Let’s say you could muster two key hard workouts a week on the bike (other ones endurance or easy etc) and had to balance it with fatigue with general training for a 12 hour week roughly what would you prescribe ?
V02 and sweet spot ?
Threshold and ss?
Vo2 and threshold ?
My long course race is done and now entered 4 months worth of short course racing, just looking for some direction with key bike workouts. Or maybe some order like threshold and ss for several weeks then some vo2 perhaps 🤷â€â™‚ï¸â€¦Thanks
I would do a VO2 block followed by a threshold block trending towards very race specific power work, whatever you think that will be. This includes considerations for the course. In general, a sprint triathlon is going to be a threshold effort. However, I did a race last year with 4 180s and several other sharp turns. For this race, it made sense to do some workouts where I was spending ~5-8 minutes at threshold in between 10-20 second sprints.
If your threshold power is quite close to your VO2 power, then you may benefit from a longer VO2 block to give yourself more room to raise threshold power. If you’re the opposite with a VO2 power much higher than your threshold power, then maybe a shorter VO2 block and more threshold time.
If your sprint races have longer bike legs where you’re going to be closer to an hour on the bike, then some sweet spot work could make sense, but that’s more applicable for an Olympic distance race usually. Assuming you did a lot of zone 3 work in your long course race build, you can probably safely put that kind of work on the back burner for now (maybe touch it once in a while as part of an over under threshold workout or something).
This is my view on it, but I’m sure there will be differing opinions. I know a coach who would say to almost never do threshold workouts (preferring VO2) and save those efforts for the races. I know others who would order it threshold then VO2.
“I would do a VO2 block followed by a threshold block trending towards very race specific power work, whatever you think that will be. This includes considerations for the course.”
x2, especially the course specificity advice.
I would run off of these workouts, too, at a fast pace.
I’d consider spending more time at sprint race pace and building that pace up. Do some testing to see where your current bike fitness is at that distance and go from there.
if you are a zwift user and also have access to a treadmill, the zwift duathlon series is a great sprint tri prep. usually 4 races per month, one per week. 35 minute bike TT, 10 minute break to transition to treadmill then 15 minute run. you go all out, and the distance is converted to points and tallied over the month long series. the first week is rough, but by the 4th week you will watch your watts go up and feel much more comfortable at threshold. same for the run, usually each week i try and knock off 5 sec/mile from my pace and feel much more comfortable by the final week. if you can time this 5-6 week before your Tri this will help a ton.
I don’t use zwift but it seems to follow the protocol of shorter higher power intervals and focus on sprint work in the track too, so thanks for that
Gotta get the body out of long course mode, my first sprint is in 4 weeks, hopefully get some improvement in by then
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