This chart is pretty much dead on for me. My PR's 1:13 open half, 4:14 HIM, 324 CP/20, big weeks 24hrs. I am within a minute or watt of what the chart calls for. Great work!

I think it's insane for age group athletes. Even "elite age groupers". All the kona qualifiers I know well do it on 12-16 hours a week. For someone like me, who *might* qualify for kona as long as the "wrong" people don't show up to the race, training 23 hours a week in season and averaging 19 per week over the year means basically no vacations. No skiing on the weekend, even if I take my bike, because I cannot afford any extra stress on my legs. No taking a day off to spend with my wife. It's 4 hour training rides on Christmas eve while the extended family works together in the kitchen talking about what a dick I am (and they'd be right). A 12-15 hour week in season, 9-10 out of season already puts a lot of limits on what else I do in my life.

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Ed O'Malley
www.VeloVetta.com
Founder of VeloVetta Cycling Shoes
Instagram • Facebook

You've touched on an important point. Time effective training for the working/family triathlete. Wouldn't it be great to do something like what Seilor has done for rowers and XC skiers by looking at the training of successful triathletes. For example, why not plug all the KQ STers training hours in and AC's benchmarks and see what we come up with. I think that would be worthwhile.

That would be very interesting. The distributions, particularly.

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Ed O'Malley
www.VeloVetta.com
Founder of VeloVetta Cycling Shoes
Instagram • Facebook

Hey Ed-

I've not looked at the model, but read your comment above and got a chuckle because what you describe above is what you're competing against. I imagine that at least half of the clients that Alan works with are in a position to put triathlon as the #1 priority in their life. And, that is ok. Might not be how we chose to balance our time or implement the sport into our lives, but we are all different. I've known Alan for over 10 years and I'd have to guess the athletes reaching out to him are doing so because they are 100% performance driven...heck, he's coached the Ultraman World Champ. And, Alan is one of the best coaches in the world when it comes to performance modeling and using numbers. Doesn't mean he's a good or bad coach, but he's one smart dude.

We are all different. Have different goals and the amount of time we are willing to commit to them...might not make sense to you, but is perfectly logical to someone else.

Hope to see you around town sometime soon.

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Mat Steinmetz

51-SPEEDSHOP.com - instagram - @matsteinmetz - facebook

I get that this sample is skewed in that in only includes people who have sought out and used Alan as a coach, but I still am having a hard time understanding the hours trained to race time.
For instance, to break 6 hours on a flat 70.3, a 35 year old male is training 572 hrs (or 11 hours a week) for a year. I have a hard time believing that someone would train 11 hours a week for an entire year, and not be able to break 6 hours relatively easily. The same 35 year old male is training 884 hrs (17 hours a week) for a year in order to break 5 hours.

I get that genetics can play a role for some people, but these are aggregates, and the are aggregates of people who have sought coaching. I would be flabbergasted if I trained 17 hours a week and then finished middle of the pack in a 70.3.

Yep, it suggests at least 2x my training volume as well. I think anyone who does the listed training volume would be significantly faster than me, is training terribly, or has unfortunate physical traits handicapping them. I'm very MOP and do not believe I am especially talented. At 42, 1.78m (5'10") and thus a bit overweight at 82kg, I can do a flat 70.3 in under 5:30 on well under 8hrs/wk average. The table suggests that would require between 780hrs and 884hrs training a year so lets call that 16hrs/wk. Surely anyone putting in an AVERAGE of 16hrs/wk would hope for better results?

I find it very hard to believe this represents the norm. I think it more likely that it represents a distorted sample population or invalid extrapolation from a model based on data somewhat removed from my demographic.

I would add, however, that I think the rest of the benchmarks are interesting and helpful, and I appreciate Alan posting them.

Agreed that AC certainly knows what he's doing! But would be very interesting to pull from a much broader data sample as I think this is extremely skewed towards those who have a lot of time on their hands at the very pointy end of the sport.

Even amongst the FOP group there are plenty of time-compressed athletes who are achieving FOP results on much lower hours than in this table. How much of that is down to genetics and how much to training very smart and time-efficient I don't know.

Below FOP I think the BOP and MOP training volumes are way out from what I see amongst friends and training buddies (unless there's a big conspiracy and everybody is doing lots of secret training and hiding it from Strava...). When I look at people who are turning in IM times of 12+ hours it's normally pretty obvious to see why - they're either overweight and/or their training volumes are pretty low (nowhere near what's in the chart) and/or their training is very inconsistent, they string together a couple of good weeks and then suddenly do a whole week where they hardly train. I'm guessing that AC's data doesn't include (m)any of those athletes since they're pretty unlikely to pay for a good coach (and/or a good coach isn't interested in coaching those kind of athletes).

Again, I've not looked at the chart. I also wouldn't take what is written as gospel and more as "fun with numbers" based on the data Alan has. It will work for some and not for others.

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Mat Steinmetz

51-SPEEDSHOP.com - instagram - @matsteinmetz - facebook

This makes me laugh

I agree, but Alan is just throwing out what he has. His coaching philosophy will also skew his data to one side. The same would occur if you had another coach providing data who's training methods are counter to Alan's. There are so many variables that impact an age-groupers training and performance that it will always be easy to point out the differences from one athletes path to the finish line compared to the others.

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Mat Steinmetz

51-SPEEDSHOP.com - instagram - @matsteinmetz - facebook

And I would agree that the chart is fun. In fact, I love stuff like this, and as I posted earlier, I appreciate him posting it. I've saved the chart for my demographic, and I actually think I will refer to it often. It's definitely interesting data.

I don't think he's making up numbers or anything, but something just seems off about the training hours. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I agree that’ it’s a cool chart and fun to plug through. But the hours can’t be right.. especially if the data was pulled from “his” athletes. If he’s coaching BOP athletes at 12 or whatever hours a week and they are still BOP.. that isn’t a coach I would trust. And I don’t think that’s the sentiment here.

I mean really, can someone train 12 hours a week and just be considered “recreational”? At the same time, can someone train 12 hours a week and only have a CTL of 50? That just seems a bit off considering his clientele are of the “performance” type.

Cool chart though.

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Team Zoot - Great Lakes

I agree, but Alan is just throwing out what he has. His coaching philosophy will also skew his data to one side. The same would occur if you had another coach providing data who's training methods are counter to Alan's. There are so many variables that impact an age-groupers training and performance that it will always be easy to point out the differences from one athletes path to the finish line compared to the others.

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Mat Steinmetz //

It would be fun and informative to be able to expand a database like this with various spectrum athletes. Like you say, it is skewed right now, so bringing in the opposite style of coached athlete would make it more meaningful to more people. For me right now I'm not even on this chart, I mean nothing lines up anywhere even close. The hours, the speed, the powers, the pace, nothing is remotely in my ballpark. So for sure there should be some more balance to this, but perhaps he only wants it to reflect his coaching philosophy and his athletes, that's ok too. But not really helpful to the majority that dont fall into any or most of his slots..

I am liking this chart! My chances of KQ have just gone way up if this is true. Just need to train 7-10 more hrs a week lol (which i'm guessing not coincidentally has been what I've been doing since hiring a coach)

N=1
Qualified in M30-34

In my case, the numbers don't really match up except for the swim zones. From my experience, the weekly hours are vastly overestimated (except for a few monster weeks).

Cool chart and happy that AC collected and shared this data! I regularly read his blog and he's clearly a BIG volume guy!

The hours on this chart are so ridiculous and incorrect. I feel bad for this persons athletes, I don't think this is a great advertisement.

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Dimond Bikes Superfan

Please don't feel bad for them. Some of them are World Champions!

&, whatever the level/goal, every one of them has a true passion for the sport.

On a very deep level, they're the type of people who *love* the trial of miles and miles of trials that make up serious training.

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Alan Couzens, M.Sc. (Sports Science)
Exercise Physiologist/Coach
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Alan_Couzens
Web: https://alancouzens.com

Congrats, but if you have a MOP training 20hrs/wk then you've messed something up.

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Dimond Bikes Superfan

there might be some algorithmic error when calculating the hours per week of training especially when i toggled the buttons to female: 20hrs lead to MOP which is hard to believe. Unless of course they just started picking up the volume as a MOP athlete.However, everything else seems to be believable in the middle of the bell curve. I certainly don't feel sorry for any athlete Alan Couzen coaches judging from his articles that seems to be very evidence based and analytical.

BTW @ Alan couzen i just found your site from this forum post, booked marked it and will provide me with lunch reading entertainment for several weeks/month to come.

Appreciate the contributions !

Yes, my OP wasn't intended to be one the resulted in a 'bashing' of the data/rationale. I was trying to understand if those performance benchmarks were what should be aspired to if one is looking at getting to a position where they can start to think about a KQ.

I would love this to result in some sort of broader data capture from Slowtwitch, where athletes release their training data for plotting against results they achieved. I think that, as with all of the other content on your blog, would be very valuable.

Yes, my OP wasn't intended to be one the resulted in a 'bashing' of the data/rationale.//

To be fair, hardly anyone bashed him, but there was a lot of constructive, if you want to call it, criticism. But mostly it was just people that dont fit into his charts, either the training side, or the performance side(mostly the training side). He is fine, and seems to be able to handle the outliers of his charts..In fact, it looks like his chart is a chart of outliers to begin with, so there is that...

Alan - Au contraire to most of the other posters, your chart squares pretty closely with my times across the board. One question: are your swim times for scm or lcm??? A bit of difference there, as i know you know. I would guess scm since most pools, across the globe, are 25 m rather than 50 m. (In the U.S., short course pools are of course mostly 25 yd.)

I think one reason so many are saying that the total hrs are too high is that they are not really training to be balanced triathletes. My hrs come out pretty close b/c when training hard, i swim about 7 hr/wk, bike around 12 and run 6 hr/wk. Most of these guys swim like 2 hr/wk which puts them at about 250 annual hr less than myself.

One more question: you list estimated total half and full iron times for each level but not for the Olympic distance. Reason for this???

Thanks for compiling all this data.

Cheers,

Eric

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

Thank you Alan for taking the time to answer some questions here and also for sharing the chart in the first place. Maybe I don't understand exactly where the numbers come from, but I suppose a lot of it actual data while some surely must be extrapolated. Which maybe could be why some of it looks strange. Anyway here's a couple of issues I have.

1. The anaerobic/strength efforts seem to increase linearly but surely there would be a point where, for an endurance athlete, further gains in these areas would have very little impact on performance or could even be detrimental. Maybe this is a result of insufficient data but the numbers seem very arbitrary as is.

2. Wingate numbers on the other hand are very low generally. It's not entirely clear what protocol this number refers to so maybe it's not standard 30s test?

3. The race performances doesn't seem to match up to the training benchmarks. For the "blue belt", the table indicates a 1:36 z2 swim pace which would indicate that the athlete is capable of a ~1h IM swim split? Then, for a 75 kg athlete riding on a road bike with standard wheels and road helmet, I get an estimated time of 5:18 at 213 watts average when putting the data into bestbikesplit.com. Add a predicted 3:41 run and you would be a bike investment away from easily breaking 10 hours. Yet the aggregate time is listed as 11:06. This number seems off for some reason, a possible reason could be individual athletes in a small data pool significantly underperforming?