cyclist87 wrote:
I wrote pro/ amateur as I am not on a actual pro team. However, racing my bike is how I manage to pay my bills.
That's good stuff. I'm impressed with how few hours you ride to maintain performance at that 'pay the bills' level, which is going to be very high.
While I definitely do not train anywhere as hard/intensely as you do, I do log more hours than that, and I'm a middling FOP AGer who can't even get onto the podium despite decades of running and ample time to get decent on bike/swim.
I put up 14-15 hours a week in the off-season, and when half-ironman (my "A" race) season comes in it goes up to 18-20 hours per week while holding down a full time job and family. It's amazing how many hours of training you can cram in between 4AM-6AM as well as the half hour lunch hour - my wife barely notices how much I train! I will say that because I do a lot of training in those earlier morning hours, I can't crank up the intensity as much. I still go plenty hard for me, but even with warmup it's still not the same doing interval work at 6AM having just woken up than doing it when you're fully awake.
Crazily, even at 20 hours per week, which feels like a lot of training to me, it really doesn't feel anywhere near maxxing my results in triathlon. Even at 20hrs per week that's only about 7-8 hrs each of bike/run and 5-6 of swim, which is nowhere near what a standalone athlete would do for training hours. I also felt much more tired and beatdown in my prior incarnation as a pure marathon runner running 70+mpw which took 8-9 hours per week, as opposed to now where I log 2x the hours but don't feel as beat up.