Some how I came across a post that mentioned a ratio where for every mile cycling, you run a 1/4 mile, and xx swim yards. Saw it quick thought I bookmarked it, now I can’t find it, I really didn’t get a chance to read it. It looked interesting. Anyone remember seeing it here?
Ah, pretty interesting article, thanks for the link, I had been thinking about this last year and came up with a different scheme - but ends up pretty similar.
Using olympic race distance, arguably most equitable discipline balance, then looked at a week where each discipline is ~6x race distance. So a 9000m swim, 148mi ride and 37mi run week would be “balanced” by this approach. If you divide each distance by your average pace, you get a ~target weekly hours, something like 14.3 hrs for me, for example. I have been trying to use this as a general goal for ~average week, then skew towards a certain discipline depending on personal strengths/weaknesses and actual hours available to train.
Of course this wouldn’t work too well for FeMan, but perhaps with smaller multiplier, like 2x race distance?
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That doesn’t really account for the fact that the time “efficiency” and recovery needs for each are way different… I can swim ~2X Oly distance every day, no problem. If I were to try biking at approaching the same ratio, I’d run out of time during the week, and if I tried running at an equivalent ratio, I’d run out of knees.
So the reality for most is that swim training is disproportionally high compared to the race distance, and running is probably low.
Whatever happened to training focused on your limiters?
AP
SlowTwitch is awesome, I knew I saw it some where on here…
I just think it is a cool guideline. I am focusing on an Olympic distance and riding well, so just end doing more running because that is my weakness. That is why the article caught my eye. In my case during the summer 120mi/week riding is easy, so for say 120mi of riding…
Cycling 120mi @ (18-20) ~6.5hrs
Running 30mi @ (8:50’s) ~4.5hrs
Swimming 1,200yds @ (harder to guess say 4 (3,000yds x1:15hrs) ~5hrs
That is a lot of swimming!!! Equal to the cycling. I have been busting my a$$ to get 9,000yds/week for my race, doing pace stuff at least twice a week in the pool, and while I feel stronger swimming I have not seen much speed improvement, not sure I would throw 5hrs a week swimming in there during the summer. But it’s a good article and good for planning.
Here’s another good article…basically outlines the training volume you need to peak at for a given race distance.
http://www.qt2systems.com/Thoughts/critical.htm
Basically it says that you should peak at the following training volume -
Swim – 9/3 of the event distance per week
Bike – 8/3 of the event distance per week
Run – 7/3 of the event distance per week
Where do people come up with this stuff? Some guy just made up a bunch of really random ratios in order to write an article, so people will pay him money.
Try this:
Swim hard 2-4 times per week for 40-60 minutes. Focus should be on things like 20x100 best average or 4x500 best average. Threshold work.
Bike hard 2-3 times per week. 2 workouts of 2x20 minutes at threshold. 1 workout of 5x(5:00 HARD + 3-5:00 EZ)
Run 6-7 times per week. Just F’ing run. After 6-8 weeks, make one run a tempo run for 20 minutes of it. After another 6 weeks, add in a workout with strides.
If you do this program as laid out above, you will get much, much, much faster than you are now. If you are pressed for time, then package your swim and runs together, and do all of your bike stuff on the trainer. I could see this plan being accomplished on 10-12 hours per week. Who cares about ratios?
If you need to train for IM, then train this way up until 8-10 weeks out. Over the course of 6-8 weeks, add some volume. You will be fine.