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

Time for some Intervals, baby!
photo credit: yngrich

Every year triathlon coaches begin to recycle the advice not to be a “winter” rockstar; someone who trains hard in the Winter only to peak and fade long before the season even starts. Instead of working out so hard these coaches suggest you begin laying the foundation for a great season by “training to train,” something that involves putting in many hours of “base” work on the trainer, treadmill and in the pool.

Unlike these coaches, we have spent the last three seasons being rockstars. In fact, we have worked to build a team of rockstars who emerge from their winter “pain caves” stronger and fitter than ever before…and proceed to have breakthrough seasons. We are here to tell you that these triathlon coaches are sadly mistaken in their approach, and that there’s a better way to train that makes you fitter & faster, takes up far less time during the dark, cold winter months, and will utterly transform you as a triathlete.

Are you ready?

Contrasting Approaches
These coaches stack hours of aerobic volume into crammed winter schedules, recommend 3-5 hour trainer rides over 8 months away from your “A” race and sprinkle swim workouts in just because you’re a triathlete and should be swimming. Doing strength work is a good idea and Bikram Yoga is really hot right now, so why not add those too? The net is a typical triathlon plan for an Ironman or Half Ironman, in January looking towards a June/July/August race, will have you logging 14-18 hours of training time across all disciplines.

Contrast this with Endurance Nation, where our typical OutSeason plan contains 4-6 hours of training time in a week, with two whole days off. We don’t recommend swimming or strength training as both have a relatively low Return on Investment for triathletes. Instead of logging time and miles in the winter, EN athletes focus on boosting their power at threshold (bike) and improving their vDOT (run). Even though they log less than 50% of the same training time as their training partners, these EN athletes emerge fitter and faster? How is this possible?

Understanding The Triathlon Season
It helps to begin with the end. In triathlon it’s important to note that our peak, race-specific effort is ludicrously aerobic. We “fly” around the Ironman and 70.3 race courses in zones 1 and 2 (maybe some zone 3 for Half Ironman). We train all season to peak at an effort level where most athletes feel like they can go all day as long as someone feeds them. In other words, it’s not that hard.

Those last twelve weeks leading into your race are the most critical in terms of how you will race, so everything is race specific. You swim, bike, and run some of the biggest miles and weeks of your season here, just before tapering and heading into your race. Again, these aren’t hard training sessions, they are volume-oriented workouts designed to prepare you for the rigors of a single-day endurance event.

Everything before these last twelve weeks, then, is simply preparing you to train for this critical phase. The training you do at this time isn’t really race-specific, and traditionally it’s structured as easier than what your body will endure for the final build up to your race.

I call this traditional approach “Triple-E” for Easy, Easier, and Easiest:

• Go easy — but long — as race prep.
• Prepare to go easy and long by building up your long at an easy effort.
• Build a foundation for your season by logging easy miles and hours so as not to arrive at the prace prep phase in an overtrained state.

But at what point are you actually pushing your fitness? Your body doesn’t know better, it only responds to progressive overload. Based on the above schedule, there are only 9 weeks out of 52 — a full year — where you are adding miles and training hard. What then, exactly, are you doing with the rest of your time to improve your strength and overall speed?

Getting Out of the Volume Game
Following the traditional triathlon approach, most triathletes are de-training–yes I said losing fitness–even though they are working out year-round. Congratulations on logging that three-hour fixed gear rides in the dead of winter dodging holiday traffic! Since it was all zone 1 work, however, you could have ostensibly done no training or an easy 45 minute spin inside on your trainer and achieved the same effect without risking your life or losing an addition 2:15 of your day.

Fortunately there are different ways to create the progressive overload that will lead to increased fitness. Traditional proponents hold that building your training load by manipulating volume (adding more miles at the same intensity) is the best way to go. But this takes 14-16 hour winter sessions into 18-20 hour spring weeks and 20+ hour race prep weeks — an overwhelming amount of time spend training across a season for an “easy” day.

Inside Endurance Nation we create this training load by recognizing the fixed nature of your volume and time constraints in the winter, and instead manipulating intensity (doing harder work for a shorter time). Our OutSeason plans are chock full of hard work, precisely because you can’t do this type of training when building up to your race. The fact that it fits into your overall life is really just a bonus.

Go Fast to Get Fast
In order to build your strength and speed you need to actually train them. No amount of riding 18mph will prepare you to ride 20mph on race day. To make this leap, you need to train at these faster paces and harder efforts when you don’t have competing demands to build race-specific volume. The winter is a perfect time to accomplish this, hence the structure of the EN season as outlined above (and in our online manual).

With the last twelve weeks so focused on race prep, there are minimal fitness gains made. Three plus years of tracking athlete data has shown that critical benchmarks of threshold power and pace don’t change during this phase. Spending a lot of time riding, running and swimming will certainly make you fitter (important for race day!) but it doesn’t make you any faster. The increase in volume and time across all three disciplines really limits your body’s ability to adapt and get stronger/faster…that really only happens once in this cycle when you taper to race.

The Siren Song of Volume
The lure of training more, of making life and work sacrifices to achieve our triathlon goals is appealing. It’s part of the cultural fabric of our sport; it’s how the men and women who are our triathlon idols live their lives. It’s also easy. Easy to coach, as all you have to do is add 10% more to each week with every fourth week being a bit lighter. Done. Easy to train, as your body can adapt quickly to more time at a light intensity, with the only hard part being where to fit your workouts into your schedule. Easy to follow, as in block out all other important things that don’t fall into your tiny triathlon world.

But it’s certainly not better. We’ve been there and are sharing our story so you don’t have to make the same mistakes. Patrick has logged 25+ hours of training during a 60+ hour work week, getting up a 4am to ride the trainer for three hours, sneaking Coke onto the pool deck to avoid falling asleep during lunch swims and running at night in the dark. Rich has ridden back to back 150 mile days on the bike, putting up 1500 miles across 10 days and more…and neither one of us improved as triathletes. We got really good at training a lot, and a lot fitter, but no faster.

Finding A Better Way
It wasn’t until we condensed all those easy hours into a challenging, yet effective schedule that allowed for progression, recovery, and kept things FUN that we began to see the results we wanted…the results of all our hard work. Now that we’ve emerged on the other side, it’s our mission to make sure that triathletes like you don’t simply “opt-in” to the volume because it’s the only way to go. There is another way, a better way. But we can only show you the door; you are the one who has to walk through it.

To learn more about how we recommend you reconstruct your season, consider registering for our FREE email seminar on Rethinking the Off Season or check out our OutSeason training plans.

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