about execution, all the training leading up to this point determines the nature of your race. Speed isn’t something magical that shows up, it’s earned. And no part of your training is more speed focused than what you do in the winter.

You Will Plan A Full Season

The first thing you should do is sit down and create a roadmap for your full season. This will be your overall guide to building fitness and allowing you to peak for your A race of the year. Using the Endurance Nation approach to seasonal fitness, you will incorporate time for building your fast in the OutSeason and follow that up with ample time to add far in the Race Prep phase. Here are two articles that look at the season planning process in more detail:  A Season Map and Season Planning Case Studies.

You Will Select Appropriate Activities

The hardest part of the wintertime siren song of volume is the true variety of options. Outside of the usual triathlon disciplines, you can ski, skate, hike, ride cross or MTB. You can look outside of aerobic work and find yoga, crossfit, core strength, weight training and much more. Before you know it, you could easily be singing up for the same amount of training time you did in the winter!

Instead, you’ll drop the swim workouts unless you average slower than 2:00 per 100 yds in the pool. You won’t lose that much swim fitness and it only takes a few weeks get it back (here’s another article where you can learn about our no-swimming policy for the winter).

If you want some diversity in your winter training cycle, you can pick one or two outside activities to complement the work you are doing to build your fitness. An example would be skate or crosscountry skiing that you did once during the week and once on the weekends. We vastly prefer you picking one additional activity to replace swimming, something that you pursue in-depth, as opposed to filling your calendar with too much.

You Will Skip “Base” Work, Focusing on Fast Instead

Your competition will break out the fixed gear bike. Could be there’s a big marathon that everyone in your hood will want to do…like Disney. Whatever the endurance challenge might be, let your them do it. The more time your age group competition spends in Zone 1 means less time they’ll actually be building speed or getting faster. They don’t know any better, because they are doing exactly what the elites and pros do — pile on the miles.

The unspoken challenge of a volume-oriented approach is being able to do enough miles in zone one. If you take a look at the average pro triathlete training schedule, they are riding 15 to 25 hours a week at that level. Then you add running and swimming to the mix. Sure the volume works; the only problem is you can’t have a full-time job, family, or other responsibilities if you want to get the full benefits because you simply can’t do enough training — and recovery from it — for it to work. In other words, one five-hour ride a week simply won’t cut it.

Focus on Training ROI

As a savvy age-group triathlete, there are many other things weighing on your mind outside of trying to log more hours than anyone else you know. The winter is an excellent time to focus on excellence in everything you do outside of your regular in-season training: you have work, social and family commitments that can use your attention. You do this now to earn the right to take time in the summer for your training and racing.

Instead of just piling on hours, you will focus on improving the critical metrics of threshold power (bike) and pace (run). This means hard interval training in both sports, three sessions each a week, with workouts limited to about an hour. That’s right, a baseline of about six total hours of training.

This gives you plenty of time to recover from each workout, and to dominate in the other areas of your life that matter. After three to four months of this focused training, your bike and run fitness will be at season peak levels. You’ll be ready for a short break and then it’s time to turn your attention to adding some volume on top of this newly created speed.

Conclusion

A lot of what you’ve read here runs contrary to traditional triathlon training. Don’t let that deter you; we have put over 3,000 triathletes through the OutSeason since 2007, and the data and testimonials don’t lie. So before you fall inline with your training partners, remember that the only “foundation” you need in the winter is speed related.

After all, as an Ironman or 70.3 triathlete, the actual race-specific training of the final twelve weeks is more than enough time to ramp up your endurance. It’s time to break with tradition and find some new fitness…good luck!

Want To Learn More?

Please take the Endurance Nation FREE five-part “Rethinking the OutSeason” Email Seminar.  We’ll cover these topics above in much greater detail while also teaching you the basics of training with power, pace, annual scheduling, and much more. Join the more than 5,000 athletes who have benefitted from the EN approach to winter training!

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It’s that time of year again, as athletes end their 2011 season and begin to plan their training and racing for 2012. Inside the team we are now fielding many season planning questions and the Big One is:

“Given my race schedule for 2012, when should I start my OutSeason Training Plan?”
Answer: You should start the OS when your head is ready to commit to anywhere from 14 to 20 weeks of focused, hard work.

This is a function of the nature of the season you just ended, the length of your 2012 season, and your own personal constraints during the winter months.

What is the OutSeason?
This is the critical time of year when we build your power and pace at threshold.  Because you have minimal volume goals with no big races on the schedule, we can fill your extra time with recovery. This means we can really push the intensity of the workouts and help you establish new levels of fitness on the bike and the run. The net being that when you return to the open road next year, your training partners won’t know what happened to the “old” you that no longer rides or runs with them. To learn more about our OutSeason training methodology, please watch the videos on the OutSeason Training Plan page in the Endurance Nation Store.

Your 2011 Season
If it’s been a long one, you definitely want to take some unstructured downtime to recover your body and reset your head. This includes Ironman Canada, Louisville or Wisconsin, and especially the late season races of Ironman Kona, Florida, Arizona, or Cozumel.

Why rest, you ask? Because our OutSeason training plans are tough. We’re going to ask you to a lot of hard work. You definitely want to be a mental place where you are ready and eager to do that work, not feeling like you have to do the work now because you have race on Date X in 2012.

Unstructured is just that — do what you want to do, staying active, maintaining your running frequency, etc, but consider not training with a scheduled training plan. Again, your priority is to reset your head before diving into the hard work. Feel free to post to the Endurance Nation Facebook Page if you want more feedback from us.

The Length of Your 2012 Season
If you’re racing a late 2012 race, you want to err on the side of starting your OS training later rather than sooner. More importantly, definitely want to break your 2012 season into smaller, more manageable chunks. The idea is to move from short term goal/race to short term goal/race, vs putting your feet on the floor at 5:30am in December thinking you are training for Ironman Florida 2012. If you try the latter approach you will be insane by May, we promise.

Your Personal Constraints
When does the weather sentence you to the drainer or dreadmill? How far into 2012 will you be on those damn things? What are your work and/or family commitments during holidays and winter months?

Training time during the Winter can be very costly — indoors, in the cold/dark, shoehorned in around holiday commitments, occurring months and months before your 2012 races, etc. Be realistic about these personal costs and pick a start date for your OutSeason that reflects this assessment.

“But what about my goal race of the Podunktown 70.3 on April 15th? How does that affect my OS start date?”

Please go here to read our thoughts on transitioning from the OS to your A-race training plan. If you’re a TeamEN member, please take the Season Planning Survey to have Coach Rich plan your season for you. In short, we’ve managed the back end of the OS — how to integrate that with the rest of your season, how to transition you to your A-race plan — a thousand times. We have/are an app for that! But what is much more important is you choosing the best OS starting date for you, based on the three bullets above. Don’t worry about what means on the back end. That’s easy to manage.

OutSeason Start Date Considerations and Recommendations
Within TeamEN we traditionally start the OS on set dates to get massive numbers of athletes starting the same plans at the same time. This helps to maximize the accountability and mojo of the Team:

• ~October 1st — good for athletes who finished their goal races for the 2011 season in July or August (or earlier), “maybe” folks who raced Ironman Wisconsin who have seriously unplugged for the balance of September and are genuinely ready to get back at it.
• ~November 1st — better start date for the IMWI and September 70.3 folks.
• ~December 1st — we do NOT recommend you start your OS plan in December. In our 5yrs of experience with guiding athletes through the OS, December is just very, very messy and more often than not December OS athletes end up doing a hard reset and starting their OS over in January.
• ~January 1st — for athletes who finished their season in November and/or have very late 2012 races.
• ~Feb 1st — similar to the January OS folks.

In summary, our OutSeason training plans are the best tools we have for making you a much, much faster triathlete. We will ask you to work very hard; not long, but hard. Averaging just six to eight hours a wek, these intense sessions have created huge bike and running speed boosts for hundreds of athletes across the last five years. Once you are ready to wrap your head around about 20wks of hard, challenging work — work that will create massive PR’s for you in 2012 — come check us out!

Endurance Nation Triathlon Coaching
Go here to create a FREE 5-day trial membership, or go here to enroll in our FREE OutSeason Virtual Seminar and learn more about our proven OutSeason training methods!

Popularity: 6% [?]

Please Get Out of The Water — Until It Matters
photo credit: m.gifford

It’s pretty well-known by now that Endurance Nation recommends that you don’t swim during our OutSeason training cycle. That means for a grand total of five months, our athletes aren’t swimming a single stroke. This approach has generated a lot of buzz, mostly negative, that how we train is in someway incomplete. After all, what’s a triathlon training plan without swimming in it? The Long Answer: It’s an incredibly focused approach to building the required bike and run fitness that will carry you through a personal best on race day. The Short Answer: Re-Learning how to swim is better than constantly swimming and making tweaks.

The Problem

As adults engaging the water, we are at a distinct disadvantage because we simply don’t have the time to train like actual swimmers. And by time I mean the five days a week for years that will allow us to develop an insanely effective stroke. To further compound the issue, most triatheletes spend an inordinate amount of time working on building their swimming fitness as opposed to developing an actual stroke. The truth is, it’s way easier to just pile on the miles in the pool every year than it is to dig down into the fundamentals of what can make you a faster swimmer and eliminating whatever is holding you back.

The Facts: Swimming Is 80% Technique and 20% Fitness

As a triathlete you are very aware of just how much technique plays a role in swimming speed. There’s nothing like being a ridiculously fit athlete on land but getting your butt handed to you on a regular basis by an out-of-shape, former collegiate swimmer with a nice beer gut. Or, as some of our members can attest, by their own 8-year-old kids who are way faster. While Mr. State and your kids don’t hang out, they do have something in common — they have put the time in to learn how to swim, and they started young.

Your goal as an Age Group Triathlete looking to improve your swimming is to find the most time-efficient way of improving your stroke. Your job is to seek out the advice, coaching and learning opportunities that will allow you to improve our stroke given the basic constraints we all face (lack of time, two other sports, job, life, family, etc.).

Inside Endurance Nation we eliminate the time cost of off-season swimming by removing it entirely from the schedule. Now you can sleep in an additional two to three days a week, and you are more rested to hit the run and bike workouts on your schedule. Most importantly, you have the advice and support of 600+ athletes who all are telling you that swimming in the winter doesn’t actually make them any faster than the work they do in the final three to five months before their big race.

Let’s learn more about why that works…

Re-Learning Beats Tweaking

With swimming being such a technique oriented undertaking, your mental and physical focus has to be 100% if you are going to be able to identify and make the changes that will improve how you swim. Nothing dulls this mental edge more than the combination of year-round swimming and group swim workouts with forced distances.

While common sense says the more you swim, the better you’ll get at swimming, actual experience says otherwise for the time-crunched triathlete. Just as in any individual swim set, say a 300, you know that the first 50 is better than the last 50; that the first half is better than the second. Over time your form and skill succumb to fatigue and lack of focus. (Note: This is why we recommend swimming lots and lots of repeat 100s with rest, to ensure that a large part of your swim workouts will consist of actual quality strokes.) But the same effect happens on a macro-level scale as well: the more often you swim as an Age Group Triathlete, the less likely you are to have a technique breakthrough.

In other words, being away from swimming makes you much significantly more prepared to become a better swimmer when you do return. This is not the case for fitness dependent sports like cycling and running, but it is born out in the swim on a regular basis.

“my ‘haven’t swam 1 stroke in literally 6 months’ self swam about 1 minute slower than my PR self from the previous year. Less than a month later, I set a 30 second PR, after focused technique work and some fitness sets. “

Compressed Timelines Make a Difference

Finally, there’s nothing like a deadline to motiveate you to improve. If you only have fifteen weeks to swim, then you make the most of it. Giving yourself all year only means that you are spending more time in the water since extra time doesn’t in and of itself guarantee improvement.

What Can You Do?

If your race is more than 20 weeks away, you can back off the swimming right now. When you do drop into swimming, spend the first 30% of your time on technique alone. Once you feel comfortable with your form, then it’s time to begin adding a bit more fitness each week.

The 1k Time Trial Challenge

We can talk all we want, it’s the performances of our athletes that really sets the tone for what do here at Endurance Nation. To that end we have fired up a 1000 yard challenge. We are asking our folks to:

1. Record their last timed swim. For many this will be several months ago.
2. Perform a 1k time trial in the pool. Preferably, this will “cold,” with little to no swimming in the weeks beforehand, so we can quantify exactly how much time they have lost by not swimming.
3. Repeat these time trials every month so we can document how quickly they get their swim, and then some, back.

Our experience is that their cold TT will be a bit slower then their last season PR, the second TT a month later will be spot on (4-6 weeks of swimming) and the third test will show improvement over last year’s previous best…in just 12 weeks.

But talk is cheap! We’ll record these results and share them with you in a few months after we have many data points!

Popularity: 16% [?]

photo credit: k.steudel

Auth Note: PSA = Public Service Announcement

Attention Triathletes: Do Everything You Can to Avoid Swimming This Winter

If you are like me, you don’t like to wait. We live in an on-demand world, and nowhere is this more true than in the realm of our performance, where we seek out incremental speed gains by dropping cash on wheels and carbon widgets. If you are planning on being faster next season, and are ready to do the work to get there, here’s the single best tip we can give you this winter: Stop Swimming.

Swimming in the winter is the fitness equivalent of voluntarily waiting in a really loooooong line at the post office.

You are effectively saying some version of the following:

• I don’t need to recover or rest in the Winter.
• I don’t need to do quality bike and run sessions that will boost my fitness.
• I will do the same work now, in the winter, that I do during the regular tri season, and I will hold out hope (against all odds) that I will see different results by my next race.

Training Isn’t Complicated: If you want to be fast, you have to train fast.

Since 2007 we have helped over 2,000 triathletes build the baseline strength and speed over the winter months that has carried them to personal best performances during the regular season. Let’s take a closer look at our No Swim Policy and what it means for you.

The Average Swim Session Is Twice the Time for Half The Work

Think about it: 30 minutes drive + change, 60 minute swim, 30 minutes change + drive. Do this three times across a week and your 6 hours of time is only netting you 3 hours of training. Contrast this with a bike or run session from your house (or in your basement) where an hour long workout takes just that — an hour.

But it gets more challenging. Most swimming pools aren’t open at “regular” hours that fit our basic schedule. Most triathletes have to be at the pool between 5-7 in the morning to get in their swim, meaning an early morning wake up call and reduced sleep at night.

The real rub on swimming? Swimming is a technique-oriented endeavor. For most of us triathletes, proper swimming is about 80% technique and 20% fitness. This makes it incredibly muscle-memory dependent — meaning that unless you are a human rock in the water, your swim time is much better invested closer to your actual race season — when you can build your skills and fitness and then put them directly into a race.

And the final straw? Swimming is the shortest leg of any triathlon. Improving by 5% in an Ironman swim, for example, will move you from a 1:05 swim to a 1:01:45. Put that same 5% improvement into a 6 hour bike split and you’ll be flying to a 5:42 (that’s 18 minutes faster!).

Real Swimmers Don’t Have It Better

True swimmers have been in the water since age 5. By the time they are 20, they have been putting in 25, 50, even 75,000 yards per week! They have swum more in the first 15 years of their career than you or I could ever hope (or want!) to, given our jobs, lives, and multisport focus. But at the end of the day, those 15 years of swimming might earn them a 50 minute Ironman Swim…maybe only 15 to 20 minutes ahead of you. You can make that up with a solid bike and a smart run…and you got to watch all those episodes of the Smurfs and the A-Team while they were swimming away their youth.

But…But…But…

Everyone has their own reasons for swimming, and we certainly respect that. Outside of it being a powerful social activity, there is no real reason to suffer through the winter and miss out on better bike and run training.

#1 — Social Butterfly: If swimming is the only place you get to hang out with and get your tri-mojo, then cut that back to 1x a week in the winter. Think about it…if you save the other 4 hours, you could get stuff done and then actually have time to go out for a social night!

#2 — The Ambitious Upstart: After one year of racing, you are ready to pour your heart and soul into getting better. You have figured out how to squeeze the most time out of your week by cutting back on social stuff, curtailing family time and leveraging the trust of your employer to be a bit late (or leave early)…combined with a few well-placed sick days, you are ready to train 20 hours a week for the next 8 months….YEAH! With an IM swim time is slower than a 1:15, you aren’t a rock but you do need to focus on swimming. Don’t waste the better part of your winter in the pool…get faster on the bike and run while you research a good 1:1 swim coach in the area and plan on starting your “real” tri season in the spring with a few good weeks of multiple 1:1 sessions. Done.

#3 — The Rock: Yes, you. You are a great athlete, able to defy gravity on the bike and the run…but there’s something about the water that makes it your personal kryptonite. You are the sole exception to PSA #132 — you can start to work on your swim stroke. That said, instead of signing up for a masters program with tons of hours but little personal attention, we suggest you find a swimming workshop (think Total Immersion) that will get you the fundamentals. Then put those into practice 2x a week during the winter…keep the sessions to technique only so these days are very similar to a day off. When the season is nearing, you can begin to look at the guidance for the Ambitious Upstart listed above.

The Background

We launched the “No Winter Swimming” policy with our 2007 OutSeason training plans to a great deal of buzz. A triathlon coaching company who say don’t swim…people thought we were pretty crazy. We had to do a lot of damage control, as folks assumed we meant never, ever swim (not true)…and we even capitulated and now offer swim workouts and our swim ebook with all of our triathlon training plans, even the winter OutSeason plans. As the results trickled in from the 2008 season, we saw athlete after athlete who took 14 to 20 weeks off from swimming and swam just about the same speed as the previous year.

The real rub, however, was that these folks had taken their newly found free time and used it to recover better and get stronger on the bike and the run. The net being a season full of PR performances ranging from 10 minutes to almost three hours! This cycle has since repeated itself every winter, with a new host of Team EN athletes taking the no swim pledge and making the most of their focused winter training. If you are interested in taking your triathlon game to the next level, and know that swimming 5k three times a week in January for a September Ironman event just ain’t right, then please check out our OutSeason Training Plans here.

Interested in learning more?

Please take the Endurance Nation FREE five-part “Rethinking the OutSeason” Email Seminar. We’ll cover these topics above in much greater detail while also teaching you the basics of training with power, pace, annual scheduling, and much more. Join the more than 5,000 athletes who have benefitted from the EN approach to winter training!

Popularity: 22% [?]

It’s been less than a month since we announced our “Cash for Clunkers” training plan trade-in program and we wanted to give you an update:

We have paid over $4,000 so triathletes don’t have to train with their old, clunker training plans!

Our email filter of these training plan trade-in receipts reads like a Who’s Who of high-dollar, old skool coaches. Exchange reasons vary widely, but include:

• Out dated training methods;
• Ridiculous volume of training across an entire season;
• Injuries and burn-out from attempting to follow the other plans;
• Same workouts (and weeks) across entire seasons, and many more…

Endurance Nation Is Here to Help You Break The Cycle
Let Us Help You Get Stronger & Faster Today!

Many of these customers have gone on to take advantage of our double top secret training plan upgrade option to become full members at a discounted price.

This is how the program works:

• Have you trained with another training plan in the last calendar year? If so, we want to buy that plan back from you!
• Purchase an Endurance Nation OS training plan, on sale through December 31st for 20% off.
• Send us the receipt of ANY competing training plan and we’ll write you a check for 100% of the value of your clunker-plan, not to exceed the purchase price of your OS plan.
• Go here for complete details.

Thanks and stay tuned for another update when the Cash For Clunkers program ends on 12/31/2010!

Popularity: 18% [?]