Hi. I am looking for advice from some people who have “been there, done that”. I swam in college, started running in grad school because I was packing on the pounds, ended up running 9 marathons, and then decided to buy a bike and give triathlons a bash. I have been a “casual” triathlete for about 5 years now and I have done numerous sprint and olympic tri’s and one half ironman. The half ironman was my single greatest athletic accomplishment to date, but just took too much out of me in terms of training and recovery. I have had a few good races over the years but I typically walk away feeling like I didn’t train enough, etc., instead of being happy with the fact that I am simply able to finish the bloody things. I generally place better in my age group in sprint races than in olympic which provides greater overall satisfaction. So where am I going with all this???
Where should I focus my attention? On sprint races where I can place better? Or in olympic races where I have more room for improvement? Sprints are over so quick that sometimes it barely seems worth the ride to the race and booking a hotel room.
Yeah, even a ‘sprint’ is really more of an endurance event as opposed to requiring real anaerobic-type speed… I had my best-ever results at several shorter events this year during IM training.
I think generally speaking the longer the race the stronger the field. So it’s no wonder that you do better in sprints than in oly races.
Having said that, I love shorter races. I can race fairly well for about an hour but after that I really fall off some, no matter how many hours I train.
I just like to race. So while I would choose Oly as my favorite distance, I can find plenty of sprints to enter & race & still continue to train toward a Oly race. I don’t give a rip about placing but I care very much about my performance. I have placed in races but was disappointed b/c I felt I did not race up to my potential that day & the opposite as happened as well. I didn’t place but was very happy as I felt that my performance was even better than my goal. So for me, Oly is my favorite distance but I will race either just to get out & race & at the end of the day the race is really against myselft.
Hi. I am looking for advice from some people who have “been there, done that”. I swam in college, started running in grad school because I was packing on the pounds, ended up running 9 marathons, and then decided to buy a bike and give triathlons a bash. I have been a “casual” triathlete for about 5 years now and I have done numerous sprint and olympic tri’s and one half ironman. The half ironman was my single greatest athletic accomplishment to date, but just took too much out of me in terms of training and recovery. I have had a few good races over the years but I typically walk away feeling like I didn’t train enough, etc., instead of being happy with the fact that I am simply able to finish the bloody things. I generally place better in my age group in sprint races than in olympic which provides greater overall satisfaction. So where am I going with all this???
Well without knowing how much time you can spend on training and how you distribute your time across training levels, it’s hard to know if you ever going to be satisfied with your performances over an oly. Because in my mind, that’s the only question. Reason why you typically score better in sprints in term of ranking is that often, there’s just less competition there.
One way or the other, your career should continue to progress. There’s nothing wrong in my opinion in getting faster before increasing the distances. With maturity, 2hour long efforts become easier to book. Also, you know, if you have a clear bottleneck somewhere, I donno, could be the cycling, or the running. If you can identify clearly some bottle neck then you may be better off taking a bet on weakpoint training. For instance, lots of folks fear the 10k. That kinds of keep them in sprint distances. In such a case, especially if the two other sports are fairly strong, it may be worth spending most if not all winter time on the weakness, preparing it for the oly distance to later resume the two other disciplines.
That can give some boost to your oly performance. Otherwise… threshold, threshold, threshold. No gym. Specific preparation for a 2h long effort.
Olympics will definitely give you more of that worthwhile feeling. It doesn’t break the time bank trying to peak for one, and the rCe s long enough to make you feel it the next day without putting you out of commission for a month. You can always intermix a few sprints close to home to keep travel costs down. I like sprint because you have to be fast, but olympics make you be fast with an added mental component. You have got to endure that pain longer with minimal loss of intensity. You should get to the point of racing your sprint speed, for the Olympic length.