Last year i bought a mountain bike training plan from FASTCAT. About half of it was short, hard intervals on the road.

Long rides on the road were still very beneficial for overall endurance.

Running was nearly the same as i did with road running with two runs a week on the trail. One was a brick and the other was semi long.

With that said I'm a fairly decent mountain biker. For someone that isn't I'd have them add another easy mtb ride with an experienced rider for skills development.

The post above is pretty good. I haven't done any Xterras outside of the Midwest, but the few I have done seemed to place a bit of importance on the swim. There wasn't a ton of passing room before getting into the single-track. From there, there's either 1) not enough room to pass or 2) it takes serious match burning to make passes.

The run always feels like 'survival' more than any other event to me. I'm curious about the experience of others as well.

I haven't focused on the XTERRA world for a few years, but still do one or two a year. I hope to get back to Utah and Maui next year as both courses are fantastic (and hard).

For me, I would train pretty similarly to my normal tri schedule with mainly masters swim, and several run sessions a week (long, speed/hills and a hard off the bike, as well as running on rough trails every other week). For the bike, I would do 1-2 very technical MTB rides (pure focus was on the technical side) and then did a hard VO2 ride and lots of threshold work on the road/tt bike depending on the time of the year.

The swim is important, more so than in regular triathlons as many courses are tight and if you don't get out the water early, it is hard to pull back the leaders (especially in Maui). Some courses, like Utah and a few here in TX as well as the old Vegas course had lots of room to pass so the swim plays lesser of a role.

Just writing this makes me want to get back out on my MTB!

Jack

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So much better responses than what came to my mind: A mess!

Sigh. Dealing with an exhausted mind from yesterday's Xterra Knoxville. That run hill is 2 categories beyond HC.