I have two full time employees. I pretty much do whatever I want the rest of the year and work an avg of 25-30hrs a week. Summers are pretty slow for me which is good for vacations and relaxing. Be your own boss and make triathlon a marketing expense!! I do get a little busy from late Aug to Oct 15 with extensions but its manageable for getting out of the office but tough for a week long vacation. I'd recommend sharing office space with some like minded professionals so you don't go it alone at first.

Being a coach with a full time day job, I'm working 60 to 70 hours a week + 3 kids + wife works full time + I race + travel for work once a month... and don't do half bad.

Key to keeping fitness will be load, not just volume and not just intensity, but the right combo of both.

You can do a lot with 30 minutes x 2 times a day.

But, there is MAYBE 30 minutes after the kids go to bed that I have to stop the world and relax before going to bed and getting up to do it all over again. Just be ready to go go go go....

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Ryan
http://www.SetThePaceTriathlon.com
http://www.TriathlonTrainingDaddy.com
I got plans - https://www.trainingpeaks.com/...dotcom#trainingplans

I have two young kids and work full time. Unlike a lot of others, I train at night when the kids go to bed at ~8:00.
Evening swim at the YMCA at 8:30-9:45
I run at 8:30- ?? But get in anywhere from 5-13 miles.
Have a trainer in the basement so ride any time.

It works for me.

I'm a CPA and worked for years with a Big 4 firm and now on my own.

In the busy seasons, I really focus on diet, eating only 2 meals a day and lots of quality fats and vegetables. Maintaining my weight is by far the best way to avoid getting out of shape. I also focus on doing something each day, even if it's only a 30-minute run. If you did a 30-minute run or indoor trainer 5 days in a row and a little more on the weekend combined with a good diet, you'd be surprised how long you can maintain fitness.

Keep your priority on your health (good light diet, stress reduction etc.) with "fitness" secondary.

Working for a big 4 too, didn't have too much trouble training for full IM last year, and this year shouldnt be any different. I found a couple of guyz who do IM's too in my business unit, and we train almost every lunch together, small sessions of 30 to 40mins (usually 3 runs/2 swims a week), then just eat in a few minutes what we brought from home. A quick Zwift session a few times during the evenings. This adds up to 6.5/7hours a week of training, which as been enough for me to go sub 11H at IM events the last 2 years, not a great result for a lot of people but enough to make me enjoy it :)

Run commute? If you can work it then working running into your commute can squeeze in a few workouts that might otherwise not happen - easier and more time efficient than bike commute.
Or work on strength and flexibility issues as a focus and add in in 15 min mini sessions.
Or move your year around so that that can be part of your off season.
Main thing is mentally accepting that working out will be tricky and compromised so that you then don;t beat yourself up about it.

Just ideas.

This is what 30 min workouts are great for

5 Samples:

• 5 min trainer warmup, 20x54 seconds at 95-105% FTP, 6 seconds rest, 5 min cooldown
• 5 min trainer warmup, 10x1:50 starting at half IM race pace building to 110% FTP 10 seconds rest, 5 min cooldown
• 10 min warmup run with some accelerations, 2x1mile hard, with 2 min jogging in between, end the remainder with strides.
• 5 min warmup treadmill, then 10x 2 min with 1 min at Ironman race pace at 10-15% grade, recovery 2% grade at Ironman race pace, 5 min cooldown
• 30 min easy jog

If you do these five workouts and do 14 of them (two times 30 minutes per day), at least you stay pretty fit off 7 hours of training per week. Don't get fat.

If you can't make 30 minutes per day 2x per day or 1 hour per day 1x per day, you're either disorganized or bad at priority management or fitness is not a priority even if you say it is.

Dev

I think it all comes to motivation. Of course all things important to you too.
Depending on your job and the physical or mental fatigue you accumulate from it, it can become hard to complete a planned session.
I'm a cook, now teaching at cooking school.
I used to work hard and stressful 80 hrs/week, 12-16 hours shifts standing on my birchwood clogs. At the time, I quit all physical activity for 15 years, besides having 4 kids and trying to complete a teaching college degree.
Now I can tell there is a huge difference in the motivation but also energy left when I have a week of ''office'' work, sitting on a chair in front of papers and the computer, and ''shop'' (kitchen or restaurant) work, standing all day long. I can almost never push the same watts on a ''physical'' week.
Triathlon being a new sport to me, I'm entering running early in the morning first thing around 6. I swim at the near school (2000-2400m sessions) at lunch hour when I have time (not when I have a class). Like many here, I do my cycling inside on the trainer, often late.
The positive thing of now being in education is less work during summer :-).
But lots of taxi driving all around the eastern continent for the kids's sports....that's another story... I looked at the 2019 calendar and already know I will probably only have availability for an olympic tri in august (my maiden one !) and mayyyybe a 70.3 in september.

Louis :-)

Back in the days when I was as an associate at a big law firm and racing Ironman, I used to make it a priority to plan to get in my two key workouts each week (long ride and long run), and did whatever I could to stick to that plan and get those done. Beyond those two key workouts, I did what I could, when I could. If I got in the pool more then 3x/month, that was a nice bonus. Some of my trainer rides started at 10:00 p.m., and I found that leaving the bike constantly setup on the trainer made it much easier to motivate to get in an indoor ride in after a long day.

There are two approaches to this.

1. Hyper-discipline with regards to the training. This usually means crazy early morning for any and all training.

2. Get in what you can when you can. Here, I find running to be the best option. Why? Running is VERY time efficient. You can pack a lot into a 35 - 40 min. run. The whole enterprise from street-cloths and back taking less than an hour. That's hard for swimming/cycling. So - just do a running block, if work is going to be crazy for a month - squeeze in a swim or a bike when and where you can.

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Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog

I’d recommend not going to work anymore.

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USAT Level II- Ironman U Certified Coach

I was 10 yrs at pwc. You can train and keep up training, even during busy season. And 70 hours / week ain’t that much. 80+ is when I stopped getting to workout If you travel, it’s harder

As new guy (or gal?), I probably wouldn’t plan to be first one out of the office. So evening workouts are hard to be consistent

If you can get up in the AM everyday you can fit in an hour. Weekends you’ll get longer workouts.

Just stay up on your sleep, do your best to eat healthy

Make the most of your opportunity at work. You can succeed at both work and training!

I’m guessing you’re young. It’s much easier now than when you’re 35 w a family of little kids. Trust me :)

Want type of a lame excuse do you have for quitting training at 80 hours per week of work. There are 168 hours in a week, so there are still 88 hours of possible training.

Personally I think people BS about work hours. I run a tech startup and I'm work occupied from 8 am till 11 pm and on weekdays that is 80 hours. Add in 10 more hours on the weekend and it's a so called 90 hours but I still move thing's around and get 1-2 hrs in during the day every day plus I take a break to eat dinner. I eat breakfast while working with euro or India time zone connections and eat lunch on the fly while working. But out of all the hours I am working I doubt I am really producing more than 40 hours of really valuable output. But I am around to stick handle things on an ongoing basis. The nature of my work means being available but lots of is just high volume of items that all need to get done from garbage man to CEO/CFO work. But I seriously don't buy people claiming 70 hour work weeks. It's more like they are present but not really working at full throttle and really counting work input hours is a backwards 70's metric. Sorry for laying in, but long work hours is no longer a badge of honour.

If someone wants to train they will.

You know that 80/20 rule? I try to live by it and I get pretty good results, but when I need to sacrifice I take it out of the 80, never the 20.

When work gets crazy I've gotten to points where I'm basically 10/20, where the other 70% is me wishing I was biking instead of working. This is a rare week for me so I can get away with it and I'm sure I'd have to adapt it if I ever had to go through months of this.. but keep as much intensity as you healthily can.

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Too old to go pro but doing it anyway
http://instagram.com/tgarvey4

Don’t disagree in your situation

But part of the culture OP is waking into is he will need to be present for long days. Most people can’t skip out away from the team for long lunches regularly, WFH to train or leave early to get to the gym (like you can in other lines of work)

Just my experience

I think step 1 is to re-orient your year so that you are peaking late fall, early winter (think IMAZ/ IMCoz/ or even one of the december 70.3s on the calendar) and treat tax season as your offseason.

I'm not in accounting, but I am in IT project management, and I've had some of my big IT projects go-live in Q1 the last couple of years. These go-live events and the build up seriously impact my training. So i've accepted this, taken what I could get workout-wise, and just slid the window for my target race later in the calendar year for when things open up a bit.

It's a little weird because you see everyone else building back up in jan/ feb/ march, but you'll still be in off-season mode. So shorter stuff, higher intensity, slot in what you can, maybe a run focus, and let the body come down a bit as work gets crazy. Once tax season is done, start building.

If you do it right, you'll still several months of building and will just be coming into form later than you probably are used to in the calendar year.

Yeah, I agree with you. This is my general vent with the presentee-ism work culture that rewards input rather than output. It's really too bad. Fortunately the values of millennials and work force automation will make output-ism the way forward. Companies trapped in the input culture will largely go out of business as AI enabled software engines leveraging natural language processing will transform law and accounting for example.

Fingers crossed for the death of input driven companies.. Then we can all go train !!!

I can't help with the 70-75 hours....and all of the responses here are good....but I'm surprised no one else mentioned this....GET A COACH! Seriously. I'm managing attorney for a law firm of around 16 (attys/support staff). I also have kids ages 6 and 4.5. It's very difficult to find balance. I'm busiest work-wise come spring, but the holidays are also no picnic...with events/parties to attend at night. So first, when I chose my coach I made sure that our philosophies matched. More quality than quantity. Second, I'm at a coaching level where I can email/text daily (which I rarely do), in the event life/work gets in the way....late work days, sick kids, etc....which alter my training. I let him make the decision of whether we just skip the workout or juggle things for the rest of the week. I know that there are many that don't like to spend the money on a coach. I've been at this for close to 30 years....and I'm sure I could manage training on my own. But, it's invaluable to have someone else handle this when I'm busy with everything else. Good luck!

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Pat Dwyer
@pdwyer99