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

Now that we’ve established our broad training principles, let’s move forward by discussing their application to the training season and beyond.

In this chapter we will:

• Layout our overview for the Long Course Season;
• Discuss each training period in detail;
• Finally, we’ll put it all together for you by laying out the Perfect Ironman Season.

Endurance Nation Season Overview

OutSeason Overview
Of all the items in our tool-kit, we’ve found our views on OutSeason training, what you know as the Off-Season, are most counter to what you’ve been told. Open a tri magazine or check your email between October and February and you’ll be met with a constant stream of messages that have been recycled year after year until they’ve become firmly woven into the very fabric of our sport:

• Go long and slow now so you can build a bigger engine. Then make that engine faster when it matters: closer to the race.
• High intensity training is risky. You need to pay your dues, earn the right to get fast through being slow for a long time.

Recall from Chapter Two that fitness is the ability to do work, and we create and retain that ability by…doing more work. Here’s a tale of two athletes to illustrate our point: Waiting Walt and Get Faster Today Tom.
Waiting Walt
Walt begins October with a Functional Threshold Power (FTP) of 220 watts and 10k pace of 8:00/mile. He throws a leg over his bike or laces up his shoes, does his training at the prescribed intensities he’s read about in the latest tri-mag. It’s cold outside, it’s dark outside and so, while his frequency may be the same as In Season, his intensity continues to be low (per tri-mag) and his volume is low (see cold and dark). He rides and runs precisely on Zone 1, maybe Zone 2, confident he is building his “engine” and will get faster when the time is right. But let’s look at the training math: frequency is held constant while volume and intensity both decrease = Walt does less work = his body adapts by becoming less fit. If you cheese in the gym, you get weaker. You know this. Why should endurance training be any different?

Get Faster Today Tom
Tom’s game is much simpler. His Functional Threshold Power (FTP) is also 220w and 10k pace is 8:00. He is completely focused on watts/pace/speed at FTP or LTHR. On the bike, he might set himself of goal of X minutes per week at his FTP, increasing the watts he dials in on those sessions as he sees his FTP increasing. He does similarly on the run, using his 10k pace to calculate is other training paces, but is much more cautious than on the bike. He knows that running intensity is more risky than cycling intensity. He still does it, he’s just careful.

At the end of 8-10wks our two heroes meet for some field testing and then have a beer afterwards to discuss their training and where to go from here. Walt’s FTP is 225w, maybe 230w, and 10k pace is 7:45-50. Tom, on the other hand, has lifted his FT to 235-240w and his 10k pace is closer to 7:30. However, as Walt and Tom enter the next phase of their training Tom has a 10-15w and 15-20″ head start on Walt. That’s a lot of catchup, folks. In our experience, even if Walt gets on board the Tom Train, Tom will continue to increase this delta even more because he “gets it.” He has learned that work works, he’s not afraid to work, and he has a significantly different perspective than Tom on what work truly is. Walt’s experience, when riding with Tom (mostly likely on his wheel) will be WTF!!!

At this point in time, and we’ll discuss this more below, both Tom and Walt now realize that they need to start putting in the volume to get ready for the race.

• Walt: Is now trying to build “fast” at the same time he is trying to build “far.” He cannot manage the two simultaneously and spends his lunches sleeping under his desk (we’ve been there).

• Tom: He has built “fast.” He has more flexibility to separate his fast training from his far training. If he wants, he can consolidate his fast, focus on his far, and introduce bits of fast training into or around his far as he assesses his fitness and recovery from day-to-day, week-to-week, etc.

Building Your Perfect IM Season
OutSeason Dates:
The length of your OutSeason is entirely dependent on life and the weather, although a 16 week window is optimal.

• Able to ride outside most if not all year: October through late February.

• All others: About Nov or Dec through March or April.

OutSeason Keys:

1. Total Focus on ROI: weather, daylight, family, and, most importantly, the need to conserve your head across a long season, demand that you maximize your return on a minimum of time investment. In the OutSeason we build the FAST that will put the FAR under when we are closer to your race and you have more time available. Again, this structure is a necessary product of the “real life age grouper” condition first, good training scientific sense second.
2. Get FAST while the competition gets FAT. In Chapter Two we discussed our ideas of base, LSD training in contrast to our perspective of fitness as simply the ability to do more work, and that it’s never too soon to start going fast.
3. Zero weekly and session volume goals. Workouts are usually described as the Main Set only, volume is up to you. The only exception is the long run, which do have volume goals for to support your half marathon race focus (see below).

OutSeason Focus Points:

• Swim: Very much an individual, return on investment (ROI) decision. We feel that the time, logistical, and mental cost of swimming often does not yield a high enough ROI to justify much time, if any, in the pool during the OutSeason. We’ve done this informally with our athletes for years but in the Fall/Winter of 2007-2008 we had the opportunity to apply this principle to over 80 athletes in our ENGroups Off-Season training program. After a week or two of kicking and screaming, they eventually came around, especially when they began to see the gains they were making on the bike and run compared to the relatively small gains they knew they would have seen for the same or even greater time investment on the pool. That said, it is always a good idea to attend a swim clinic in your area and, if you are going to swim, swim for technique and form, not fitness.
  
• Bike: Build 40k bike fitness, ie, GET FAST! Insert athlete on bike, ride hard/push the watts, done, repeat. No regard for cycling volume. 3-4hrs per week on the bike is entirely common for our athletes at this point in time.
  
• Run: Build half marathon fitness through high frequency running, tempo runs, and a long run just long enough to support the half marathon goal.
  

OutSeason Results Summary, 2007-2008
October 2007 through April 2008 we trained approximately 80 athletes through these protocols via our ENGroups program. We have seen some incredible gains made in just 16 weeks and are working on getting the data for everyone compiled. This section will be completed when that data is made available.

Transition Overview
From a physiological standpoint, the OS paradigm we outline is effective and scientifically sound; it’s valid for making fitness gains all year long. The only problem? You aren’t a robot. In our world, fitness is the ability to do work; increased fitness is the ability to do more work. But an individual’s ability to do the the training in the first place is a combination of physical and mental focus. Asking you to sustain that focus for longer than 16 weeks is typically too much; the further away your race is, the more this is true..

Improvement in the off season is important for long-course athletes, but like anything else in life, too much of a good thing can be not good at all. A typical error folks make at this juncture is to look back at their fitness 16 weeks ago, draw a line to where they are today, and assume that further improvement will maintain the same trajectory. Instead of waiting for the inevitable drop off / plateau / break to happen, we preempt it by building in set aerobic periods. In the off season / after a big race this is called “Transition;” during the IN season we encourage you to use Big Weekends or Big Weeks to “pay for” the low-volume, high-intensity approach of our training model.

Deconstructing the Off Season
People generally view in-season and off-season as two big chunks of a year. For our athletes, it’s more a function of managing two distinct, recurring work periods across a season: Intensity Focus and Aerobic Focus. The intensity focus fits your real-world life and racing goals, while the aerobic focus helps you adapt to the specific demands of long-course triathlon. These demands include managing nutrition, flexibility, strength of core/lower back/neck/triceps, ability to sit and ride, ability to pace effort over longer course.

• Within the EN system, no work phase lasts longer than 16 weeks.
• Each Work Phase targets an event.
• Length of a Transition period should be 1 week for each 4 weeks of work.
• IN season aerobic periods are self-selected according to athlete’s schedule.

Transition Goals
The overall goal of Transition is to set things up so that you emerge ready to train again. The last thing you want to do is realize mid-season that you are burned-out and need to back down. To be more specific, you need to be ready to tackle another 10 to 16 weeks of work (depends on how far away your next A race is). If you can’t talk yourself into the next work cycle, you just aren’t ready yet.

Transition is little more than a basic week you can execute as long as needed until you are ready to start hitting it again for your next race.

Transition Week Template

	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday	Sunday
Workout 1:	Day Off	Bike, self-selected intensity	Swim 2-3k, technique and moderate speed focus.	Bike, self-selected intensity	Swim with an Endurance Focus; 3-4k including drills and long sets.	Bike	Long Run
Workout 2:	Day Off	Get It Done Run: brick, PM, whatever, just keep frequency	Run 45′ including 30′ @ top of Zone 2 for distance.	n/a	Just run, max of 45′.	No Saturday run, be a human for 21-22hrs each weekend day	n/a

Note: The schedule listed above is specific to Half and Full-Irondistance athletes, short course athletes can cut back if necessary.

Other things to do during Transition include:

• Focus on nutrition / body composition — it could be hard to change nutrition back to “civilian” levels.
• Invest “extra” time in flexbility and core strength work.
• Line up things for your next block (equipment, nutrition, holidays, etc.).

InSeason Overview
InSeason starts when the weather and your life says it should. That said, it’s very important that you choose early season races commensurate with your training time available during the OutSeason. You New England April Ironman Arizona athletes know what we’re talking about!

The snow melts, the sun shines again, and TeamEN athletes all over the country emerge from their Pain Caves to rip the legs off their base-training competitors (see results above). Volume goes up because it can, not because it has to and largely levels out at a volume that is repeatable and manageable, week after week.

General Preparation Phase, or Training to Train
The themes are:

• Continue to build FAST.
• Integrate FAR into your training in a manner that is manageable and repeatable, week after week. Don’t burn the SAU’s you’ll need later!*
• Continue to address body composition, flexibility or core strength issues, etc.
• Goal is to get all your homework done so we can enter Race Prep ready to rock and roll.

* SAU = Spousal Approval Unit

Quality still trumps Quantity
You will get to ride longer as your season progresses, but we still demand hard work and keep the sessions shorter than your local tri-geeks will like. Again, in our world we don’t do volume for the sake of volume. Any training session is nothing more than an opportunity to deliver a training stress to your body. If we can deliver a vanilla 4hr training stress with a focused, 3hr ride, then why would we waste an hour of your time. More importantly, that 3hrs is more repeatable, week after week, and doesn’t burn the SAU’s in March you’ll need in July. Time efficiency, ROI, always.

Days Off and Recovery
Minimal days off in your plan and not so much recovery “weeks” as recovery “days”. Why?

1. Over the years and through our experience we’ve crafted schedules that build recovery into each training week. Monday flows into Tues flows into Wednesday, etc. Our athletes’ first steps are often to scan the plan for the weekly day off and the recovery week in Week 4. When they tell us they don’t see it, we ask them to take the plan for a spin and get a feel for the rhythm of the schedule. One consistent comment we hear from our athletes is how well thought out everything is and how, just as they feel like they’ve been brought to the brink, things ease up at just the right time.
2. We feel that that “need” for a recovery week is a symptom of ineffective scheduling, a combination of doing too much too soon and paying more attention to the details of the workouts than to the recovery between sessions. In fact, as coaches, we spend FAR more attention considering how to schedule recovery between sessions than we do to the nuts and bolts of the actual workouts. Therefore, we feel if we can build recovery into every week of the schedule, then we can eliminate or reduce the need for a recovery week. Rather than a scheduling a light week, we have you rest hard on the front end of the training week, retaining your key sessions of the week, and therefore 25% of our key session for the training month. This is huge.

That said, if you feel the need, at any time, to take a day off, go for it. This is a static plan and there is no sense following it into a brick wall. At best, any training schedule is merely a suggestion that you back up with your common sense, your experience, and the support we can provide for you in the EN forum.

Testing
We don’t do testing for the sake of testing. Whenever possible, we encourage you to extract objective measurements from your testing (watts and pace) and use these in your training.

• Heart Rate Athletes: You may find you need to do two tests in the first 8 weeks of your program, particularly if you are beginning the program with a low level of fitness. Your body will adapt very quickly which will usually change your LTHR and the PE associated with your heart rate training zones. Once things stabilize, there is no need to have you hammer yourself just to confirm that your LTHR is, still, 175bpm!
• Power Athletes: 1-2 Functional Threshold Tests (FTT) on the front of your plan to establish your baseline. We then encourage you to the data analysis tools explained in the Wiki, the Power Webinar, and in the forum to extract your FTP from the data rather than formal testing.
• Pace Athletes: A 10k road race, time trial, half marathon or similar activity is an excellent opportunity to extract a new VDot score and recalculate your training paces. We’ll cover this in much more detail in the Training with Pace chapter of the Wiki.

Race Preparation Phase, or Training to Race
We’d like you to think of Race Prep as beginning with the “It’s On Day.” This is the day on the calendar that marks the transition from training to train to training to race. From a mental relaxation about training to now it’s time to get serious. You’ve finished all of your homework: you’re at your goal training weight, you’ve had your bike fit addressed, you’ve taken care of any nagging injuries, etc. You’ve prepared your family for the shift in your focus, which we only ask you to keep for 7-11wks. Hopefully, in February, you put some epic training weekends on the family schedule for June or July and have been diligently racking up the SAU’s for months and months. Time to cash them in.

But wait…there’s no need to go crazy. On a week to week basis, you’re only going to ask for about an additional 2hrs of training, as an extra hour tacked on to the weekend rides. Everything else stays relatively the same and we use the tool of Epic Training Weekends to really boost your fitness in small but effective and time efficient chunks.

Other Race Prep Items:

• Positional and Nutritional Fitness: what you may hear referred to as “race specific” fitness, we prefer to think of as Positional and Nutritional Fitness. That is, the ability to ride at your race pace and fuel yourself in the position you’ll use on race day. This is definitely a consideration for a successful race day and so in Race Prep the road bike gets put away and we lock ourselves into the aerobars as much as we can on every ride. Rich likes to specifically strain his neck and lower back by forcing himself to look far up the road, even have training sunglasses with a thick frame that he has to look over or under.
  

• Big Weekend/Week Training: We’re not 100% against big miles, low-intensity work. There is a time and a place for it, however, and how you use this focused volume is largely a function of your race day goals. We offer some basic guidelines on how to implement this work here and here.
• Race Rehearsals: These are critical parts of your Race Prep, as the work you have been doing during the year has made you into a lean, mean, racing machine. And that’s NOT who you need to be on race day. These rides are the only time of your season that you want to emulate Waiting Walt; steady, smooth, and well-paced as you ride well and prep for the run. To learn more about our Race Rehearsal Protocol read on in the EN Library here and here.

Popularity: 20% [?]