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How to choose your triathlon

This is an excerpt from Unlocking Triathlon by Alison Freeman.

CHOOSING YOUR RACE

Choosing your triathlon is so exciting. It’s the embodiment of your Big, Scary, Awesome Goal and your “no-turning-back-now” moment. I want you to be excited when you click “Sign Up” and officially commit to your race. I also want you to go in with eyes wide open, fully aware not only of what you will do between the start and finish lines but also of what it will take to arrive at the start line prepared and confident.

Because when you sign up for a triathlon, or any endurance event, you are committing to more than just the race. You are also committing to the training required to prepare for the race. The race is one day. One possibly arduous, challenging day, but one day and a discrete number of miles and minutes (or, more appropriately, hours). You do need to think about that day and whether the date and event distance and venue location and all the additional details will work for you. But you also need to think about all the weeks before the race, when you’ll be training alongside all the other things you normally do in a week, and ensure that those weeks are compatible with the training necessary to prepare for your chosen race.

So, let’s approach this race-choosing exercise with intention. We’ll start by selecting your race distance, ensuring the required training fits into your life along with your other commitments and activities. Then we’ll determine the optimal months in which to schedule that training. With that timing in mind, we’ll find a race that meets these criteria while considering factors such as race location and course details. Before you officially sign up, we’ll make sure you have buy-in from your people to pave the way for support instead of friction. And we’ll wrap up the exercise by discussing goals for your training season and your race. (If you already selected your race, that’s okay! This exercise will highlight where your chosen race aligns with your life and give you advance notice of possible challenges.)

Selecting Your Race Distance

I already said this, but it bears repeating: When choosing your race, what you are actually choosing is the training. If you love the idea of the accomplishment but cannot – or just don’t want to – squeeze all the swim-bike-run hours into your week, then it becomes really hard to make the idea of that accomplishment a reality. As a coach, my primary goal is to set you up for success. I do that in part by ensuring that the training you commit to is training you can and want to do. So, let’s make sure you understand the training required for each race distance, compare those hours to the hours you have available in your life, do a quick gut-check on the commitment, and then make your race distance selection official.

Understanding the Training Commitment

The number of workouts you’ll complete each week and the number of hours those workouts will consume stem directly from your race distance. Race distance, number of workouts, and training hours are tied together for two distinct and important reasons. First, you’ll need to individually prepare for the three sport-specific distances, achieving the fitness in each sport to cover – or often exceed – that sport’s race distance in a single workout. For example, to cover a 25-mile (40-km) bike leg after you swim and before you run, you’ll want to prepare so that you can cover 25 miles (40 km), and more typically 28 to 30 miles (45-50 km), in a single training session. Second, you’ll want your overall peak, or maximum, weekly training volume to appropriately support the total time you’ll be on the race course during your event. In other words, you want your peak weekly training volume to exceed, typically by an order of magnitude, the amount of time it’ll take to complete your triathlon.

Table 2.1 shows the number of workouts and weekly training volume, and table 2.2 shows the longest swim, bike, and run workouts that the average triathlete will complete when preparing for each of the four standard triathlon race distances. A few factors can push an athlete’s training schedule outside the ranges shown in table 2.1. For example, a faster athlete might complete their training in fewer hours, or a more competitive athlete might add workouts or increase their training volume to further enhance their fitness. Most athletes, though, along with the training plans provided in part V of this book, will follow these training patterns and fall within these ranges.

As you wrap your head around these numbers, we also need to factor in time spent outside of swim-bike-run training. Most athletes will benefit from incorporating strength training sessions into their week, so that’s another 0.75 to 1.5 hours. Then there’s driving to and from the pool and possibly to the starting point of your bikes or runs, plus extra laundry and lots of snacks and recovery time on the couch during those bigger training weeks. Which is all to say: You need to round up, padding those weekly training volume ranges by at least 1.5 hours and potentially several times that.

More Excerpts From Unlocking Triathlon

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