Wow....8 kids AND triathlon....give the guy the gold medal right there.

Yes, I was implying that to get good in a single sport you pretty well need to train that sport every day and do doubles most days, but you're not doing three sports.

Having said that, here was a sample day doing all three sports most days per week

bike commute to work 30 min, get off the bike, jog for 15 min, go to work, jog 10 min to pool and back, swim for 35 min hard, bike commute 45 min going with some hard intervals, 15 min easy jogging off bike
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Yeah Dev,I was talking to someone the other day about the huge volumes of training I would do back in the 90's. Most of it was what would be called "unstructured" these days but man did I ever get fit.
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Things like in Penticton,getting up at 5:30am to run the 6k to the pool,do a 4k swim session and then run home.
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Putting my shoes in a backpack and riding backwards along the Ironman course to the S-Bends under Twin Lakes,do a bunch of S-Bend hill sreps and then ride on to the Yellow Lake climb.Hide the bike in the bushes and take my running shoes out of my backpack and run repeates of the last Yellow Lake climb.Ride home.

Every Canada Day we would ride to Peachland for the Canada Day 10k and ride back to Penticton afterwards.

Every August we would ride to Kelowna for the Across the Lake Swim (2k) and if we couldn't arrange a lift we would have to rode back.One year I rode to the start (about 65k) locked my bike at the swim finish,swam across the lake to the swim start,did the Across the Lake Swim and then rode back to Penticton.

My 5x week swim training in Oz at the time was trip to the pool with the girlfriend,do a 3k swim then a weights session with her in the pools gym.We would them go home and go to the beach across the road where I would ,for fun, do another hour or so of bodysurfing. So that may as well have been another swim workout.

Once a week was a 5hr ride ending at my job followed by a 1hr run before starting my shift running the Room Service Dept of the Park Royal in Surfers Paradise.After work ride 23k home.

Once a week I caught the bus to work and ran the 23k home.
All kinds of weird shit was done and not a coach was paid,not a Garmin in sight or Strava to prove myself to random stragers.
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Come to think of it,nothing has really changed..Except for the Garmins.

Unfortunately, my wife HATES swimming and was grossed out by the idea of a public pool even before Covid. She thinks too much about pee in the water. Of my eight kids, the oldest six have all had swimming lessons and the option to join a team and not one has wanted to yet (and I am conflicted about "forcing" them). I have wrestlers, runners, snowboarders, skiers, soccer players and volleyball players, but no swimmers yet. My three year old (#7) flips out when he has to put his head in the water to wash his hair, so I don't see him becoming a swimmer. #8 is a little girl who (so far) loves the water, so maybe I will eventually have a little swim club kid...

90% + of my workouts during the week are commuting to and from work as well as running at night after work. That really sucks this time of year with sunset in the Bar Area before 5. Today, I did my first daytime run in awhile by going out during lunch and using wet wipes before my afternoon meetings. What works for me isn't going to be for everybody. You gotta do you. It's a big part of the challenge of this sport.

90% + of my workouts during the week are commuting to and from work as well as running at night after work. That really sucks this time of year with sunset in the Bay Area before 5. Today, I did my first daytime run in awhile by going out during lunch and using wet wipes before my afternoon meetings. What works for me isn't going to be for everybody. You gotta do you. It's a big part of the challenge of this sport.

It's like a great time of year to commute by bike or run in the Bay Area! No summer heat to kill you anymore! You just needs really good reflectors, blinkies, and headlights, no reason you can't keep doing what you were doing before. I'm still doing a 1x/wk bike commute with a lunchtime run and will likely pump it up to 2x/wk soon.

"Summer heat" in the Bay area??? What, you consider 80 degrees hot??? What kind tri guy are you??? You'll never survive at Kona. :)

Hah - you have to do intervals at lunchtime with me in the summer. A few weeks this summer it was 90+, with full sun the whole way, so it was the equivalent of 95-100F. Doing z5 intervals really sucks then!

On my bike commutes home this summer, I think every single one was 85F+ at 5PM.

(Note San Francisco has a very different cold microclimate than the rest of Norcal, even just 10 minutes outside. SF will be like 65-70 in summer, and it'll be 90F just 12 minutes out)

Having listened to the advice on this thread, I have rejigged my training schedule this week. This morning I managed my fifth swim of the week - five consecutive days M-F and I know I have never done that before. I have brought my bike trainer to work so I can ride after work instead of in the early mornings (outdoors is not an option here in the winter), I can keep running at lunch time (I do that three or four days a week already). So mornings are all clear for swimming now! I'm going to stick with four or five swims per week through the winter (or until the pool shuts again...) and I'll see if I can make some progress. One thing to report after only one week: I feel so stretched out, limber and relaxed after swimming in the mornings, it would be worth doing just to start my day feeling that way. Thanks again for the advice.