A Guide to Triathlon Training in a Busy and Time-Starved Life
Performance in sport arrives from a consistent commitment to apply specific training that will yield positive physiological adaptations. Specific Training is a critical consideration when you go about triathlon training while navigating a time-starved life that is full of stress for a myriad of reasons. You must train hard, consistently, but your hard work will not yield performance gains if you cannot achieve positive adaptations. It is quite a challenge, but with a smart approach to training and a healthy dose of pragmatism to support your effort, substantial performance gains can emerge.
To build a training approach that will be successful for you, it is important to understand stress.
Let’s dive in.
Training Stress:
When you are doing triathlon training, you are strategically placing physiological stress on the body, from which you hope the body can absorb and adapt, leading to improved fitness, strength, power, and all the other elements we associate with fitness gains. Unfortunately, too much stress is applied, and the body won’t be equipped to adapt positively. The most straightforward example of this would be excess volume resulting in muscle injury or sickness. This is the simple reason we avoid random training and embrace structured training plans, allowing sensible structure for the doses of stress and recovery to allow adaptations, hence, improvement. There is no magic in appreciating this simple fact, but now we must consider the other stressors we face. In a busy, time-starved life, we have a lot of demand which can lead to a massive amount of stress accumulation, and here is an important fact:
The body is incredibly smart but isn’t well equipped at differentiating different types of stress.
This simple fact is important. Emotional stress, lack of sleep, inadequate hydration, the addition of environmental stress (altitude, heat, cold, etc.) all combine to force the body to absorb, synthesize, and adapt. No matter the level of athlete, the more non-training stressors that we must manage, the lower capacity for us to adapt to the training stress positively. Here are examples of additional everyday stressors you might face in a busy, time-starved life:
Financial
Work (timelines, presentations, managing teams)
Existential (life pathway, sense of self, etc.)
Family Commitments and Schedules
Travel
Poor Eating and Fueling Habits
Less Than Optimal Sleep Quality or Quantity
The list can go on, but this simple concept highlights why we avoid athletes chasing a fixed number of weekly training hours to seek performance. Life stress will ebb and flow, and it is critical to find a recipe and approach that enables you to integrate training into life instead of dumping training on top of life.
Integration of training, not accumulation
The Dirty Question: How many hours do I need to train for a triathlon?
One of the great things about this sport is that amateurs get to compete alongside professionals on the same course and at the same time. However, it isn't just the big difference in finishing time that differentiates amateurs from pros. The whole approach to training and preparation is very different for the full-timers versus the busy amateur.
The Pro vs. The Amateur
The Pro
It is all purely about athletic performance for the pro, and this is appropriate for the short time they compete at the world-class level. We compress the typical demands of life, making training and performance central to lifestyle. It is part of the challenge and commitment of achieving world-class performance. This means that, while we can emulate a pro, we shouldn’t mimic them, as they participate in a different mission. Nothing else matters. It is all about sporting performance.
When training a pro, this doesn’t mean that we simply pile on more and more training load, seeing when they break. On the contrary, the most successful and enduring world-class athletes successfully find their ‘performance recipe.’ If we break this approach into a simple model, it will look something like this:
Consistent and robust triathlon training, supported with embraced recovery and sleep, all wrapped with a set of essential habits under the banner of nutrition (fueling, daily eating, hydration). When we manage to keep an athlete in the performance zone, consistency is achieved, and the athlete improves -- every time! It seems simple, and it is in concept, but it takes a lot of hard work, pragmatism, and smart decisions. Neither athlete nor coach can get pulled into emotional choices, or lose perspective on the bigger picture. This model is one that our pro athletes return to for perspective, confidence, and making important decisions. I believe it is central to why we have shown so much success in the long-term development of world-class athletes and top results across gender. It applies to everyone.
The Amateur
The lens that amateurs should look through for performance is very different. In many ways, your quest for performance is more complicated. Most amateurs have busy lives, spouses, children, social lives, and other commitments. Therefore, amateur success should be measured by the ability to integrate the triathlon training into a busy life, enabling health improvements, energy management, and improved sporting performance. This is the magic, and it is the lens that we treat the success of our amateur athletes. Please let this marinate into your psyche -- as I believe it is the framework of your mission and success:
Our goal is to help you achieve your goals in sport, but not at the expense of the rest of your life. The mission is to facilitate excellent sporting success. Still, by going on the journey toward those goals, you also improve your overall health, increase your effectiveness at work, and show up as the best version of yourself for friends and family.
Now that is performance. And, you can do this with commitment and pragmatism. Every one of our highest performing time-starved amateurs adopts this lens, including the more than 500 athletes who have qualified for triathlon world championships and the multiple overall and age group winners at World Championship events. Whether a first-timer or seeking qualifications and podiums, it is important that you embrace performance within the context of your busy life.
Here is the same model, utilized with our pro athletes but adapted for a time-starved amateur. It looks the same but includes some significant differences:
Work - whether being a parent, CEO or teacher - is an integral part of your performance puzzle. You cannot ignore it. Your quest is to integrate consistent and specific training (strength and endurance) and support those stressors with critical supportive habits to help you thrive. These habits include recovery, sleep, proper eating, and downtime away from the rigors of work and training. You can begin to see why pragmatism is important. Let’s dig in and get down to some specifics of your approach to training.
It Begins with the Training Plan
The very first step is to create a realistic and smart training plan. This is your greatest chance to create a foundation that will work within your life structure. Unfortunately, most athletes are asking the question, "How many hours do I have to train each week?" I prefer athletes, often with my help, to do an honest self-assessment of their life and identify when they can always train, typically train, and potentially train if it is a lighter ‘life week’. From this, we can map enough spare time for proper sleep and recovery, as well as social time. Then, and only then, can we create a realistic framework of how many hours they genuinely have available to train. After going through this exercise, the question becomes: with these hours, how do I optimize my training and preparation.
This approach shifts the conversation from simply trying to accumulate miles to optimizing training within the hours available. Remarkably simple and effective. Within this context, you then need to be able to expand and restrict training as life provides more or less capacity. We call this being dynamic. Beyond this, there are some key elements to execute to maximize your success in both life and training.
Fully Commit to The Key Sessions
For amateurs, I build programs based on the foundational ‘key’ sessions of each week. These are the ones that are the most specific to your training needs, sitting at the center of your weekly program. In addition to these, we have ‘supporting sessions,’ which are prescribed to allow recovery and preparation for your next key session.
Manage your busy week around the key sessions
Then, add or skip the more supportive sessions as needed
Providing structure and hierarchy allows you to execute with intention and scale up or down as life allows
Support with the Basics
It seems like a hassle, and many think it is more work than it is, but it is critical. Ensure you support the endurance training (swim, bike, run) with a commitment to:
Sleep and rest
Go easy on the light days
Pre and post-training fueling
Smart nutrition at regular meals
It will allow for energy balance, more consistency in training, and a bigger yield from the training you do.
Focus on the Doing First
Many athletes get so obsessed with metrics, thinking it creates ideal specificity. As a result, they stop listening to their body, which inevitably leads to injury and negative performance adaptations. Instead, I like athletes to focus on the basic principle of ‘doing the session’ before allowing any intervals or intensity to come on top of that. I highlight a great management tool for this kind of approach below: The ‘opt-out tool.’
Use the ‘Opt-Out’ Tool
As a busy triathlete, you will sometimes arrive at a key session feeling ragged, stressed, or tired. Athletes often struggle to know whether to push through or back off. Ironically, if I empower the athlete to have control, many will make the right decision. During these stressed-out scenarios, I always have the athlete begin easily. As they warm up, they will hit a natural crossroad: If the legs and body begin to feel great, they can go on and complete the prescribed session. If they feel rough, they can scale down the intensity, turning the session into a smooth, non-metric-based, building effort. If tired, the building effort may be minimal. While the athlete loses a touch of specificity for that session, they don't fail. This heightens the chance they will be good tomorrow.
Know How to Scale
Another situation that can occur is time restriction. For example, you have a 90-minute bike session on your schedule but only have 60 minutes in your day. In this case, understanding how to scale is an important tool.
First, trim any ‘additional work’ following the main set
Retain as much of the main set as possible
Always maintain the duration of intervals, even if you need to trim the number of intervals
Unless your workout is of extremely high intensity, skip the cool down
Don't Look Back in Anger
In other words, no make-ups, no adding to future sessions if you missed a prior session. Life gets too busy? Stay on plan and move on. It is the fabric of the overall program; it will all even out. The final reminder is that you, the athlete, have to retain a healthy dose of reality. Be smart in your season planning and ensure you opt for a training program that allows consistency. No one is bulletproof, and overcommitting training hours is a key cause of:
Injury
Fatigue
Burnout
Performance decline
Get started in your triathlon training journey with the Sunday Special weekly planning tool. A helpful template to structure triathlon training into your busy life.
Choose wisely, remain pragmatic, and realize that no single session makes a hero; consistency does.