IRONMAN and IRONMAN 70.3 Triathlon Success in a Time-Starved Life
IRONMAN is one of the most demanding endurance challenges on the planet and demands great commitment, training, and patience to be successful. Interestingly, most people inspired to take on the challenge are time-starved, often with families and busy jobs. The common result of this collision of ambition and life stressors is that many triathletes end up fit, yet fatigued and underperforming.
This has to change, and there is a better way.
Still, each time I discuss triathlon training performance in a time-starved life, a tidal wave of naysayers comes out of the woodwork complaining that the approach either simply doesn’t work or certainly doesn’t work for people who want ‘real’ performance gains.
In this piece, I aim to lay out a strategy for you to nail IRONMAN and IRONMAN 70.3 within a set of weekly training hours that can actually fit into your life. You can excel at IRONMAN in 10-14 weekly training hours. You can thrive in IRONMAN 70.3 in 8-12 weekly training hours. It requires bravery, pragmatism, and a strategic approach, but the method fits into life and actually amplifies your health and performance across that life.
To ensure we are aligned, and before we dive in, allow me to lay some groundwork and set the appropriate lens:
The lessons we will go through today do not revolve around the notion that less is more. Erase that phrase from your mind. At Purple Patch, we care about performance within the context of your life. If you have tons of free time, more training hours may be better. It is about finding the right training recipe to align with your situation.
This approach is not a secret shortcut. Success requires commitment, dedication, and hard work over a long period. As a time-starved athlete, your mission is to optimize your results relative to the training you realistically can execute.
Fifteen years of results and podiums provide the platform for these recommendations. The Purple Patch approach to triathlon training isn’t hypothetical. It’s proven years of triathlon coaching experience with thousands of athletes. It is not just suitable for first-timers and folks looking to just complete, either. Remember, Purple Patch Fitness has successfully qualified several hundred athletes for the IRONMAN World Championships, and we have supported many age group wins and podiums at the World Championship level. The vast majority of these competitive athletes followed the recipe and approach I will outline below.
This discussion focuses on two main concepts:
The Traditional Triathlon Training Approach Doesn’t Work
You are time-starved and taking on the enormous challenge of IRONMAN or IRONMAN 70.3. Let’s consider what that means. To be successful at this endeavor, you need to manage:
A triathlon training plan, as well as all the habits and logistics that accompany it.
Integration of the program and habits into a busy life.
Maintaining all work and personal commitments with a drop in effectiveness.
Each of these three components is essential and non-negotiable. You need to commit to consistent training but cannot follow a plan and all of its features at the expense of your life. With this broad context, let’s identify four key issues with the typical approach.
Problem #1: Most triathlon training plans and coaching are designed and managed in a vacuum, as though the rest of an athlete’s life simply doesn’t exist.
Coaches and athletes design training plans without considering life’s other stressors.
Athletes often try to execute weekly training hours that are not sustainable when considering the demands of work and life - the most common amount being 16-24 hours of training each week.
The triathlon coach and athlete then head on a journey to find a way to cram all these hours into an already busy life.
The athlete burns their candle at both ends, and fatigue sneaks up – or worse, illness or injury.
Many amateur athletes also misunderstand what it means to commit to a plan. Coaches always highlight the importance of season planning and committing to a structured triathlon training schedule. This concept is accurate; however, the problem emerges when working a 16-24 hour triathlon training plan into a time-starved life. Athletes tend to dedicate themselves to checking off every session of every week of that magical plan. After all, it is the blueprint of success, no? The outcome is a pass/fail approach, anchored in ‘turning every session green’ in your training app, but the result is that your plan can end up playing havoc with athlete health and performance.
We are not engineering a skyscraper. Instead, we are managing the complicated and chaotic world of human physiology within the chaos of ever-changing stressors of life.
The truth is that any athlete's total weekly training hours are not a good barometer of success. It is great to plan, but you must approach each week with a dynamic mindset and the freedom to scale back the training load if commitments and stress increase or scale up your training load if your schedule offers more time to train. This approach goes against the typical rigid system of building an athlete's training program around accumulating weekly training hours as the sole pathway to performance.
Problem #2: The fad of Zone 2 training.
It is all the rage. ‘Build your base,’ and ‘polarized training’ type programs have most of your training hours Z1 and Z2 – very low intensity.
If you are following a restricted-time program, basing most of your training on low intensity will not likely provide a significant enough stimulus for success.
Let me be clear here:
If an athlete trains 20-30 hours a week, the vast majority should be at a lower intensity.
Additionally, time-starved athletes need to ensure they adhere to sessions prescribed to be lower intensity.
When training with a life full of commitments, you must always be prepared to convert hard intervals into more of a soul-filling day if the body is not ready to absorb higher-intensity work.
But, a time-starved athlete who can only train for 8-12 hours a week is better served by a higher relative proportion of higher intensity work. For example, if an athlete completes five weekly rides totaling 15 hours, much of it must be low stress. However, if an athlete completes two indoor sessions and one outside ride a week, totaling 5 hours, those bike trainer sessions can – and should – be higher intensity.
Problem #3: Race preparation is based on the ‘magical’ 12 to 16 week triathlon training plan..
If you are time-starved, you cannot expect results from a deep focus on training for just a few months. You are better served with an approach that allows consistency over a more extended period. Integrating training into life over an extended period will create performance readiness.
At Purple Patch, we keep athletes on a progressive training structure throughout the year, allowing connections, support, and community. As a result, most athletes complete much shorter builds toward key races focused on that final sharpening and taper and only do so once or twice a season. Nevertheless, they are incredibly successful, especially with the support of our triathlon coaches and their teammates.
Problem #4: Focus.
Toughness, commitment, and dedication are often misunderstood. Coaches ask athletes to show up, be present, and focus during every single session, with any distraction labeled a point of weakness or lack of commitment. These might be expectations for a professional athlete, but for a time-starved individual managing a demanding job (which requires plenty of deep focus) and a family (for which you want to be present), focus is a valuable commodity. If I then ask an athlete to be entirely focused for another 10-12 hours of training every week, I just create a second job for them.
The key for the time-starved athlete is knowing when to show up.
Focus and presence are essential for demanding key sessions. But, the more simple and ‘supporting’ general sessions can play an important role in both race preparation but equally in broader mental and physical health:
They build general conditioning – cardiovascular and muscular.
They act as a pressure-release valve for life and serve as valuable ‘me time.’
So, the traditional program isn’t a fit, so let’s discuss how to approach training more effectively when time-starved.
The Optimization Challenge
As a time-starved athlete, you are faced with an optimization challenge. Let’s break it down.
We begin with the basics: training.
As a coach, I prescribe a session. This is the ‘demand,’ namely the specific training stressor placed on you to force adaptations. As an athlete, you execute the training session, hopefully as intended. This is your response to the demand. It is often uncomfortable and hard (I can be a tough coach), but you realize this is a prerequisite to driving performance gains. It is how your body adapts physiologically. As you repeat this process almost daily, you will get fitter, stronger, and more powerful over many months, developing race performance readiness.
Pretty simple.
However, you must remember the training is prescribed within the context of all the other stressors of life:
Work, travel, financials, family commitments, personal stress, and sickness
Add to this potentially poor habits in sleep, nutrition, and hydration
We need the capacity to absorb the training demand and gain positive adaptations.
You likely cannot move away from family, quit working, or find an extra 5 hours each day; hence we face an optimization challenge. So, through a pragmatic lens that can pave the pathway to consistency, you ask the question:
How do I optimize my physiological adaptations and readiness with fewer weekly training hours?
It starts with a step-by-step process.
Step #1: Identify the non-negotiables
Let’s tackle your triathlon training journey from the opposite side of how most approach it. Don’t build your training plan, and try to find ways to cram in your training. Instead, examine your non-negotiable commitments first, then build training around that. For example, what are your time and schedule demands around work, family, self-care, and other critical elements of your life.
Step #2: Structure the Training Plan
Once you have established the non-negotiables, let’s consider the training plan.
Most of the training plans on the market seem to set every session at equal priority for the athlete. There might be many great sessions in the week, but they are blended like a chicken casserole.
If Monday's swim is as critical as Tuesday's brick session and Wednesday's strength and run, how does an athlete manage their training week if life gets crazy?
How does an athlete know when to be ready to show up and focus, or when they can just check off a soul-filling session?
The solution? As a time-starved athlete, build your plan with a clear hierarchy:
Key sessions: two or three workouts designed to move the performance needle for the week.
Supporting sessions: Generally lower stress, more supportive, and suitable for general conditioning.
This way, you don’t lose:
Consistency
Specificity
Progression
Build the week with your key and supporting sessions clearly highlighted. Then, maintain the key sessions and scale or reduce the supporting ones when you need to adapt. For example, one week, you might check all the sessions off as intended; the next week, you might get called to travel for work or coach Jenny’s softball game.
>> Check this out: Optimize your training schedule with the Sunday Special Template
Step #3: Build in Cycles
The first two steps were logical. However, this one is liberating: build your plan in cycles, not weeks.
You don’t need to hit every type of session every week to succeed.
You don’t need to ride or run long every weekend. You don’t need to hit every type of interval session every week. Working on the scale of a three-week cycle gives you far more flexibility to target different training demands without losing specificity.
At Purple Patch, we build in cycles of three weeks:
Week one might include an over-distance ride and some running intervals.
Week two might focus on running resilience, including a long run.
Week three would be transitional with a few lighter days in a row and then a big weekend race simulation session, where you tackle a big workout and test your fueling and hydration strategy.
Below is a graphic illustrating this concept (gold cells represent key sessions, blue cells represent supporting sessions):
When you layer this pattern cycle after cycle, a few results emerge:
First, training fits into life and doesn’t over-accumulate fatigue.
Training weeks remain fun and fresh.
You get to track progress as you revisit sessions, albeit often evolved, every three weeks.
And that is how you create a sustainable path forward to IRONMAN and IRONMAN 70.3 performance as a time-starved athlete. It is the backbone of our triathlon coaching philosophy. We consistently enable athletes to fit training into life and make progress while still smiling. As a result, we don’t face the ‘one-and-done’ problem that hampers so many athletes, where training doesn’t fit into life, or their season ends in illness or injury (or both).
If you feel like training is a part-time job, are struggling with inconsistency in performance, or are failing at your plan because you cannot check the box of every session, perhaps it is time to evolve.
Achieving great IRONMAN / IRONMAN 70.3 performance in a time-starved life is not just possible - it is highly accessible for an athlete like you.
For more information on how to optimize your training, check out these additional resources:
Join Tri Squad for your next race to get access to a training plan that helps you to put these concepts into action
Check out Matt’s recent webinar for a deeper dive into this topic
Make an appointment for a coaching consult with one of our expert coaches to discuss your specific goals and races
Cheers,
Matt Dixon - IRONMAN Master Coach