- Mornin', trainiacs.
See all this?
You see this, and this, and that, and the layer underneath?
It's winter, that means I'm either runnin' in the snow,
or I'm on the treadmill.
Kiss these nipples goodbye.
Not literally, that's gonna get this video blacklisted.
So, doin' a lot of talking to trainiacs,
those people on Team Traniac,
and it being like start of
everyone starting to get into some training this year,
they're like, "Well, what distance am I ready for?
"Am I ready for stepping up to a Half Ironman,
"or even an Ironman?"
And the answer, yes.
You can all step up to whatever distance you want,
but your experience might be a little subpar or awesome,
surprisingly so, depending on where you're at right now.
So after I go out onto the frozen tundra,
we're gonna discuss how you should know
what distance race you should do,
and how well you can expect to do in it.
Really procrastinating here.
(upbeat motivational music)
Backward!
(heavy breathing)
(groans) Out of shape, out of shape!
I'm ending the off season tomorrow,
today's the last off-season workout,
I figured why not,
why not just open up the legs a little bit?
And I did a 10K run
in about 50 minutes,
and I did kilometers eight and 10 at fast, fast pace.
Like a 4:05 per K, and then a 3:54 per K, in cold weather.
That hurt.
I was knocking like eight of those off in the race season.
Not knocking off eight right now!
Hooh, let me show you something.
As we're trying to fix my gut,
so that it can absorb nutrients a little bit better,
this is a very go-to recovery meal right here.
This is cold oatmeal.
Whatcha do with the oatmeal is, you heat it up,
and then cool it down, and then it becomes
a resistant starch.
Just good for all the things that live in your stomach,
the good ones that you want in there.
Feed them, kill off the bad ones
that cause stomach problems.
I'm a mess.
I'm gonna need a few minutes before we talk about
how we should figure out what distance you do.
Trust me, you don't need to do this, you don't.
(door opening)
All right, come on!
(keys jingling)
Good, good!
Grace, hey, quit dawdling!
Come on, Grace!
Petey's in here already, he's your best pal!
(door closing)
While the camera is in there recording,
I've literally been outside watching Gracie dawdle,
and choose where to take a pee for two minutes.
Go pee, Grace, go pee!
Every time, every time.
Go.
You gonna go?
See the thing is, she thinks that all the rabbit poo
that's in here, are treats,
so she doesn't wanna pee on her treats,
and they're everywhere.
This is not a joke.
Yeah, go pee!
It's okay.
(door opening)
All right, go, go!
(door closing)
Come on, go!
There you go, Pete, there you go.
Literally three minutes of camera rolling time.
Go ahead, lay down, that's your spot.
All right, so, as you are,
by the way, I love fizzy water,
and MTK does fizzy water reviews,
one of the most popular things on Instagram.
Literally dozens of people are watching them and commenting.
She rates that one quite high.
So as you're thinking about
what distance of triathlon to do,
you start thinking, are you capable of doing it?
Do you have enough time to train?
Do you have the endurance to do it?
Do you have basically the ability to go far?
Do you want to do it?
I think that there are three main things
that you need to think about as you start considering
whether you should be doing a certain distance or not.
And what this is for, is not for elite performance,
like the super amazing top 1% of 1%,
this is for the person who is kind of
just a little bit unsure of doing maybe their first race
or their first time at a new distance.
So the first thing that you need to think about is,
are you able to build up
to the distances required in training?
Now, what I recommend is for you to be able to
feel like you got over the finish line strong.
Not just finish, but actually enjoy the race,
because that's what we want.
We don't want you to limp over the finish line,
and not enjoy it, and then leave
because you didn't have a good time doing triathlon.
We want you to make sure that you can
get over that finish line feeling strong.
And I am a big believer in building up to an over distance.
This means that in your long endurance
swim, bike, run of the week,
that you are building up to a point where
six weeks before the event,
you are able to go for a sprint somewhere around
an eight to 10K run.
For the bike, around a 35 to a 40K bike.
For a sprint, somewhere around an eight to 10K run,
for the bike, around a 35 to a 40K bike.
For an olympic, somewhere around a 15 to 17K run,
around a 70 to 75 kilometer bike.
In a Half Ironman, we're talking
around a 22 to 24 kilometer run, and a 120 to 130K bike.
In an Ironman, we're talking about two runs in one day,
both of them totalling about two and a half hours,
and up to about a six-hour bike.
Now, here's how you know if you can do that.
You just start working your way back,
calculating from six weeks from the event,
taking 10% off each week,
and every third week is a rest week.
So you go like up 10%, up 10%, down to about 60%.
Up 10%, up 10%.
And you calculate it back, and if when you get to today,
it says, "All right, here's where you should be at today,"
and it's way off, then you know that
you're probably not ready to step up to that distance.
Now if you don't want to go through
all of that calculations, which is fairly manual,
you can go to triathlontaren.com/trainingplantemplate,
and that actually has just a really rough calculation of,
you put in how many workouts you wanna do each week
and what date approximately and distance your race is,
and it's gonna work its way back and suggest
kind of a breakdown of a mock week
and how long you need to go in those distances.
And when you do that calculation, it gets back to today,
and all of a sudden, holy smokes, that's way too long,
maybe you're not ready and you should wait until next year.
The next thing is just,
do you have the time to commit to it?
And like I say, we're talking about
getting you over the finish line feeling strong.
For a sprint, I'd say the minimum cost
to doing business in a sprint,
just to get over the finish line feeling strong,
we're not talking about time here, but just have a good day,
is about four workouts a week.
They've gotta be the right workouts though,
and when you're doing that few workouts,
we're talking mostly about endurance workouts, longer,
with some intensity sprinkled in there.
For olympic, we're talking more like
four to six workouts a week.
Same sort of idea, focusing on the endurance
with some intensity sprinkled in there.
And in that case, again we're talking about the same thing,
mostly endurance workouts
with a little bit of intensity sprinkled in there
when you get closer to the race,
so that you get two birds stoned at one time.
Same types of workouts for a Half Ironman,
but we're talking somewhere around
six to eight workouts a week, at least.
And for a full Ironman,
we're talking somewhere in the neighborhood of
about 11 to 14 workouts a week.
You just need a heck of a lot more volume.
So if doing that is like, whoah, way crazy for ya,
you're probably not ready to step up to that next distance
and get across the finish line with a good experience.
And the third thing that you need to think about is
do you want to, does it excite you?
That's the thing that I think
is very overlooked in triathlon.
There's so much pressure to go out
and do Half Ironmans and Ironmans,
and try to qualify for this, and try to qualify for that,
but in a lot of cases, people just aren't excited
at the idea of say adding in a whole bunch of training
at a time that's really busy in their life.
Or, maybe they wanna focus on speed,
or maybe you wanna focus on marathoning,
and the idea of also focusing on something super long
is too daunting, so you need to go down
to a shorter distance.
Think about what excites you, what you're curious about,
what gets you up in the morning, and gets you motivated.
Because when you start layering on
longer and longer distances,
it ends up getting tough to stay motivated.
So you wanna have every last bit of motivation, excitement,
that you can, to keep you going
and get ya up in the morning.
And if you're just doing a distance
because you think you have to, don't.
Don't feel like you have to.
Just enjoy triathlon.
So, with that said,
I recommend going to triathlontaren.com/trainingplantemplate
just to get you started, if this is your first time
doing some training at longer distances
to get your head wrapped around, can you do it?
Think about, do you have the time
to get in the required workouts?
And think about what excites you.
And if you really want to get some awesome gear
and look good, go to gear.triathlontaren.com.
Link is in the description below.
You can get yourself a hoodie,
you can get yourself some training tanks,
you can get yourself a hat,
you can get yourself a morning trainiacs mug.
We don't make a ton off of that, like just a couple bucks,
but I thought it'd be kinda cool,
to remind people to eat, sleep, trainiac, repeat.
Look at these two lumps, though.
Contributing nothing to society.
Yeah, you caused me to delay filming this video
for three minutes!
You!
Just blend in with the couch, don't ya?
Have some contrast, for goodness sakes.
Look at Pete, he's all about the contrast.
All right, trainiacs, go out there, enjoy your training.
Later.