If you can continue triathlon training while completeing all of the tasks the cycling team asks of you than thats great and go for it. If not you could potentially ask the team to just train with them. They might be a friendly bunch!

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Strava

Hey guys. Yes I'm on a club cycling team at CSU Fullerton. Our team competes in the western cycling collegiate conference. I'm also a graduate student, which makes it even worse...

My first race in tri season is June at Boulder 70.3, although I say my cycling leg is weakest. My PB 40k in Olympic distance race is 1:08 and 70.3 is 2:50-ish. Our team is pretty laid back in terms of practices. We have team rides in the morning but everyone is on different schedules (very different than your typical varsity sport).

I love the idea of continuing tri training but just emphasizing on cycling to enhance not only my training for races to better my team, but also to experience that precious team environment. As one of you had said, there are many things that prevent us from training, this little thing we call Life. But these are just two forms of training that could go either way and still work out.

Thank you all for the input.

This is true to some extant, but you can always make it work if you really want to. For example one of the members of the men's basketball team (I believe he was on the team that went to the final four, so a pretty serious program) at my school was an engineering major. Of course he took an extra year after eligibility to finish his degree, but that is super impressive to me. Are you telling me that sort of work ethic and dedication would not impress possible employers? I knew other people in engineering that had full time jobs and were going to school full time, sure they did not sleep much or have a social life.

Being on a team could be important to your career, especially starting out. Being on a team could be something that you sell in interviews and provide you with good examples of how you dealt with difficult situations with team mates or how you solved a problem for the team or how you learned something from how the team dealt with an issue.

Awesome advice. I was just looking at some cycling leg splits for top triathletes out there. They can hold 300+ watts forever and they are finishing a 70.3 in amazing times. Also, cycling is where you can make the most time during the whole tri. My PB 70.3 is 5:28 and I'm determined to break the 5:00 in 2016. That's why part of me is worried to focus solely on cycling, but part of me is saying that a short time spend solely cycling nowestern cycling collegiate conference will benefit me greatly in the long run.

Sure, you're committing to a certain number of practices, but that's not the same as committing to being as good as you can be at that sport. If you can do the minimum number of practices, but still fit in time for some running and swimming, then as long as you're not the slowest guy in the program I can't see anybody having a problem. Of course, if you show up to a group ride with tired legs from doing a long run that morning, and everybody has to wait for you at the top of all the climbs, you don't take any pulls at the front, etc. then yeah you're going to get no sympathy and will get cut pretty rapidly.

Like most things, there is a huge area of gray. The question is, are you being fair to your teammates, or are you being selfish? Are you half-assing the sport you signed up for in order to have a better run workout that evening?

My attitude is, you signed up for the team, so you do with them what you said you would. Use the energy / time left over for the triathlon stuff.

In order of priority:

1) academics
2) team
3) everything else.

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When I was on my college cycling team, I continued to run and bike a small amount. Early season we even got most of the team together for a few runs. Most of us did MTB in the fall and road racing in the spring. I recommend doing both as it will make you more well rounded, unless the Fall MTB season conflicts with and triathlons your doing. You can also do a few cyclocross events late fall.

I think you'll need to drop you running quite a bit and your swimming some as well. Maybe 1-2 days a week swimming and 3 runs a week, nothing too long, will keep you in descent form. After cycling is over, you can dial back cycling and focus more on running and swimming. In the Fall, do a run focus after tri season. In Winter, you can focus more on swimming and just keep trainer rides short and high intensity intervals and maintain your run.

The positive is that long term, the cycling skills and strength you gain you have forever. Another one of my teammates later got into tri and qualified for Kona. IT was part of my inspiration to do my first IM and qualify myself. maybe you can recruit a few teammates into doing triathlons too. A average CAT 3 cyclist will be a near front of pack triathlete if he has a good position and bike set-up.

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If it was a team sport I'd agree more. I used to row at a decent level at both college and club, and as a team sport there was a pretty big impact on your crew if you skipped an on-water session, or turned up with a bad hangover, tired from doing another sport, etc. That sort of behaviour wasn't tolerated, you might get away with it once or twice (or if the whole crew turned up hungover after a session drinking together...) but make a habit of it and you'd find yourself in a single scull pretty quickly. But even with rowing, as long as you met the standard required it didn't matter too much whether you were 100% committed to the sport or not. You were unlikely to make the top boat unless you were solely committed to rowing and pretty good about drinking and nutrition as well (there were a few exceptions e.g. ex-national squad guys who had taken a step down in commitment but still operated at a very high level), but we certainly had guys in lower crews who were mixing it with other sports, or having a few too many nights out. As long as they made all the on-water sessions and were good enough to earn their place in the crew on merit then it wasn't a problem.

For an individual sport like cycling it matters less, unless you're talking TTT racing or something where you need to practice tactics and changeovers as a team. Otherwise, if you skip a ride it can still go ahead without you, and if you show up too tired to hang on, you just get dropped. If you're not good enough, I guess you don't get picked for the team when it comes to races.

Club level cycling is the greatest introduction to bike racing, ever. I wouldn't trade my 3-4 years of semi-serious collegiate cycling for anything (well, for a lot of things...).

One of my good friends in the club while I was there, who was a year younger than me, came from an XC high school program and could've potentially walked on to my school's XC program (which was very good). He chose to run on his own instead and get better at cycling. He was pretty uniquely gifted (vo2 of ~80+ on the bike) but would regularly beat some of the varsity XC back end guys on our team and by the time he graduated won Collegiate Nationals Road Race (DII Cycling).

He then went on to try some swimming and had mixed success as a triathlete, but was obviously an excellent duathlete. He raced as a pro cyclist for a couple of years after graduation during grad school.

The short story is - you will get out what you put in.

I came from an XC background, went into my college tri team and then eventually fell in love with road cycling and now exclusively do only that, so I'll chime in.

1) make it clear to everyone that you race triathlons. you don't need to say that cycling is your #2, but make it clear you have your own ambitions as well.

2) You need to manage expectations. you can definitely be a great Triathlete and be up there in cycling races, but chances are unless you totally devote yourself to it you won't be the one winning. Road Cycling races are won by sitting in the group at 200 odd watts for hours, then a 5 minute all out 300-500 watt attack at the end. Criteriums are basically a 45 minute to one hour sufferfest of anaerobic effort all the way, For Triathlon, the aim is different- triathletes are sitting at 230-250 watts for the entirety of the bike leg. you need slightly different training to be good at this.

If you are perfectly fine with this and just want to 'play a role' on the team, then you can be part of the team, perfectly fine. a 1:08 PB puts you a mid- high cat 4 level, my guess is some of your cycling team members will be stronger. they will be your designated leaders and if you are fine sacrificing yourself to do a job for them go right ahead. remember in cycling 'doing a job' means you may not necessarily finish the race ( Of course, this assumes your team is organised enough to actually do some tactics, most lower level teams are not.)

3) if you want to still do well in tri, focus on your running. The aerobic fitness you get from running translates well to cycling- i.e. if you can run a decent half marathon you will have no problem keeping up in a 90km ride (attacks are a different matter). being a good runner will help in tri too because you will naturally be in better shape after the cycle. Run fitness is also more 'time effecient' than swimmin, ( assuming you''re alredy an 'okay' swimer) Having a good bike and run will offset for a relatively poorer swim.

Depending on location, access to a velodrome could be limited, whereas a track/pool usually isn't. Nontrack pacing for no track running workouts is a matter of finding the right group. For biking though, riding in a group of similarly fit people generally means most of them aren't pushing as hard as they can/should (unless it's hillwork). Say one is holding z3-4 pace for 10 minutes; people behind could be cruising at z2

Realized maybe we're arguing different points of efficiency. More people can go faster in a group ride; but more people would get a better workout if they were on a trainer together doing separate workouts

I'd like to say I'm 'okay' at swimming. At Wildflower I swam just under 29 minutes for the long course. I do feel like my running could be worked on more than swimming if I had to choose. Totally makes sense about running being more time efficient than swimming. I'd rather lose 1-2 min on swim leg than 15 min on run.

Also, if by doing more cycling I could easily raise my time on 40k or 56 mile courses during tri (granted I put the work in). The whole team is aware that I race tri's, matter of fact there's another person on the team (or used to be) that also raced tri as well.