Sustainable Triathlon Training: Build Your Week Without Burning Out

In the first five years of my professional triathlon career, I still held a day job, as many developing pros do. Triathlon, even for successful elites, rarely pays well enough to cover its own expenses, let alone the expenses of a normal adult life. 

I was newly engaged and building a life in a new city on the West Coast, thousands of miles away from the support of my family and the friends with whom I’d grown up. As many of you do, I woke up early, shoehorned workouts into tight spaces (my students would see me rushing back to class, hair wet and reeking of chlorine, and ask “do you actually enjoy that?”). I’d then finish the day juggling another workout, a mountain of papers to correct, and pedestrian concerns like, you know, feeding myself and my fiancé, along with making sure she and I were getting the time necessary to continue building a life together.

Whether you’re new to triathlon (or any endurance sport) or are an experienced multisport athlete, you’ve discovered how time-intensive training is. Poor time management not only leads you to sickness, injury, or burnout in your sport, but also negatively impacts your primary relationships, family, and career. 

But managing time as a multisport athlete is easier said than done. Here’s how to develop a sustainable plan that allows you to achieve your goals without torpedoing the other aspects of your life. 

But first! A meeting.

Your Goals Impact More Than Just You

If your goals are lofty, such as qualifying for a major race like Kona, you’re about to embark upon a years-long journey that will take up the focus of a part-time job and cost you tens of thousands of dollars. 

No way to sugarcoat that. 

If you have a partner, a family, or a job (or all three), you need to get your shareholders on board: spouse, children, colleagues, and supervisor are all possible allies and possible victims in your endeavor. You must meet with them before making a decision that will affect the next few years of their lives. 

Properly done, these vital members in your life can support you on your journey. Incorrectly done, you will spread resentment and mayhem everywhere you go, which does not bode well for your long-term triathlon career, marriage/partnership, or job.

On the other hand, if you’re simply starting out, your time commitment to the sport might be lighter, but there’s always the possibility that this fascination of yours will bloom into full-blown obsession. 

Setting expectations with your shareholders early in your multisport journey lets your family know that this is a priority to you and that it’s important to you that they’re involved. 

Involve Your Inner Circle in the Process

Try to remember that your family wants to be engaged with the things that are important to you. If you begin the process believing this whole thing is a burden to them, you might try to shield them from the stress, but this approach almost surely backfires. Instead of feeling shielded, they might feel excluded and wonder why you’re creating distance between the two of you. 

Unexplained distance is a kryptonite to a relationship, so put on your big-person pants and have a tough conversation. Explain to them the scope of the project and that you want this to be easy on them, but you’d also like them to be a part of the journey. Do the same with your children, colleagues, and supervisor. 

Map It Out: Life, Work, Love, and Training

Build an alliance—this is a crucial step that will help later. But during that first meeting with your partner is when you’re going to bang out your training week. Draw a table that looks like this:

Doing your best try to fill in regular family commitments: who drives the kids, who picks them up, who’s on duty for midnight child duty, what FUN are you going to have together, and identify  when that all needs to happen. Repeat the process with both of your work commitments, and then make sure you figure out time for the two of you to connect (there are way too many Iron Widows and Iron Widowers out there and it’s a bad look).

Finally, you will have the leftover time for training. This is a great moment to use a trick often reserved for budgeting: whatever leftover time you came up with, subtract about 10%. So if you think you have 12 hours to train a week, it’s probably more like 10:45 or so. 

Now that’s out of the way, let’s build your week!

How to Structure a Balanced Training Week

When we talk about building a week, it can be easy to fall into explaining everything about training and exercise physiology. We don’t have the space for that here (and TrainingPeaks offers reams of content on this topic), so forgive some bigger-picture principles that will help us build our weeks.

To progress as an endurance athlete, you need to balance three significant physical pillars: speed, fatigue resistance endurance, and recovery. 

Speed training raises your performance ceiling, giving you more gears. Fatigue resistance trains your body to maintain those different gears for longer, and recovery gives your body the break it needs to actually absorb the training stimulus and adapt. 

Here are the principles that will help you build your effective week:

• Speed when you are fresh, fatigue resistance when you’re…fatigued. Recovery as needed to be fresh for speed work.
• Training cycles, whether micro (the week), meso (a collection of weeks), or macro (months or seasons) work on a stress and unload pattern if we’re adhering to the principles of progressive overload and supercompensation.
• If we want a week to go well, we need days that add stress and days that remove stress. Triathlon makes this both more complicated AND easier because we have four different ways to stress our bodies: swim, bike, run, and strength. 
• Heavy lifting makes it hard to achieve speed in the 48 hours that follow a heavy session, and lifting should always be the last thing we do in a day, since if we lift first and then do an endurance session, we wipe away a lot of the strength signaling.
• Weekends are often more fatigue-resistant because you have more time

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Swim Training Is Its Own Track

Swimming helps us unload the legs but continue central adaptations (heart/lungs/nervous), while loading the peripheral systems of our chest, back, and shoulders, so you might want to think about your swim program as working in parallel with your bike/run training, rather than as another piece of the bike/run puzzle. 

You should swim between 3-6 times per week, depending on your goals and the level of your competition. Cycling and running will make you tired for swimming, so prepare your pool times to suffer as bike and run volume pick up, but the best way to think about the swim is as a separate developmental track. Space out your swims as evenly as possible and make sure that the minimum week contains:

If you have more time available to swim or swimming is a weakness, you can add up to three more sessions, prioritizing endurance, then threshold, then speed

Required: one technique session (if your technique is already strong, this can be a combination technique/endurance session)

Required: one longer endurance/Z2 session

Required: one session focusing on threshold intensity.

Building Your Workout Week

1. Start With Your Long Run 

This is the workout most likely to injure you. If you are a stronger cyclist than runner, then put the long run before your long ride because you want to be fresher when you’re doing the sports you are less good at.

Since the long run is more endurance and HR-focused, it can be on the day after a heavy lift. Often due to time, it makes sense to do long runs on the weekend.

If you have a traditional weekend, the long ride goes on the other day.

If you’re a stronger runner than cyclist, then flip-flop the above advice. Let’s add your long run and ride to the plan, which now has sub-sections for each sport:

2. Plan Recovery and Swim Days

Next, after that pair of longer days, you should have an easier day to unload the legs. This day might be an off day if you are brand new to the sport, but if you’ve been training for a few years, it could be as much as an endurance swim, recovery ride, and mobility/bodyweight strength and conditioning session.

This day should build you up rather than break you down. While we’re at it, let’s add our swims to the week, following the guidance from the “Principles” section.

3. Add Speed

After our easy day, you’ll likely feel fresh and ready to add in speed. If speed on the run is what you’re working on, let’s add a speed session to Tuesday, ideally early in the day so we can do another sport that evening.

4. Follow Speed Days With Fatigue Resistance Training

That speed day is ideally followed by a fatigue resistance session in the other sport that wasn’t speed-focused on the speed day, so maybe that’s a tempo run, a sweet spot/threshold bike session, long hill repeats, etc. 

If you have the availability, another easy/moderate day in the speed sport from yesterday can go on this day.

5. Moderate/Z2 Training Days

At this point you should only have two days left to program, You need one more “moderate” day this week, but this day can also be just a Z2 day. 

If you’re already swimming on this day pick the sport that needs the most endurance work, either bike or run, and add that. If you’re not swimming this day, both your sessions are Z2 sessions.

6. Include Final Day of Recovery/Rest

The final day of the week should be another day that unloads your legs, so this can be a long swim, a lift (remember that since the weekend is fatigue resistance, heavy lifting is OK today), and maybe a recovery ride or easy run.

Color Code Your Schedule

I find that color coding your week helps check your work, making sure nothing gets left behind. You can use the following rubric as a guide:

1. Speed and heavy lifting = red
2. Fatigue resistance and your “long” sessions = yellow
3. Everything else = green

At least half your week should be green. You can have up to two red boxes per week, but three is acceptable if you’re in a heavy lifting period. 

For this athlete, I might add some speed to the long run on Saturday, making that session red instead of yellow. The rest of your sessions can be fatigue resistance, but you should be looking at a lot of green (not unlike how your TrainingPeaks calendar should look most of the time).

Consistency Over Chaos

Elite coaches everywhere agree: moderate volume weeks that the athlete can achieve consistently win out every time over a “boom and bust” pattern of training.

The boom and bust pattern never works, and it often makes your life more unmanageable. Unfortunately, this type of athlete usually always doubles down, beginning a slide towards divorce/separation, career trouble, family estrangement, or chronic fatigue and injury.

Seems extreme? Believe me, I have seen all of the above in triathlon, and I do not want that for you.

Finally, please remember that what is listed above is meant as a way to illustrate the principles in this article and show you how you might approach it yourself. The examples are not intended as coaching guidelines or what I prescribe for every athlete. 

Do your best to see through to the principles herein, rather than the individual sessions. In my experience, endurance athletes on the internet tend to miss the forest for the trees.

Happy planning, you Type A athlete!