How to Train for Half IRONMAN and IRONMAN in a Time-Starved Life
Your sporting goals are important. They provide a compass for training and a sense of achievement. We know folks are more consistent and perform better with specific targets. The challenge for most athletes we support is how to successfully train for these sporting goals without the process feeling like a second job.
Many athletes establish goals but then limp through life, feeling overwhelmed. Triathlon training becomes an uphill grind while they often navigate frequent bouts of sickness or injury. Not exactly joyful. The truth is that a successful Half IRONMAN and IRONMAN training program should allow you to achieve your athletic goals and be additive to your health, life, and work performance.
What's the secret? How can you leverage sporting goals and bring your triathlon journey to life and live as the triathlete you are? Let’s dig in.
Today, I will outline:
The Core Triathlon Training Principles
There are two critical concepts we must establish before building an optimized approach to your time-starved training:
Success in every goal requires commitment, consistent hard work, and the ability to manage setbacks and adversity.
For improvements to occur in any endeavor, there needs to be a challenging demand applied that will stimulate growth and development. Therefore, while never comfortable, a stressor is essential to facilitate success.
We are focusing solely on Half IRONMAN and IRONMAN training today. Still, I should note that I could highlight these two principles for almost any meaningful quest you take on, like half marathons, marathons, ultra-racing, or long bike rides and races. Your journey to success will not be easy and won’t constitute a life of comfort. However, the good news is that the journey will be empowering, enjoyable, and rewarding. It will also have massive positive ramifications on your ability to perform across all other areas of life.
As an athlete, your mission in performance readiness is quite simple:
Add a demand (training stressor)
Adapt from that demand
The result is fitter, stronger, and more resilient
Every coach and athlete should seek to build a program that:
Maximizes the amount of training an athlete can execute while continuing to produce positive adaptations.
To be clear, this is not maximizing training hours for volume's sake. Finding the right balance is an ongoing planning challenge for coaches and athletes, aiming to get the triathlon training prescription right to ensure enough stressors to stimulate development but not so great that the results become negative or bleed into becoming that dreadful ‘second job.’
It is critical to consider a few supporting elements to improve your capacity to adapt to triathlon training. Far from being nice add-ons if an athlete has time, we consistently observe that it is almost impossible for an athlete to succeed if they don’t have a solid foundation of these supporting habits. Ignoring these habits will limit training capacity, but it will unhinge a whole program.
The 2 Supporting Categories of Triathlon Training Habits:
Recovery:
Proper sleep quantity and quality
Downtime and rest
Meditation or other practices
Supporting habits to foster tissue health and joint mobility (such as foam rolling or massage)
Nutrition:
A foundation of positive eating habits (quality and quantity)
Post-workout fueling (consumption of calories within 30 minutes of post-training)
Consistent daily hydration habits
By adding the critical role of stability, strength, and mobility into your program, we arrive at a successful Half IRONMAN and IRONMAN training program anchored around the Purple Patch Pillars of Performance: Endurance Training, Strength Training, Nutrition, and Recovery.
We now come to the pressing issue of applying these training principles within the demands of a time-starved life.
The Challenges Faced by Time-Starved Athletes
What’s the best IRONMAN and Half IRONMAN training program?
There is endless debate among coaches and athletes. Is it high volume with the majority at a lower intensity? Is it more ‘precise’ with high-intensity sessions the focus rather than long training hours? Well, let me tell you something that might shock you:
More is not always better.
It’s a silly statement, but more doesn’t always result in higher training yield if you cannot positively adapt to the greater stressor. So I would even go out on a limb and say that more is unlikely better for most endurance triathletes when you take in the context of life demands.
If an athlete can successfully absorb 20 hours of training each week, 30 hours of training, or even 40 hours of weekly training, then go for it. There is nothing wrong with high-volume training if we consider it in the vacuum of scientific methodologies. The problem for you, the time-starved athlete, is that these race training hours must be completed around numerous other responsibilities.
We’ve defined training as a stressor applied to yield a positive adaptation. We must also consider all the other stressors we navigate in broader life. To name a few:
Work
Travel
Finances
Family and friends (commitments, responsibilities)
Challenges around sleep
Imperfect habits in nutrition (including alcohol)
Self-image
The list could go on, but here is an important point:
The body is not good at differentiating between sources of stress.
Stressors accumulate systemically, meaning that you can only grow and adapt if you consider your triathlon training program within the context of the stressors you navigate each day.
There’s an old Purple Patch saying: ‘Life is not a spreadsheet.’ This is relevant to you, the time-starved athlete. If you identify with the phrase ‘time-starved,’ you have a high number and variety of stressors in your life. You don’t have loads of free time, and your schedule constantly shifts week by week. Therefore, you will not likely be successful trying to:
Cram unsustainable race training hours into that time-starved life (at least long-term).
Follow a rigid training plan built around total training hours in any given week.
Your only real chance of long-term consistency and success will emerge from creating a dynamic mindset around training. You must plan your week within the context of the non-negotiable commitments from work, life, and supporting habits that build your capacity and health.
How To Apply an Optimized Training Approach
Something simple to begin this section, a word of warning. As a time-starved athlete, you will not be successful if you build a training plan aiming to stuff it into life. Pragmatism must rule. I encourage you to tackle the challenge from the other side of the equation. Begin with life, understand the framework you must work around, then optimize the training hours available.
I recently discussed this in a webinar for time-starved athletes. Here’s a nice snippet showcasing the mindset.
Let’s put the optimization into action:
First, calendar out the non-negotiable weekly commitments you have.
These will include:
Hours at work
Commute time
Family time and associated activities (coaching Jenny’s softball team etc.)
If you map these, day by day, you will begin to envision a typical training week.
2. Calendar out the all-important supportive habits.
This is often overlooked and so important for long-term success. I typically see folks overestimate their capacity because they self-sabotage through neglecting these non-negotiable elements:
Sleep
Downtime and rest (including a transitional time toward sleep)
Sufficient time for meals (including preparation)
Social time
Once you’ve completed the first two steps, you’ll have a clear picture of the free time remaining in your schedule. We see weekly training time range from 4 to 16 hours for most time-starved athletes. Our average IRONMAN athlete tends to have 8-12 hours each week.
3. The optimization challenge.
Now you have a simple question to answer.
What is the best triathlon training program to produce the most significant performance yield with the hours I have available?
The fewer the hours you have available, the higher the proportion of them likely to include some higher intensity work.
While training Purple Patch athlete Sami Inkinen, who was busy as the co-founder and CEO of Trulia, we faced this challenge. Sami had ten free weekly hours on average. Hence, his program included a much higher percentage of IRONMAN training hours at high intensity than other elite amateurs who were less time-starved. With this prescription, Sami broke 9 hours in the IRONMAN Hawaii World Championships and became Amateur World Champion.
The clear message is that 20 weekly hours isn’t always better than 10, and in Sami’s case, he likely would have failed if he had tried to sustain 20-hour training weeks in the context of his life. Equally, if Sami had kept most of his training hours at low intensity, it would not have produced the physiological stimulus required to prepare him for the IRONMAN. Sami is an excellent example of optimized triathlon training within a time-starved life.
The last piece of your puzzle is the week-to-week dynamism of the program. Repeat a similar process to the one laid out above over a shorter time frame (weekly). If life demands pick up, then be happy to reduce training hours and load. On the other hand, if you gain some capacity, it serves as an opportunity to extend training hours. The key is that you retain your key habits and consistently through the ebbs and flows.
Our approach to coaching busy people isn’t rocket science, but it takes pragmatism and bravery.
Cheers,
Matt Dixon