Any coach is really just a time investment manager. This includes you, the self-coached athlete.
"Real Life You" gives "Coach You" only so many hours of training time to work with. First, time must be assigned to the more important areas of your life: family, work, personal interests, social stuff, etc. As your own Time Investment Manager, your job is to maximize the Return on Investment (ROI) of time spent training.
Over the last eight years of coaching age-group triathletes, we've found that all training time is not created equal. In the winter, training time is particularly more expensive:
- There is less time available as the days are shorter.
- It's cold, raining and/or snowing outside = indoor training = training time has a huge mental cost.
- You've been training all year, or at least a long time. You need to give your head a break before you ask it to commit to the work you'll expect of it next season.
- Most importantly, you've asked your family to sacrifice a great deal as you swim, bike or run for hours and hours and hours every week. You owe it to the people you care about to spend more time with them, and this means less time with your bike or running shoes.
While we completely understand that training is part of your lifestyle and you want to do what it takes to get faster year after year, "November-Thru-March You" owes it to your family and "April-thru-September You" to make that training as time-efficient as possible.
And the best part is you can still improve on a more focused training schedule. We suggest you achieve this ROI by making your training very low volume and very intense.
Fitness Is the Ability to Perform Work
The physics of you moving your body down the road or through the water, using your hands, your bike, or your feet is simply work. Work X applied to the mass of your body yields speed Y on the course. Your fitness is then simply an expression of your body's ability to perform work.
Your body is adapted to perform Work X, yielding Speed Y, but there's only one problem: It's lazy. If you only ask your body to do X, it will only ever be an X body. The purpose of training is simply to apply a load greater than X, forcing your body to adapt to this greater load. Over time, your body adapts and is able to perform Work greater than X, yielding Speed greater than Y.
You have three variables with which to manipulate this training load across the week:
- Frequency: The number of swim, bike, and run sessions you can schedule each week. This is mostly fixed by the constraints of your life (pool times, hours of daylight and road conditions in the winter) and is therefore not a useful manipulation tool to use.
- Volume: More flexible but much less so in the winter. See our arguments above for why we strongly suggest you keep your winter training volume to an absolute minimum.
- Intensity: How "hard" or fast you go during each session. This is infinitely more adjustable. For example, I can just run easy for an hour, or I can do endless variations of speed work, pace changes and other hard running. Two runs, both one hour, but dramatically different in the training load applied to the body.
Intensity is our preferred method for manipulating the training load of our athletes across the training week, particularly in the offseason, because frequency and volume are largely fixed. This is why we call it the "Outseason", eliminating the concept of "off" from our vocabulary.
Work is Speed Entering the Body
We combine these two principles above to create the cornerstone of our coaching: Work is Speed Entering the Body. It's on our t-shirts, jerseys, singlets, and more. Nowhere is it more important than during the Outseason. Our logic is this:
- Outseason training volume should be as low as possible for the reasons outlined above.
- But you still want to become a faster triathlete, right? If life keeps frequency and volume relatively fixed, then the only variable left is intensity. If my body has adapted to doing Work X while training 12 hours per week, but I now allow myself to train only six to seven hours per week, I need to dramatically increase the intensity in order to maintain or increase this adaptation.
- Therefore the Outseason is the perfect time to train less, and get dramatically faster, by training yourself to bike or run faster by...biking and running faster!
In the end, you earn the right to go faster on race day by making yourself faster in training. The most time efficient method to get faster is to go faster in training. And nowhere else is time efficiency more important than in the Outseason.
Our athletes realize that the Outseason is where they build the speed now, that's translated into faster race times next season, when we put far on top of this Outseason fast. As you read this, they have their noses on the grindstone, putting in the work to get faster, while training far less than their peers.