I made a point about the importance of establishing good habits while training for a triathlon event. This is so for athletes of all abilities. Work, family and social demands on your time are all enhanced by your efforts to identify and commit to dedicated training time each day. With this approach, the busier your life, the better your training. In training for endurance competitions, I respect the three core principles of the Training Triangle: Endurance, Strength and Speed.

Endurance is built over time, and distance is the most critical component of your training plan.

Strength training is often overlooked in building endurance. Continued attention to core strength, development of lean muscle mass, functional strength/movement and proper muscle recruitment patterns go a long way towards keeping you healthy and injury free. The more coordinated your movements are, the more efficient your energy expenditures will be.

Speed is efficiency; as such it is often the least understood principle in terms of development. The majority of us share a bias toward “more is better” and equate the value of training with pain/sweat equity. Speed is directly proportional to the perfect execution of a specific movement. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

How to put (and balance) these three components together to meet the needs of a race distance is a question that everyone struggles with. In building a training plan, I look at race distances and the energy systems required to sustain the effort. Understanding the terms and relationships of energy systems management, heart rate and training zones can be overwhelming. I have put together a training intensity table that lines up energy systems with heart rate values, intensity levels and race distances in order to clarify common terms.

In the next article, we’ll put together a training template based on race distance requirements.

Happy training!