| BOOKS The best overall guide is Joe Friel's "The Triathlete's Training Bible" and for the longer distances another of his called "Going Long" |
| Training |
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| Training for triathlon is a complicated juggling of schedules. When to do your long swim or your hard run. How to recover properly before the next hard or long session. How to fit all this around an already busy career and family life. Most guides are difficult to follow. Basically because they are designed for those who can focus 100% of their time and energy on them. They usually use methods for each discipline that come from the individual sports of Swimming, Cycling and Running and rarely address the cross-training effects that come from doing all 3 sports together. For instance, it's almost impossible to put 3 distance workouts, 3 tempo workouts and 3 speed workouts into a week without the risk of overtraining and burning out, but if you adopt a big-picture approach to your training, you can achieve the desired training effect with only perhaps 2 tempo workouts and 1 speed workout and have time to recover in-between. |
| Periodisation |
| The most important element in the Big-Picture approach is the yearly plan. No really satisfying gains in performance can be achieved without it. It is also especially true in triathlon and endurance sports that you should look at an even bigger picture of a few years and set long-term goals because you can't increase the volume (overall amount) of training you do by too much or you risk injury and burn-out. If you're just starting out, it will take at least 3 years before you can train enough to be able to tackle the longer distance races, but the shorter distance races should provide you with ample challenge and improvement opportunities. Don't get me wrong, it is fun! I get immense pleasure out of training and racing as do most of my friends who take part and many argue that too much structure makes it less enjoyable. If you just want to swim, bike and run whenever you feel like it that's fine too, but you won't ever enjoy peak fitness or achieve the best of your potential without a plan. |