One of the problems I find is that getting in the training itself can become a ‘stressor’. I sometimes feel guilty for taking a 2 hour lunch break to get a 3km swim in, because I didn’t get up early enough that morning to get to swimming. Then you have the rushing home and around after work just to make sure you get the training in. Then some other things comes up on an evening and you feel guilty for not training.
Constantly rushing around (one of the things some people on here might refer to as “good time management”) trying to fit the training in around other life commitments can be stressful in itself.
I’m going to go against popular opinion and disagree. Finding a way to get out and train every day, 45-50 weeks a year is certainly one of the foundations to success, but IME it isn’t usually enough. The next step is to establish goals, weaknesses and limits (IE injury concerns) and design a training plan based on sound physiological principals. Far too often I’ve seen athletes who prioritize volume and frequency above all else get stuck putting in a big time commitment with limited results.
So yeah, what you’re saying about training every day, every week, is important and a foundational message for slowtwitch but to assume it stops there would be a mistake.
Yes that sounds like me, when my friends asked how I fit everything in, then follow up by saying you must be very organised with your time.
My answer is always no more organised than the next person, my life is like ‘organised chaos’. Where I plan for things, and I’m lucky if I can hit the plan 50% of the time. The rest is rushing around and trying to make things fit as bet I can, be it family events, work meetings/tasks or training sessions. I follow a simple hierarchy, family first, work second, tri third. Of course I sacrifice some work and family stuff for tri, but if the family stuff is important that takes priority, no matter if it’s a key workout, or work meeting etc or not
I’m going to go against popular opinion and disagree. Finding a way to get out and train every day, 45-50 weeks a year is certainly one of the foundations to success, but IME it isn’t usually enough. The next step is to establish goals, weaknesses and limits (IE injury concerns) and design a training plan based on sound physiological principals. Far too often I’ve seen athletes who prioritize volume and frequency above all else get stuck putting in a big time commitment with limited results.
So yeah, what you’re saying about training every day, every week, is important and a foundational message for slowtwitch but to assume it stops there would be a mistake.
I definitely agree that its only a starting point, that gets you to within shooting range of your full potential, but you need to get a lot more specific to maximize. This thread was not about what you need to do to maximize performance. That’s another layer on top of this. I believe that’s been addressed a few times in this thread already.
It not that hard people - 2-3 hours out of my day is easy to find even with 3 kids, a fairly big job and some other committments - its only difficult to do if YOU make it so
Really? For me, I only work 7 hours a day and work 15min from home, so piece of cake, even with kids, but people out there with long days, big commutes, kids, wives that work, not sure how they can do that long term without something getting neglected, whether that’s children, wife, sleep, sanity or whatever.
One of the problems I find is that getting in the training itself can become a ‘stressor’. I sometimes feel guilty for taking a 2 hour lunch break to get a 3km swim in, because I didn’t get up early enough that morning to get to swimming. Then you have the rushing home and around after work just to make sure you get the training in. Then some other things comes up on an evening and you feel guilty for not training.
Constantly rushing around (one of the things some people on here might refer to as “good time management”) trying to fit the training in around other life commitments can be stressful in itself.
I had that issue too. For me, I had to realize that there is nothing in this world that will make me get up early. So I sleep in till the last possible second, go to work, get most of my shopping done on my lunch, and then train immediately after work. I had to invest in a good set of lights, plan out some routes where I could comfortably do my workouts, and invest in some good clothes. It was worth it! Once I got used to the routine there wasn’t any stress and I could concentrate on training.
Anna s, I think it’s impossible to not neglect something if you are doing 12+ hours of training a week on top of a full time job, especially if you have kids and post regularly on slowtwitch hah
You could always have less sleep, but that is probably going to affect your ability to do your job and do decent quality training. Plus you might be more likely to be grumpy, moody etc around your family/gf/bf/partner etc.
For the amount of time some people seem to spend on here, they are probably also neglecting their job when they’re meant to be working.
I know that when I feel stressed about getting the training in, I often think “why am I doing this?”
On the “stress” of cramming the training in. Mental stress is interesting. Take for example, my retired dad, who has all day to do anything. Now if he has to just meet us at the coffee shop at a random time, it’s this massive ordeal with his entire routine (whatever that is…he’s on perpetual vacation) being turned upside down. This from the guy that spent half of his career on planes bouncing in between Canada, Africa and Asia winning and managing large scale ultra complex mining projects (yeah, you know, the ones in the 60-80’s that ripped apart the environment). Now any stressor throws him off. I THINK as humans we get used to more or less repeated stress to the point that if the same stress appears daily it falls into the category of “white noise”…it’s there in the background, but you get used to it. If it changes dramatically and you have to keep changing your system to get the training in, that’s when I feel it gets a lot more stressful. But I always say to my guys…the challenge is not the workout, the challenge is getting to the start line of the workout. Just make getting to the start line easy. Do sub optimal workouts for which it is easier to get to the start line than ideal workouts where making it to the start line is iffy, because in the latter case, there is a great chance there will be no arrival at the start line. When I was doing my gad degree at biz school, I chose to live beside the university and away from work vs close to work and far from the university, because I knew I had to go to work but I could skip every class. So I made the start line of getting to class “easy”. Added bonus was I made the start line of getting to swimming also easy since the university had a 50m pool.
So I understand the concept and also see how consistency is key here but I still struggle to see how each 2 hrs should be play out per day.
So if I am too apply the 2 hrs per day, is there any benefits if the sessions are done in ‘little chuck’? Would a extra 30 min in the morning or a short 30 min brick run/double run in the evening be as beneficial as doing let say 2 x 1 hr session? In the perfect world, I would love to get that but with family, work, commute, commitments (kids activities, homework, …), it is not always that easy.
Take for example, my retired dad, who has all day to do anything. Now if he has to just meet us at the coffee shop at a random time, it’s this massive ordeal with his entire routine (whatever that is…he’s on perpetual vacation) being turned upside down. This from the guy that spent half of his career on planes bouncing in between Canada, Africa and Asia winning and managing large scale ultra complex mining projects (yeah, you know, the ones in the 60-80’s that ripped apart the environment). Now any stressor throws him off.
Im 50 years old and I have pretty much trained anywhere from 1:45 to 3:00 per day 7 days a week for over twenty years and even before that I was probably hitting 10 hours plus per week.
There is no magic to it, consistency is key, day in day out for years and you will get good.
There is plenty of time in the day even with family, work etc…
I would agree with the idea that consistency is key, and somewhat underrated.
I think there’s a notion that fitness is merely like TSS “chronic training load.” And that only marginal gains happen after you’ve reached competence and trained a lot.
But I suspect, with only anecdotal evidence, that continuous training year in and year out (with proper rest, nutrition) can bring sort of non-linear breakthroughs in performance. I don’t know the mechanism.
However there is some selection bias here, probably. You take the time to do something consistently when you really enjoy it. And when you’re pretty good at it relative to most others. So consistency probably isn’t totally independent of other factors like genetic predisposition, strong social cohorts in training (good group of people to train with and race against), etc.
So while long-term consistency probably has some direct causality to good performance, there’s also probably a lot of mere correlation.
There is plenty of time in the day even with family, work etc…
Why do people continue to say this??? How can you possibly know without knowing someone’s time commitments or desire to fill non committed time to triathlon
And that’s again still assuming you want to spend all of your non-committed time to triathlon. There is a place in this sport for those who don’t. I train a lot (according to my wife) and any average human being but pales in comparison to those on here.
Take the other day for example… I had some non committed time that I could have fit in another workout. My son asked me to play Legos with him. Because I said yes, I am now either mentally weak, don’t structure my time well etc. because I could have done another workout. Again, this thread topic is great and right on point but the assumptions and innuendos in the posts that follow are, in my opinion, severely misplaced.
There is plenty of time in the day even with family, work etc…
Why do people continue to say this??? How can you possibly know without knowing someone’s time commitments or desire to fill non committed time to triathlon
And that’s again still assuming you want to spend all of your non-committed time to triathlon. There is a place in this sport for those who don’t. I train a lot (according to my wife) and any average human being but pales in comparison to those on here.
Take the other day for example… I had some non committed time that I could have fit in another workout. My son asked me to play Legos with him. Because I said yes, I am now either mentally weak, don’t structure my time well etc. because I could have done another workout. Again, this thread topic is great and right on point but the assumptions and innuendos in the posts that follow are, in my opinion, severely misplaced.
I agree with what you have said here. At the end of the day, everyone gets 168 hours per week. It’s a lot of time, but it’s not a lot of time. It really depends on what all one has going on and how they want to prioritize them. By the way, there is not a single workout or race that can replace the hours of lego that I played with my son (OK, I lied, I’ll selfishly take the day of a kona finish over lego time, but other than that, lego time was awesome). We still have a 1/4 of a room in our house devoted to all the lego builds. We’re not throwing all those memories away.
There is plenty of time in the day even with family, work etc…
Why do people continue to say this??? How can you possibly know without knowing someone’s time commitments or desire to fill non committed time to triathlon.
Next question, what’s special about 14 hours a week? Wouldn’t the truly committed be better with 18 or 20? Or could they get by with 10?
Again, 14 hours a week is only 700 hours a year if you train 50 weeks. If you “only” train 45 weeks a year you have to average almost 17 hours a week to do 750/year. What magic number means something to you?
Yes indeed, I feel like I have the same “time is running out” stress you mentioned.
Sundays I tried to schedule my coming week training. I put it all in my calendar and take the time to put some notes to motivate myself. My main battle: going to bed early.
I’ve been trying to get my 8hr of sleep everyday, but sometimes for instance, If I have to swim at 5:30 am but forgot to complete my meal preparation, I end up cooking after work, going to bed at 11 pm, which would lead to only have like 5hrs of sleep and you get the idea, it cascades to the rest of the week and creates anxiety that I screwed up my entire plan.
I found this book “The Champion mindset” by Joanna Zeiger that I’ve been reading lately and It helped me to stay motivated (that and also this forum with amazing post like this).
As someone also mentioned, finding YOUR balance is a very personal journey. But definitely just dumping my own excuses and JFT helped for sure.