On the limit

A fun morning of coaching with the Triathlon Team from Front Runner Sports. A good solid morning of work with 8 x 3 minutes bike intervals done at FTP. A short but tough Threshold session.

The model that Front Runner uses for triathlon training is a fairly simple one, however, being simple doesn't make it ineffective. The basic model that Front Runner uses for the three triathlon legs is three sessions of each leg a week. Each of those sessions is specifically targeted, one of long steady stuff to build endurance, one of tempo work to on your aerobic strength and one threshold session to build your aerobic capacity. This morning's session was all about the Threshold part.

As mentioned above the idea behind concentrating on Threshold once a week it to help build the aerobic capacity. The way I think of this is that these sessions are aimed at making your engine bigger. I explain it like this to our athletes. The rule of thumb is that you can go at about 70 to 85% of your threshold on the bike in a Half Ironman and still run. In an full Ironman that figure is more like 65 to 80%. Typically the faster you are the higher percentage FTP you are able to hold. but the idea is still the same, if you go flat out you won't be running.

If you want to go faster in your race you have a couple of choices. You could certainly ride harder, but if you do there is a very real chance that you will have a slow run, or perhaps a long walk. Go watch an Ironman it is pretty obvious the people who have done this. The other option is that you increase your threshold. 70% of 250W is 175W, whereas 70% of 300W is 210W. More watts means you will go faster. Simple.

This increase is what the Threshold session is all about. A lot of the research has shown that in order to increase your Threshold you need to work at, or slightly above it. One thing we are constantly telling people in these sessions is that you don't want to be smashing your Threshold out of the park in these sessions, the point isn't to be going flat out. Rarely in Ironman training is the point to go flat out. Rather the point of a Threshold session is to be working just outside the limit of your comfort zone. You will certainly be working very hard, but you should be about at your limit, not over it.

This is the approach we use for each of the triathlon disciplines, one per for each sport. For long course athlete's more than one threshold session per week tends to be overkill, plus for most athletes more than one per week is unsustainable as they require quite a bit of recovery time.

Tough work for sure, but one that we consider is a fundamental building block of any successful triathlon preparation.