Triathlon is Not Three Separate Sports
Many time-starved athletes seeking to juggle three sports and supporting habits into a full week of commitments end up stumbling through the journey. They struggle to find their perfect recipe or end up battling chronic setbacks and lingering fatigue.
There is a better way to approach this sport.
Sustainable performance and improved results are all possible in a time-starved life. Today, I aim to unlock your potential by explaining the training approach we use to tackle the unique sport of triathlon.
In this piece, we will cover the following:
Common Mistakes
Time-starved athletes must balance training hours with non-negotiable commitments across work and life. Unfortunately, this ongoing challenge often results in poor decision-making and sub-optimal results. Here are a few of the most common mistakes we observe:
Volume obsession: Too many athletes develop their training plans through a rigid spreadsheet of training hours that ignores fluctuations in their daily schedule. The notion that the accumulation of total hours of training is the surest path to training success is outdated. At Purple Patch, we tell athletes that life is not a spreadsheet: a smarter approach will ensure you can adapt any week of training to the ebbs and flows of life’s demands.
Inflexible programming: Reviewing many training programs, it is often impossible to identify the key sessions across any week. All sessions hold equal value and importance, and an athlete can't make decisions around training management relative to fatigue or logistical demands. The best training programs incorporate an athlete’s freedom to prioritize or shift sessions around on a weekly or even daily basis according to their needs.
The three-sport mistake: While triathlon is comprised of three disciplines, it is still a single sport. Too many treat each discipline as its own entity. Building a program to focus on independent improvements in swimming, cycling, and running, each alone within a vacuum, can be catastrophic. The typical result is too much intensity and total training load relative to time and life. This approach also shifts focus away from essential strategic elements of your training, such as learning to ride with great muscular efficiency and posture so that you can both optimize your bike speed and run well off the bike afterward.
The Kitchen Sink: Most coaches and athletes appreciate the benefits of some higher intensity intervals, longer duration resilience, and perhaps some strength-based or tempo intervals included as well. Each discipline has its own version of each type of session, but too many folks try to squeeze every type of session into every week of training. This is a fast track to fatigue and underperformance in the long term.
A Fresh Perspective
The good news is that it isn’t overly complicated to shift your mindset to a smarter approach to performance.
Volume obsession: Too many athletes develop their training plans through a rigid spreadsheet of training hours that ignores fluctuations in their daily schedule. The notion that the accumulation of total hours of training is the surest path to training success is outdated. At Purple Patch, we tell athletes that life is not a spreadsheet: a smarter approach will ensure you can adapt any week of training to the ebbs and flows of life’s demands.
Shift the mindset: Triathlon is a single sport comprised of three disciplines. The execution of each sport in training and racing affects how well or badly you can perform in the others. Put simply: train for one sport, not three. Making this critical shift in mindset opens up a world of performance opportunities. For example, swimming is a sport in which ninety percent of your weight is displaced, so it represents a great forum to develop cardiovascular conditioning with minimal risk of injury. You can do more frequent, harder cardio-focused work in your swims than you can do in running. Another example is the positive impact low cadence riding has on running resilience and endurance. Lean into thinking of triathlon as SWIMBIKERUN, and your consistency and performance will shine. (Another place where your swim, bike, and run all intersect: strength training. Endurance-specific strength work should be included in every triathlete’s training program.)
Build a smarter approach: No matter your methodology on intervals and training duration, develop a program that structures key sessions around multiple-week ‘cycles’ of work. At Purple Patch, we build training cycles in 3-week blocks, which include two stronger weeks of training, followed by a transition week infused with a few days of rejuvenation and a stronger session on the weekend that can act as a benchmark of progression throughout the training season. Repeating and evolving these 3-week cycles a few times results in sustainable and effective training. It avoids the common mistake of cramming every type of session into every week, and prevents fatigue and excess load from accumulating. Consistency is king (or queen!), and this mindset allows for simpler performance progression and consistency in training.
Apply the multisport lens to running in particular: By adopting the SWIMBIKERUN mindset, you have access to a more pragmatic approach to the run portion of training. It reduces injury risk and amplifies the quality of sessions across weeks of training. Here are a few key tips for helping adopt this lens:
Integrate walk breaks into all run training sessions: This reduces muscle strain and helps avoid you practicing in poor form while running under fatigue.
Leverage treadmill walking: Nothing promotes good form, posterior chain activation, and strength-based resilience better than strong walking on a treadmill set at an incline (4-6% grade is a good amount to aim for).
Embrace alternate modalities: We discussed the power of swim intensity for cardiovascular development and the value of some forms of cycling training for strength and neuromuscular improvements, but other modalities can be helpful too. For example, many of our injury-prone athletes spend time on the rowing ergometer and elliptical trainer as a high-value alternative to develop running fitness.
Prioritize supporting habits: If your training schedule leads you to compromise sleep, good nutrition, or hydration to execute all of your planned training, the training program isn’t working. The cornerstones of performance are implementing effective training with supporting sleep and positive habits in nutrition. I cannot overstate the importance of these elements in every program.
Take the common training mistakes into consideration and start thinking of triathlon as a single sport, and you’ll be further down the path to sustainable performance than most.
We invite you to take your SWIMBIKERUN to the next level by training with us this season. Book a zero-pressure call with us to learn more about how we implement these strategies and how Tri Squad could help you optimize your training and racing this year: