Three-Month Race Plans are Ancient History
What predicts great race performance success for a time-starved athlete juggling a busy life?
It isn’t nailing every session in the weeks leading up to race day. There is no magic ramp program that will ensure greatness. Don’t be fooled by spin-doctor coaches proclaiming the critical need for a periodized program.
Your life is likely chaotic and unpredictable, and your ultimate success is going to be built off a platform of smart training that integrates into life and allows you to arrive with specific fitness and resilience developed over many months, all without the accumulation of too much systemic, mental or muscular fatigue.
Find your sustainable performance recipe, and you can be close to the race-ready for most of the year without the whole process feeling like a monkey on your back.
Today, I will outline a process to help you refine your approach to training and achieve better results:
Why Standalone Race Builds Don’t Work
If I held a magic wand with the power to change one thing in amateur triathlon training, it would be the perception around the importance of a magical 12-16 week plan to prepare for triathlon races.
These three to four-month programs hold a firm grip in many athletes' minds, who are sold on the premise that success in their races is dependent on the successful completion of every workout prescribed in their programs. Over many weeks we often see athletes desperately trying to ram training into the chaotically fluctuating schedules of work and family life and being forced to stick to a rigid structure of weeks of progressively harder training, with designated weeks of recovery and adaptation.
These race builds are often wrapped with science-sounding labels such as ‘periodization’, and seldom offer any flex or consideration relative to logistics and stressors from factors in life and work. These progressive plans look great on paper and offer athletes a clear blueprint to follow.
I’m sure you have seen the magical ATP (Annual Training Plan) roadmap that looks like this:
There are several challenges with this rigid approach:
Performance readiness takes longer than 12-16 weeks: You can get very fit in three to four months, but true race performance requires a longer duration to enable readiness. This doesn’t mean that you must be obsessed with your commitment all year, but these race builds don’t offer enough time to place focus on some critical training efforts that yield large performance gains.
These pretty graphs seldom line up with life: An elite athlete focused primarily on training, with less distraction from work and life commitments, has a much greater chance of executing a race build than you. I have yet to meet a time-starved athlete who can align a progressive block of training that syncs well with the challenges from life stressors, work commitment, phases of travel, or poor sleep, and everything else that life throws at you. I constantly see athletes skipping needed sleep to cram in training when life is chaotically busy while frustrated to be following a designated ‘recovery week’ when they have more time and training opportunities.
Rigid race builds tend to build fatigue: When athletes commence a race build, it presents a natural ‘x in the calendar’ to denote that training has truly begun. The emotional response is to aim to check the box on every session, after all, it's on the plan so it must be important. So many maintain the non-negotiable work and life commitments, and are rigid in hitting every session, with a result of compromising sleep, proper nutrition and downtime. This can work for some weeks, but fatigue incrementally and imperceptibly builds. You get fitter, but the training becomes a drag, you are systemically and mentally tired, and you arrive on race day ‘fit n’ fatigued’. Many athletes don’t ever realize this happens, instead blaming a poor run or gastrointestinal distress on a poor race result.
You arrive with eroded confidence: When you place such elevated focus and priority on a ‘magic race build’ to deliver performance, individual training sessions become grossly elevated in importance. The tendency is to approach tougher sessions in a pass-fail mindset, elevate intensity in easier sessions, and treat any modified or missed session as a signal of regression and lack of readiness. You feel like a failure before the race has even begun, but the truth is that real readiness is better built from a sustainable approach that integrates with life over the longer-term, and de-emphasizes the critical focus on some mythical build to a race.
Before we move on, I should point out that planning is an important component of race performance, and random training is not a recipe for performance predictability. You want to arrive at key races very fit, with specific training, as well as mentally and physically fresh. That won’t happen by accident, but equally, your best recipe is not going to emerge from a heavy focus on a standalone race build.
There is a better way to get race-ready. Let’s explore.
Key Supporting Ingredients for a Time-Starved Athlete
The most successful path for a time-starved athlete is to find a global recipe that integrates into life over the longer term. While it is important to structure the focus of training over a progressive series of phases, the best path is to enable ‘close to race readiness for several months of the year. It is critical to find your own recipe that can ebb and flow with the demands of life.
Many elite coaches dismiss this concept, as they are so entrenched in a rigid elite athlete model, but it is imperative that we consider the mission of athlete success. I define time-starved athlete success as:
Improving overall performance and arriving at key races ready to perform, without compromising your health, ability to perform in the workplace, or how you show up for family and friends.
This is important. Any athlete's performance is always going to be developed on a platform of health, and ultimately, success cannot be defined as ‘win at all costs’. Success is achieving great performance athletically while retaining and amplifying health and life performance. This might sound aspirational, but it is the backbone of what I consider success. You might smash a PR in a marathon, or qualify for the Hawaii IRONMAN, but if you are failing at work or nailing these goals at the expense of important relationships, the training prescription has been a failure.
It is also important to realize that great race performance, within the context of life, doesn’t require bullseye accuracy for the vast majority of age-group athletes. There is a reason elite athletes live a monastic existence, reducing life stressors as much as possible. Acknowledging this and finding a smart and structured program that can enable global performance readiness frees up the mind and the ability to ramp to races much more easily. Here are the key components to time-starved success:
Consistency: The journey never ends, but it must fit within life and not feel like an additional part-time job. While there is no need to be obsessively training with pinpoint focus, most of your success emerges from retaining structure (of some sort) over an entire year or more.
A Dynamic Program: The training must be flexible enough to align with what’s going on in life. Sometimes life flows and gets busy, meaning training load must easily be reduced. At other times, life commitments ease off, allowing a ramp-up in load. As long as the training is consistent, and specifically structured in progressive phases, then athletic progression occurs.
Building a Platform of Health: All training programs must include supporting elements of functional strength training, proper habits in fueling and nutrition, as well as great habits in sleep and recovery. A time-starved athlete benefits and thrives when they view ‘the program’ as a culmination of all of these elements.
A Long-Term Lens: Confidence and performance readiness builds when you appreciate the value and power of consistency. Instead of checking workouts off each week, count your training hours over the entire progressive season. If you average 10 weekly hours over 40 weeks, then you have 400 hours of training to prepare you for whatever race looms ahead. That's powerful and confidence building, and dissolves the distress you may feel from a single missed workout.
Ramp to Race: What is useful is a race-ready ramp to dial in sharpness and race-readiness over just a few weeks. If you hold a long-term lens, and are successful in establishing great fitness and freshness, then priming for a race can occur in just a few weeks. You cannot complete training hours that you don’t have in life, so this is the best opportunity to get ready without deconstructing a successful performance recipe.
How to Build Sustainable Performance
While refraining from diving into the specifics of individual training sessions, let me provide a framework that showcases how we build programming to suit time-starved athletes.
It starts with a focus on long-term consistency, along with a healthy dose of pragmatism. Each phase of training must build on the next, all framed within the context of life and a progression of training to deliver race-readiness in the time of year for key races. You cannot yield optimal return on effort if you decide to take long gaps of random and completely unstructured training.
Consistent commitment isn’t nearly as daunting as you might imagine. Many athletes think of structured training as very high commitment, and life dominating, hence unsustainable for a long period. It is no wonder that race builds are so popular. By shifting the lens and aiming to sneak fitness and performance readiness over many months, the process can feel highly sustainable while optimizing returns.
Let’s break down the phases:
Preparatory Phase: Often referred to as off-season or post-season, I view this as the underpinning of almost every athlete's success story. It is the most important thing you can do. Here is the surprise:
This phase is the lowest physical stress of the whole year
It allows for high flexibility and opportunity to integrate other activities and sports
The mission of this phase is not anchored on driving core fitness gains
So what’s the value here?This is the only part of the year where you have an opportunity to truly focus on technical improvements but also develop low-level cardiovascular and muscular conditioning to set up a robust platform of resilience. This is why we label it preparatory. Patient, low-emotional load training will set you up to optimize adaptations from upcoming hard work. This is a must if you want to reduce injuries and develop a chance to optimize training returns. You can imagine how this type of training would simply never occur in a race build.
Build Phase: Once you have evolved beyond this phase of preparation, it is time to develop the athlete you want to be. We want you to get fit and fast in this phase, but not specifically race-ready. This can be a tough but really fun phase of training. In broad and simple terms, these weeks’ main sessions are focused on the type of training far away from ‘race specific.’ We focus on:
Developing the size of your ‘engine’ (VO2max)
Speed work
Increasing your maximal steady state (often referred to as threshold)
Most athletes are excited about this type of training and are ready to work hard, as the prior months have carried much less physical and emotional load.
The bonus during this phase is that training hours can still remain quite low relative to the typically weekly capacity of hours relative to life. We are not chasing great muscular resilience and conditioning that emerge from longer endurance and race-specific training.
Race Specific Phase: As athletes enter the warmer months and race season, the emphasis of the typical training shifts toward more race-specific. We retain a lens on layering consistency and integration into life, understanding some weeks will allow more training accumulation while others will see less due to life factors. It isn’t rigid, but we begin to drive toward developing large conditioning and resilience that leads to race- readiness. This is a longer part of the annual program, but we retain pragmatism and look to leverage the longer days, as well as drier and warmer weather. In addition, this phase:
Integrates race-specific intensity
Develops specific skills associated with race performance (examples are sighting for swimming or terrain-management on the bike and run)
An enhanced focus on race fueling and hydration
And on it goes. But what about actually racing…
Getting Race Ready: Once into the race-specific training phase, you are executing a sustainable training program that fits into life, work, vacations, and travel. With this, you just need quick refinement and focus shift to step up and race well.
B Races: If you choose to do a race that is not designated as truly ‘key’ then we ask most athletes just to roll on training until the week of race week, then hit a race week prep, followed by a week of recuperation. This ‘detour’ of two weeks allows a good performance without a massive cognitive tax of distraction from overall athletic development.
A Races: Depending on the type of race distance, a truly important race for an athlete requires a shorter step-by-step build-up into the event to ensure the athlete is primed and ready for a great personal performance. This type of preparation, or build as we call it, can last 4 to 10 weeks. Unlike a classic standalone build, these builds don’t represent a rigid shift in approach, instead relying on the platform of the prior months. They are the ‘cherry’ on the cake, allowing the same style and rhythm of regular training, but simply driving toward a specific race day. Post-race, the athlete enjoys one to two weeks of recovery before sliding back on the program.
This system allows plenty of space for mental rejuvenation, seasonal recovery, a feeling of a ‘break’ from the rigors of training, but with none of the regression or risk of going random and going on a sabbatical from structure.
There is a reason our athletes stay emotionally fresh but also equipped to race well, with great predictability, all within a time-starved life.
If you want to excel without feeling like training is a burdensome chore, the ironic requirement is to commit year-round. Just commit the right way.
I am sure most of you read this through the lens of racing faster, but I feel it is appropriate to end with an important point. By adopting this year round consistent approach to your program, it will actually allow greater productivity and effectiveness across the rest of life. It is a healthier way to approach training, boosting energy and focus, while reducing injury risk. It will also increase capacity and effectiveness in life. You can leverage it as a backbone of stability, much of your training year still leaves plenty of capacity for adding family time and capacity to take on other hobbies and commitments.
Athletes often feel like they need to step away from the sport to give focus and time back to family and work, but the likelihood is that this need has been caused by approaching their training in the wrong way in the first place.
There is a better way.