If I am training for a sprint race with a bike distance of 19 miles and a 4 mile run, what should be the max distance I run or bike in a single workout session? Like would I want my longest bike training session to be 25 miles, 30? 7 miles run max? What? And at what pace…?
Thank you for any help…
The max distance you should run is related more to you fitness than it does to the event you are racing. From a running perspective, any event longer than 2 minutes is a distance event that requires lots and lots of endurance. People training to run a single mile will often do long runs of 12-18 miles.
If you want more specifc advice as it relates to your training, I’d be happy to help you out. What kind of training have you been doing? Give me your total weekly mileage and what workouts you normally do.
Are you asking what the minimum training you should do to complete your race? It’s tough to say - it is based on your fitness… my first tri (9.3 bike, 3.2 run) - i didn’t do any runs over 5 miles, or rides over 20. And that’s mainly because i liked riding.
Now I still do sprints, among other distances, and I run 30 - 50 miles a week (depending on time of year), and 50 - 200 miles a week on the bike. And I don’t really have a chance at front of the pack.
But yes… 30 mile bike rides and 7 mile runs will get you finished in a MOP time probably. Don’t forget to swim too…
I answered your PM with some more specifics regarding the running. If you shoot Desert Dude a quick PM, he’ll usually give you some quick advice on the cycling and swimming side of things (as well as the running).
In general, assuming an athlete already has a solid fitness base of miles (which you don’t), I’ll stucture the training plan with two things in mind.
The athletes fitness and ability
The race distance they are training for
This post goes into a little more generic detail:
http://forum.slowtwitch.com/...t_reply;so=ASC;mh=25
On there I show this table that helps illustrate the type of training that you do and how it relates to fitness for different events.
As you can see, if your race consists of only 11 minutes of running (ie 1-2 mile stand alone race) you would want to do a healthy mix of Vo2max interval training, a good portion of speed work, and some threshold training mixed in there, while still having the bulk of your training be aerobic running. If your race is 60 minutes long (10K-15K stand alone) speed becomes much less significant, V02max has less focus, threshold training becomes much more important, and aerobic running increases. For iron distances its almost all about aerobic training (except for fast IM athletes).
I’ve broken this down into table form. For you I’m going to assume this run segment (4 miles) will take you ~30 minutes to finish. Look at the table:
Look at the top table and slide right to the 9th column (29 minute tri run). Here I recommend (ball park numbers) 0.7% of your total running to be speed work, 4.7% to be intervals, and 8.7% to be threshold training.
So, lets say you are running 25 miles a week, comfortably. I would knock that down to about 22 miles a week because you will be adding intensity, and do the following on a weekly or bi-weekly basis:
EDIT: I make an adjustment for triathletes by dividing total mileage by 0.8 before calculating. This takes into account the extra load placed on the body through cycling and swimming. Adjusted value would be 22/0.8 = ~28 miles. Then I mulitply 28 by 0.007, 0.047, and 0.087 to get the following distances:
300 meters of speed work
2100 meters of intervals
2 1/2 meters of threshold running
From here there is a little bit of art involved. I’d probably suggest doing a 2.5 mile threshold run every week. However, the second workout I would alternate between one easy session of 3 x200m pretty hard one week and then the following week would be 5x800m @5K race pace with 400 jogs.
The idea is that if the training load is too easy, then you bump everything up in proportion (everything is 5% longer). If it is too difficult, then you bump it down in proportion.
Oh, and back to the original question: How far? I answered this in your PM. I typically like to do short, medium, and long runs. 3 short, 2 medium, 1 long, and 1 short or a day off. Mediums are twice as long as the short. Longs are three times as long. With this forumla, the long runs tend to be close to Jack Daniels’ 25% rule. The reason why I write it this way is because many triathletes only run 4 days a week, and the 25% rule becomes kind of meaningless. For every day less that you run, you get rid of one of the short runs. So a person running for days a week might run a 2 miles, 2x4 miles, and then have a long run of 6 miles, for a 16 mile week. If the above 22 mile week was done on 4 runs a week, it would be 8 mile long run, two 5.5 mile runs, and a 3 mile run. The workouts would likely be done of the 5.5 mile days…but again, these are ballpark numbers. You need to adjust according to how you respnd to the workouts.
Edit: I originaly wrote 3 medium runs. It should be 2.
If the roads are nice and the weather’s good, your maximum bike distance should take up as much time as you’ve got to give it.
Don’t let training ruin all your rides.