Last year I started a thread on how to break 4:45 in a half, and it was a very education thread. I’m hoping to find some good into here too.
For those of you who have broken 2:10 in an Oly race, what were your splits and what was your average volume, per week, for each sport, and your frequency for each sport (i.e. 3 swims a week, 4 bikes, 7 runs or whatever). Specifically, I’m curious how much biking you were doing. Coming from a long course background, I’m not sure how much volume I’ll need to do this year to race well at a shorter distance. I’m assuming I don’t need to be doing 20 mile runs and 4 hour bike rides. Just looking to see what sorts of volume and frequency others in my speed range are doing.
When I was racing short course I didn’t do mega volume on the bike but I did a ton of high intensity stuff. Weekly time trials (10-12 miles), 4 x 10 min at LT and run off it. Track workouts on the run like lots of 800s and 1200s.
Also a lot of high intensity swimming with a good amount of volume like 10-12k a week. I think the swim is pretty critical in oly distance race and to get under 2:10 you’re going to want to get out of the water in 24 minutes or less. Training was around 12 hours a week.
good question- I’m doing the same this year, as school will preclude doing anything long. I’ve been studying times from a few races, and it seems like a good rule of thumb is swim approx 25 min, bike approx 1 hr, run approx 40 min. This is the general pattern I’ve noticed. Of course, these add up to 2:05, but there are transitions as well, plus a little bit of wiggle room.
I’m a bad swimmer, so that makes it even trickier. The swim is going to be a 2-3 year project.
Staple bike workout for the last 10 weeks of the season last year was 6x5 min at 110-115% of FTP with 2.5 minutes recovery. I saw ridiculous improvements doing this. I put PT display on avg watts and held at exactly the target wattage for the entire duration (even pacing is critical).
I also averaged 150 miles per week on the bike from April through October, including 2 weeks with zero rides. This was probably a bit excessive.
3 swims per week @ about 14K per week (this was about 3.5-4 hours of swimming). This depends on how you swim already. I was a 1500 and 400 IM guy in college, so it is very much maintenance rather than progressive improvement.
Run volume was low due to a couple injuries. I think I averaged 26 miles per week over the same time span. There were certainly a number of 40+ mile weeks, but there were probably just as many 5 mile weeks.
1:55 at Nations triathlon, but the bike was short; however, the winner and I ended up running long because we were led off course. A legit 1.5/40/10K olympic would have probably been 1:56/57 that day…
Over the course of those 6 months I averaged somewhere around 14 hours per week. Very little of that was “easy”. I get bored with easy. That is probably why I’m solid on the swim and bike and a perennially injured runner…
at the end of the season I was around 335-340 for FTP, and I was doing 5-7x 5:00 at 375-380 watts with 2:30 RI. end of season FTP was estimated from a 34 minute 357 watt effort.
I prefer long course racing but like doing the shorter stuff as speed work.
My workouts are pretty simple. Probably average about 10,000-12,000 yards of swimming, 240 miles riding and 40-45miles running a week. 90% of that is done at HR at or below Zone 2.
Splits are about 26-28 min swim. ( I have been working on that this winter), 55-57 ride and 37-38 run.
There are no secrets here. Since I race long I train long and the speed comes as a bonus. I think that cycling is still the basis for a successful race. Training for oly distance races can be tricky as it invloves a lot of speed work and recovery time. There are no junk miles. Here you have to be very careful and stay injury free. Make sure that you have enough base to go 2.10 otherwise you might be asking for trouble. If you do have enough base, you should train like a swimmer, a cyclist and a runner. Intensity!
Have fun. I a couple of years I will retire from long course stuff and am looking forward to racing short.
In my first Olympic race I went 2:05:05 on a hilly course (Pinehurst, NC) going 21, 1:04, 37. That was on about 15mpw running, 60mpw riding and 6k per week swimming. There is more than one way to skin cat. Being a collegiate swimmer is helpful.
With transitions just under 2:07. Bike is a little less than 2k short on that course, so call it 61ish on a legit course which puts me barely under your target. In the 3 months leading up to that, per month averages were: 9 swims and 7:45 hours, 11 bike rides and 16:30 hours and 12 runs and 11 hours.
But enough about me. If you want to break 2:10, you need to figure out which discipline you are worst at vs. the guys who are going 2:00 to 2:10 and get better at that one. That’s the one where you will get the most bang for the buck.
Getting fast at Half Ironman and full Ironman is all about jacking up bike fitness so that you can run moderately fast and not slow down…for example, 1:30 half marathon or 3:30 marathon are slow as fresh runs but are very solid FOP age grouper “off the bike run splits”…you don’t have to run intervals to go this fast…you just have to run…and bike a LOT!
Getting fast at Olympic distance is more about maximizing your swim speed and run speed. Leveraging lots of pool and run intensity and moderate bike mileage, you can have a fast enough Olympic tri bike split and fast overall time…just do once a week 5x6 min bike at 120% of Olympic tri race intensity and you will be good to go on the bike…but you can be off the back if you have a weak swim and slow run…you can’t fake a 21 min swim unless you are a good swimmer to start off…the rest of us have to work for that with 4-5x per week in the pool…same for the 36-40 min off the bike run split
22+65+38+3 (depending on T zone size) = 2:08
Of course you can put a ton of mileage in to get to 60 min on the bike (which is frankly pretty hard on most tri course), and perhaps not even ride that fast and swim-run much slower, and not break 2:10.
When it comes to Olympic tri, you can bank on your swim split and to some extent bank on your run split if you put the work into these 2 sports. As an age grouper with limited time you have to decide where to put your time into and the swim-run focus will yield more guaranteed results than a bike focus to get to a fast olympic tri.
But this is ST and no one wants to hear that you have to work on swim-run…but to some extent you can “fake the bike” off swim-run fitness with minimal/intensity biking, but you can’t swim and run fast without devoting hours and intensity there.
Its really a question on your available units of training time …like a stock portfolio, where do you put your money to optimize the return on investment…my take is that when you get to Olympic and sprint, the swim gets magnified in importance as does “pure footspeed” in the run.
Racing a 2:05 on that little of volume begs the question what sort of training/base did you have before doing the Oly?
H20 is right. Mostly genes, and swimming since I was 8. It’s really not fair. I didn’t have any recent base at all really, hadn’t swam competitively in 4 years, and had only been doing tri’s for 3 months at that point. I had done a little mountain biking, that was it. Anyway, I don’t think my experience is very helpful, I’m just bragging then, and that is dumb, no one cares, and there are plenty of guys on here who are faster than I am!
I did do a lot of quality work in those three months to get to that 2:05, but I didn’t have any running experince, so I built up from 0mpw to about 15mpw, battling shin splints the whole time. I’ve since improved my form and I’m on pace for 50+ miles this week. Gotta put in the work…and for Olympic/sprints, you gotta do a lot of high intensity stuff that hurts if you want to be sub 2:00.
RhymeandReason…it is not bragging. You provide some useful context. Ex swimmers have a huge base that they can leverage, and in fact you help make my point that being a strong swimmer is critical to being competitive in Olympic tri.
My best Olympic tri years from 1993-1995, were where when my staple midweek workouts were: 4-5x per week swim with main set 10x200m at race pace (back then around 21-22 min, which meant coming in just under 3 min) Run 40-60 min 6 days per week with one hill session and one track session that was 15x400m in sub 80 seconds with 200m jog (this was a 33:33 10K pace…that’s also when I ran 33:27 in a fresh 10K). Most of the running was done at 4 min per K or faster. Bike once per week 1 hour TT on a hilly loop (because of the hills it was more like 15x1-6 min hills, with rest on the downhill) plus daily bike commuting to shake out the legs, Weekend longer 3-4 hour ride with some intensity thrown in.
Back then I was training for the Canadian Military Championships to get on the team for Military World’s…short course was my focus and I was a lot younger and dealt with the high intensity running much better…where did all that run speed go…I know…15 years and a few blown body parts later, its just too hard on the joints to run that fast anymore…at least I can bike faster now!!!
“In my first Olympic race I went 2:05:05 on a hilly course (Pinehurst, NC) going 21, 1:04, 37. That was on about 15mpw running, 60mpw riding and 6k per week swimming. There is more than one way to skin cat. Being a collegiate swimmer is helpful.”
With that run you should have been running in college instead of swimming. I did not swim in college and I can swim 21:xx. But I tell you what I can not run that fast with 40 miles or more of running per week. Good for you either way.
6-7K a week swimming, with solid main sets like 10-15 x 100 or 5-6 x 200.
100 mpw biking with one solid workout like 2 x 20 minutes, one longer 2.5 hour ride and one easy 60/20-30 minute brick
30 mpw running, with one moderate workout like a 20:00 tempo run or some hill repeats at tempo pace.
for a total of about 8-10 hours should be adequate. On a flat course 2:10 is not that tough. I am making the assumption that you can easily meet the pacing for each individual sport as a standalone. If not, my main advice is strong focus on your weakness; e.g. if you cannot run an open 10K in 38:00, or bike an open 40K in about 60:00 you need to step back and do single sport focus to get up to speed. If you are not there in the individual sports I really do not see you pulling all the pieces together successfully.
BTW, my recent Olympic performances in the past 3 years include a 2:11 (Saratoga Lake), 2:17 (Cayuga Lake) and a 2:25 (Alcatraz, but this is basically an Olympic), so take this with a grain of salt;)
With transitions just under 2:07.
If you need 3:30 to do your transitions in an Olympic, you are killing yourself. There is an easy 90 seconds to drop right here.
Na, you are not bragging. Depending who we compare ourselves to, we can always find folks who are “better” than us,
or we are “better” than! As you say, in the scope of the sport, 2:05 is not really fast compared to the folks you are looking at.
But, what is fun for me is to try and see how good one can be with the genes, luck, injuries, etc we have had.
If that makes my first or last, who cares. Have fun!!
