I’m a junior in college (season peaking in mid April) and the past couple years I’d spend the winter at low, low intensities…just logging in miles and miles.
Recently I heard someone say that for Olympic distance, especially for the bike leg, there is no need to spend an entire season building a base since the race is only a little over an hour long…He suggested doing long aerobic intervals all winter to build/maintain speed…and also said it’s pointless to ride more than 2 1/2 hours on the bike (about twice the race length) for a workout.
Any thoughts for a self-coached collegiate triathlete with about 17-19 hours of weekly training available this winter (who also needs to drop time specifically in the run)?
You probably don’t need to ride much more than 2.5 to three hours for your long ride. A 2.5 hour ride is still base, so you are not skipping it. My two sense is that since I gave up speed and just do mostly longer slower stuff I am much faster at Olympic and Sprint distances. If you are doing 17 - 19 hours a week, you will need to do 50+ miles rides on a regular basis to fill up your hours.
hey, i’m 21 and am also in university… i do draft legal stuff…
this is what i did last year - swim all winter on the team, I started some hour sessions on the trainer around jan/feb, and started transitioning into running/more biking late feb early march…
I usually swim 4-5 times a week for an hour (my pools doesn’t have lane swim times for longer than that), run 3 times (early in the season it was a long run (20k), a tempo run, and a 20-30 min run off the bike, later in the season it was a tempo run, a track workout and a long run (15k)) and bike two or three times (group ride, hard 80k, long ride 90-120 k, and usually a filler ride of 60 min ez), i did do a phase of bike specific work and that was group ride, tempo ride and long ride…
If your in college right now, I would spend your time learning how to swim fast, try to get in with your schools team and be prepared to be humbled… to run fast the trick is tempo workouts and then transition that to track workouts 3-4 weeks out of your big race to build that last anerobic bit…
hope this helps, if you have any other questions PM me
Doesnt sound too bad, considering he is doing draft legal stuff, which means 10 K runs. 12 milers should suffice. Now for an ironman, that is a bit short. But especially considering the rest of his workouts, 20K should work fine.
10 k is the longest i run, i did do 1 long course race this summer (2k, 56k, 15k) and I died pretty much right around 10k on the run, but I think that was more nutritionally based than endurance based… I think its much more important to have the tempo runs, the long run is important but don’t get stuck in the trap of increasing milage in exchange for intensity, the tempo and track workouts are key for 10k speed.
I used to think that you could get away with low volume for Olympic Distance. Now after three consecutive seasons of increasing volume and NO intervals I had my fastest spring season ever. Some people try to break up a tri into pieces and thus say that each individual leg is not that long. True enough, however, as a whole, racing for two hours is still about 95 percent aerobic. Thus, the bigger your base is, the faster you will go.
I have tried it both ways and high volume wins out every time at every distance. Marathoners who race about the same time you do for an Olympic tri run upwards of 160 miles per week. For them that is about 25 hours of running, most of it done aerobically. If you want to reach your peak then do what the fast people do and put in as much volume as you can over the winter in all your sports.
If I had 20 hours I would just break it up base of the time of each event, i.e. your riding should be about 10 hours (roughly 50 percent), running six hours (roughly 30 percent) and swimming four hours.
Don’t find this lesson out the hard way when you are 35 and left all those carefree days behind when you can train as much as you want. If your peak race is college nationals (late April, early May at Havasu isn’t it) then set up a nice periodization program backing up from there with speedwork in late March-Apr, hills and strengthening in in Feb-March and Nov.-Jan. pure volume as much as you can stand.
“Recently I heard someone say that for Olympic distance, especially for the bike leg, there is no need to spend an entire season building a base since the race is only a little over an hour long”
Damn man, a little over an hour for Olympic distance, when are you turning pro?
Keep in mind the amount of mileage logged by elite runners to build endurance even for the 800 and mile. I think it benefits most distances longer than a literal all out sprint.
Because, relativly speaking it’s all about the base! Look the event is 2:00 hours long to maintain that sort of effort for that long, until the final push to the finishline over the final 200m, an almost totally aerobic effort. So the bigger your aerobic base the better you will be.
As to your cycling analogy - it’s a bit off. Why then are the best 40K ITT riders in the world the top road racers who’s daily training is a 4 - 5 hour ride almost every day of the year? These guys have a MASSIVE base!
Many people overtink this. If you have extra time this winter, just ride alot. Hook up with a club or group who regularly rides and put in the miles.
Amen to that. I read that Steve Ovett (former world record holder in the mile, gold medalist in '80 at 800 meters and the main nemesis of Sebastion Coe, my favorite runner) ran 130 miles a week when he was training. If a guy running 1:40-low for 800 and 3:48ish for the mile runs volume like that, then a two hour event makes it 10 times more relevant.
just so. It started with Lydiard and Snell, Snell was training at 100+ miles a week for 800m and 1500m. It worked well… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Snell
Of course you can race Olympic distance without significant volume of training, but the results are pretty much guaranteed to be sub-optimal.