Today I want to talk about some ideas to improve your triathlon running. That being very different to fun running, you know, different sports. And the sort of things that I tend to apply to, let’s say a majority of people who come to me for training, you know, they’re limited in a particular way, so some of these ideas are what I apply to them. They might run a little bit contrary to what you read or hear or even do yourself.
So, look before I talk about training particulars, and this will be a two-part vlog I think, so I’ll give three ideas here and then probably give three or more maybe. Before we talk about training, we want to consider, as I’ve said before, our swim fitness and our bike fitness. ‘Cause they’re gonna be heavy influences on what we carry in terms of fatigue into the run and also your pacing, your bike pacing. It doesn’t matter how run fit you are, if you stuff your bike pacing up, nothing’s gonna save you there. So, keep that frame of mind.
So let’s get on to it. Talk about training. Number one, the big one: consistency. I say it all the time. You just keep hitting the nail on the head, week in week out, these people that have big holes and then expect performance, three words: ‘having yourself on’. Just a fact! So you want a minimum three runs a week, and any extra’s a bonus, you wanna space them appropriately. So say, let’s say it’s Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday or Monday, Wednesday Friday, or Wednesday, Friday, Sunday. Not where you’ve got a three day and more than three-day gap more than once a week. So you wouldn’t run Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, or Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, because you’ve got that big hole after your third run until your next run. It’s not optimal for hanging on to your fitness and your adaptation. So, really do your best to avoid that. Keep touching on it and keeping that aerobic cup topped up.
I’ve said it many times to you guys. Your basic endurance pace…don’t go into that grey area, that steady sort of area, or brisk, it’s in the middle and it’s too hard to optimally train your basic endurance and fat metabolism, and not hard enough to start to improve your top-end. So obviously you know, I steer my athletes to where that pace actually is, and the paces they need to hit. But yeh, really important, otherwise you end up with legs that never really recover for the key days as well. I’m not saying to trot around at regeneration pace for everything, absolutely not. But when you do your basic work, it needs to be at an appropriate pace that’s not in that grey area. Yea, really important.
Next, I would look to insert a tempo run into the program for people. I’m not talking threshold, I’m talking tempo. For a lot of people we’re probably talking 25-30 seconds a kilometre slower than their one hour time trial speed. This is an approximation. So it’s high-end, quality aerobic running, but sub- threshold, not threshold, work. I’m really big on this, the polarised types would probably call that, you know, the no-zone, to me it’s the go-zone. And I’m gonna load an athlete with some of that sort of work before in most cases I’m giving classic training closer to the threshold itself. Without a decent enough foundation of this tempo stuff behind you, I tend to find that their response to any threshold work later on isn’t as good anyway. So, yeh it’s just imperative in terms of developing aerobic efficiency, economy, and as I said getting a better response to the faster stuff later on, if and when it’s time to do it for a particular athlete. So there’s three ideas there, I’ll touch on some other things you might want to integrate in the next one.