- [Narrator] This here is how Pat
does the training programs for me.
Tuesday and Thursday we've got my group bike rides for fun.
Pretty exciting stuff.
Morning trainiacs.
Today: day one of training for Ironman Austin 70.3
on October 29th.
Let's talk about how to start a training plan.
Shall we?
What do you say?
It's kind of foggy in here today.
It is hot!
Trainiacs, Pat game me the heads up
that the coaching plan is all set.
Kind of gave me a skeleton of it last week,
but now it's ready to go.
Let's take a look at this.
It's a good indication of how you should be starting
a triathlon training program.
This here is how Pat does the training programs for me.
He lays out every single workout,
or two workouts, or three workouts,
every single day.
Then on the side every day I have to punch in
my motivation level,
my level of recovery,
my level of sleep,
how much sleep I got,
and how the workouts went.
What Pat does is he takes a look
and he says all things perfect.
If they go super well, no hitches,
this is the training program
that Taren should be going towards.
Then he'll monitor my levels of motivation,
recovery, sleep, and workout.
We'll also be talking back and forth.
I'll be saying like dude,
the commuting in -30 weather in Winnipeg is killing me.
Or I'm really busy and stressed out at work,
so that's taking a toll on me.
Or I'm just not jiving.
Something isn't feeling good.
From that, he'll take say week number one here,
then week number two will be adjusted.
He does the training plans one week on,
two weeks on,
and then third week is a rest.
It's kind of similar to what he set up
at triathlontaren.com/coaching
that you've got two weeks of work,
one week of rest.
You've got to monitor your motivation,
your recovery, and your sleep.
The difference is that every single week
Pat is monitoring and tweaking
what's happening going forward,
whereas in your case
that's just kind of left up to you.
Let's talk about where we start.
race season summer.
What he set up for me here is all of the workouts
that I need to do in a week.
We have a swim, a tempo workout Monday morning.
Then a pool and maintenance routine shortly after.
I'm gonna be at Pan AM pool
somewhere around 1.5 to 2 hours.
The circuit maintenance routine
is very, very light.
Just keeping my body activated.
Tuesday and Thursday we've got my group bike rides for fun,
'cause I want to stay motivated.
It'll help for the shorter race
that I'm gonna do in August.
When I do an Olympic just for kicks here locally.
On Wednesday I've got a swim and a pool maintenance routine
same sort of thing as Monday.
I find that little bits of maintenance,
little bits of strength and core and stability movements
help keep me injury free.
But nothing is like big strength movements
because I'm right in race season.
You don't want to be doing a ton of big strength movements
right in race season.
It's just too much for your body to handle
to be getting better at an endurance sport and stronger.
So what we want to do is maintain the strength
and keep the muscles activated,
but not necessarily build them up.
Friday is gonna be an open water swim.
No other workouts.
Then the key workouts are Saturday.
We're gonna have an endurance ride of two to three hours.
We're gonna start building up my endurance.
That 90K on the bike and a half Ironman is like no big deal.
Easy.
Then a small transition run of four to six K
zone two really light afterwards.
Sunday is an endurance run progressing
from eight miles to 10 miles,
then we'll start building that up.
And an open water swim,
or just a swim in the pool if I can.
Now here's the thing to notice about this
for where you start in the first few weeks
of a triathlon plan.
Yes, I could go out and absolutely start smashing myself
doing key workouts,
doing time trials,
doing track workouts,
just having murderous workouts
but you don't need to.
If you're constantly at say,
a level of right up here with the intensity and the workload
you're just gonna kind of get stale.
What you want to do,
even over the course of 3.5 or 4 months,
is slowly build up,
because that's gonna keep you injury free,
and keep you from getting burned out.
You start doing more and more key workouts
as you get close to a workout,
because you can't keep that kind of level of workload going
for very long.
That's gonna be about a 12.5 hour training week
with maybe two to three hours of it being intense.
Let's go back and relate this to what I was doing
right in the thick of things.
Training for Camp Peche.
This is my week about three weeks out from Camp Peche.
Right in critical time.
It was a similar sort of structure that I had
three swims, Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
I had bikes Tuesday Thursday.
I had another run Tuesday.
I was starting some heat training.
I was still doing all that maintenance routine.
The intensity and the workload was way different.
The swim Monday, Wednesday, Friday,
basically the same.
What's different is here I had three runs
that were fairly intense,
from 45 to 60 minutes on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday,
instead of just Tuesday right now.
However, we didn't start with 2.5 hours of intense running.
We started with one half hour.
We built up to that.
I could tell that when we had built up to that,
and I was right at max volume,
my body was just hanging on for dear life
because we had maxed out.
If I had done that for all of the three months
leading up to it,
I would've burnt myself out.
Now in addition to that,
the morning bikes on Tuesday and Thursday
grew from about 50 minutes long all the way up to 1.5 long.
The weekend ride was mandated at at least
two to 2.5 hours of really purposeful runs, no, bikes.
You see here instead of the weekend endurance run
being eight to 10 miles,
here we're like 14 to 15 miles.
Now the whole thing about starting
a triathlon training program
is that it's not like you start and bam,
you're on the pain train right away.
It's more like you gotta start and make sure
that you're building a base of fitness,
to accept that high intense huge volume that happens
in say the three to six weeks before a race.
That's when you're getting really fit.
Looking back at Mark Allen back in the 80s
and early 90s when he was winning all of his Ironmans,
he said that he would train from January
until the middle of August,
basically just to get himself ready for Ironman training.
Then he would do six weeks of huge volume,
huge intensity.
But that six-month buildup is to build a base of fitness,
a base of strength,
make sure that your cardiovascular system
is firing on all cylinders,
but not just constantly punish, punish, punish, punish.
Because your body can't peak that many times.
Start off your triathlon training
with making sure that you're building fitness,
not murdering yourself right away.
That'll come.
We've got some excellent triathlontaren.com/coaching
programs that can take you on that building journey.
(electronic music)
So trainiacs that is day one
of triathlon training for IM Austin 70.3.
I gotta say that I'm a fair bit excited
about seeing how my body reacts to this training plan
as opposed to last training plan for Camp Peche.
Because coming into Camp Peche,
I had a fairly big base of fitness,
but not a base of fitness
under coach Pat's triathlon training program.
Now I've got an entire half a year,
eight months under Pat's tutelage.
Pretty exciting stuff.
I'm not stuck inside training in the winter
for a hot weather race.
Who thought of that?
Day one, done!