Getting Back on the Horse (1)

Triathlon Forum
1

Can anyone share any good advice or threads for trying to get back into triathlon after a hiatus? I am sure I am not the first on here to ask.

My triathlon participation peaked in my mid 20s with IMLP in 2014 and tapered off through 2018 when I did my last race. Now in my mid 30s, a lot has changed. Getting married, having kids (almost 2 year old twins), and my career have taken up the time I once had and sapped me of my fitness. I no longer feel like I identify as a triathlete as I once did, which I believe has impacted my motivation and discipline (and also my diet). I still try to run and ride on my trainer when I can, but it is irregular and totally lacks structure. I rarely if ever come to ST like I once did, and have no idea what is going on in the sport.

Any suggestions on how to get motivated again and find the time to make it happen would be greatly appreciated!

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Welcome back to the darkside! I have little to no advice except to always keep it fun and enjoy the journey. With young kids, you’ll need to prioritize you schedule differently which will dictate when and how long you’re able to train and race. Figure that out, and then what you envision may begin to come into better focus. If you’re committed, then sign up for local races in late Summer or early Fall to make it official and stay motivated towards training for your event goals. Good luck!

3

Welcome back.

I kinda wrote a bit about this here: https://www.slowtwitch.com/Features/The_Road_Back_Includes_Detours_8644.html

4

Thanks for this. I know I probably just need to bite the bullet and sign up for something to get a goal in place.

5

I appreciate you sharing this. It has felt like one long detour to me. I need to more creative at inventing time to train. The reality is I am usually unmotivated to try to start a workout at 9pm after a long day and just crash on the couch, but it would be a good habit to get in to.

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I am usually unmotivated to try to start a workout at 9pm after a long day and just crash on the couch, but it would be a good habit to get in to.

The Dawn Patrol can be a savior in that way but it takes a bit to get used to
.

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I got back into tris after 7 years off (ran for 4-5 of those) a year before having my first kid. I wanted to have “one last hurrah” before that big unknown.

It ended up sticking, and I’ve been training 2-5 hours/week through most of my daughter’s first year. I used to do 5-10 hr/wk when targeting a race.

Swim training is 90% with bands at home, and a couple pool swims before a race. Any week’s planned training or key ride/run workout may be thrown out the window at any time. I’ve got a 70.3 this year that I’ll be woefully unprepared for, by my old standards, but with some careful execution should be able to finish without bonking too bad. And I can’t wait for that. I’m as excited for that race as I used to be for any A race where I was chasing a PR.

I used to have a better time the better I executed a race, and would be bummed out if I was slower than expected, or if my training had gone poorly. I don’t care much about all that anymore. It’s been a process but these days I am just happy to be working out, keeping some baseline racing fitness, and having races to look forward to just as events to get out with my family and other triathletes and have a great time at.

I do still try to squeeze out minutes by training smart and playing around with bike fit and gear.

YMMV but this is working great for me. I keep pushing myself to get more training in but I don’t worry if it doesn’t work out. I feel like a triathlete in spirit even if I’m working within the limits of my life more than my body.

And as long as I’m keeping my fitness at this idle level, then when life lightens up a bit, I’ll be ready to add more hours and really target a race again.

As far as where you’re looking to get - you probably know this but it’s a slow process to build base fitness after taking 1+ years off (without getting injured). Especially when you’re past your 20s (38 here). Your mind inevitably thinks you can do more than your body can. Treat this like a couch-to-5k and use that to guide your volume. Don’t go run 5 miles your first week. Not even your 3rd week, probably. Do 1, 2, 3 mile runs and sprinkle in some easy biking… After 2-3 months of that madness, take stock of where you’re at and start adding miles and harder workouts. Find a 5k-to-half marathon plan. Somewhere around 4-6 months you should be good to dive back into what you used to consider a “real” training plan.

This all may seem like a grind, but if you take a lighter perspective on it all, it can be a really nice supplement to your life. Enjoy those 4-6 months. Then if you want to build after, you’ll be ready. Or if you want to just keep things on idle, keep fitness level modest but stable, and enter races for fun and not PRs, then I’d certainly recommend considering that, too.

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Consider signing up for a single-sport event that sounds fun, like a gravel race, trail run, mountain bike race, etc. Getting back on one horse is easier than three, especially juggling family/work/etc.

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I gravitated to the sport I enjoy the most, swimming. Time is my biggest limiter. However, I think I take less risk now with a family. Don’t ride on the road, etc.

I swim on a masters team. I get social interaction and a great workout. I like that I’m done before 7 am. Most everyone is still asleep then. Traffic is also great 5:30 AM.

My son loves to be outside so I go hiking with him. I started being able to take him when he was about 4 and 1/2. Time-wise, it takes the place of a ride and or run

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A couple points from someone who took 5 years off
Don’t be so hard on yourself
Build slowly
Have a goal in mind if completing _______ race or event.
Make sure your wife or significant other is in favor of ______
Don’t worry about how you look or feel (meaning looking in the mirror at yourself and beating yourself up), just go for it.

Keep us posted on your progress and result.

11

Hope this helps.

Sign up for a race.

Even if you mess up the training and you show up feeling a little unprepared, the atmosphere and the competition will likely make you fall in love with the sport again.

Make sure to tell your wife A) that you’re doing it, B) why it’s important to you and C) how you are going to make sure the family doesn’t suffer.

oh and get used to sneaking out of bed at 5AM

12

A couple points from someone who took 5 years off
Don’t be so hard on yourself

Do NOT compare yourself now to your Pre-Hiatus self

Call yourself “v2.0” if that helps
.

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I will go ahead and 2nd the other poster about the “dawn patrol”. I stepped away from tri in 2019 because it was too much with my daughter and I was not willing to sacrifice sleep or time with her and my wife to train. Just was not worth it to me. Switched to running and it is so much easier. I push my daughter(s) in the stroller for some runs but what I really have realized is that if I do not get my workout done before I get home it rarely will get done. Wife is on board but she usually will exercise after work but when I get home I am tired but mostly the kids want to play (5.5 and 2.5 now). Waking up sucks sometimes especially if kids have a rough night’s sleep but getting it done before the kids wake up is great. These hobbies are supposed to be fun so once it stopped being fun for me I knew I needed a change. Good luck on your journey and start small and make sure you communicate with your partner (if you have one) to make sure workout times work with them. And go on craiglist or facebook and get a BOB running stroller, it’ll be a savior and help you score points with the partner!

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Hi - good for you for thinking its time to get back into the game. I think that the habits you form in your 30’s are extremely important. Don’t let inactivity work its way into your regular routine. Its not going to get suddenly easier in your 40s and 50’s to get back into it. Making fitness a priority is really a no-brainer. Sure triathlon is means to that end. Being fitter is going to help you in all aspects of your life - so again dont give up on that. Make sure you surround yourself with friends, mentors that are going to lift you up and drag you out. Training is social and more often than not fun. Joining a local club is a simple way to expedite that. If there is no tri-club in the area - join masters swim club or cycling or run club. Then once you start hanging with active folks you will invariably get sucked into doing some races. Best of luck and good for you for reaching out to the broader community for motivation!!

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Looks like people have covered a lot of the salient points already, but I’ll add my experience for an additional data point.

I got back into triathlon after a 7 year hiatus.

I found my way into triathlon early in my 20’s. I was always a completer-finisher, motivated to go further rather than faster, and so went from marathon to ultras to doing an Ironman as my first tri, but after impressing myself with my relative performance in that first tri, I decided to stick at it to see how good I could get. My sense of identity was young and naive - I cared first about impressive races, then impressive times.

Fast forward a few years and some significant life events later and I took a short break which became a long break. In attempting to return to the sport, I repeatedly bounced off. Disappointed with how far I’d fallen from former fitness, the identity I had from before led to me either losing heart fast or overstretching and injuring myself.

What changed this time? I didn’t come back to tri for its own sake. I hit my mid 30’s and started to care more and more about longevity and what my life would look like in 30, 40, 50 years time. Being motivated by getting myself healthy is the primary goal. I know there’s an argument for diminishing returns in endurance training, and I will likely want to add more muscle than is typical of an ageing triathlete as I get older. That said, I love being able to use a sport I enjoy as a framework for improving health.

Doing so let me reset my ambition - these days I set PRs for “Ing. 2.0” and I’m very happy about it. They’re getting closer to Ing. 1.0’s best times, but I am not hung up on whether I’ll ever catch him.

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I went from 9h in Kona, to being 8 years away from the sport. Same reasons: family, kids and job demands.
My advice: don’t fight for time with yourself and with your family. The moment to come back will come by itself from you. And when that happens, you will do the necessary adjustments in your life to fit the trainning. In the meanwhile, just go for under 1h fun sessions so you don’t have the feeling of pushing against everything. And lift weights. Once you come back, get a coach.
Cheers…

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… these days I set PRs for “Ing. 2.0” and I’m very happy about it. They’re getting closer to Ing. 1.0’s best times, but I am not hung up on whether I’ll ever catch him.

That’s exactly what I’m talking about; well done

👍

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Thank you so much for this thread (and its responses). I find myself in a similar boat: Started racing (for fun, always) in mid twenties, was always a FOMOP gal. Now, 13+ years later, I find myself in an incredibly stressful job and a new relationship w/ 2 kids and a dog - I’m stressed, too tired to train and am 15 lbs over my race weight. The annual half marathon that I do each spring and had signed up for out of habit I DNS, because I never got around to really training for it. I’m hoping w/ warmer spring weather/lighter in the AM I can get back into it, but I don’t really know where to start, much less how to ramp up. I like the idea of thinking of myself a v2.0 vs instead of comparing myself to my v1.0. In my case, a limiter is that I have 1 1/2 years left in this particular job (which involves 2 hours/day driving), then it gets less stressful. So I’m trying to figure out how to do v1.5 of myself to set myself up for v2.0 in fall of 2024. And one big issue for me is nutrition - not race day nutrition, I mean daily nutrition. I’ve always eaten like a teenage boy - I got away with it when I was younger and training lots. Now, not so much … have people enlisted the help of trainers/nutritionists? I always thought that was reserved for the folks at the pointier edge of the spear…

thank you!

19

The annual half marathon that I do each spring and had signed up for out of habit I DNS, because I never got around to really training for it.

One thing I found as I was coming out of The Big Quit was not to jump into the same races I used to do, right away

In fact, I didn’t do any REAL races at all - I’d map out 5Ks & 10Ks around my town, usually with a theme of some sort, make up my own bib, make something of a training schedule (because we were starting from Zero, basically) and go for it

Once I got a few of those under my SpiBelt, I put the money down and did a REAL race

20

Thanks to everyone for the inspiring feedback. I appreciate all the responses and will try to incorporate as much as possible. In the last couple of weeks, I have been working to build up more consistency, even if it means a short workout. I previously was of the view that a workout less than 30-45 mins wasn’t worth the trouble. However, it has been helpful for me to ride my trainer or lift weights for 15-30 minutes just to get back in the routine. It is still early days, but I do think this has been beneficial so far.

I think I am going to try to find a running race to sign up for as a goal that I can push my twins in the jogging stroller. They are just under 2 years old so too young to remember at this point, but hope build off of this and bond with them as they grow. Part of this is a selfish exercise to get back into shape, but part of it is also to be a good example for my children. To the extent anyone is interested, I will post updates.