You may have read my last blog which was about ‘The Dreaded Injury”. If you did then this next blog follows on quite nicely from it. If you didn’t, not to worry, as this post is totally applicable on its own, but I do recommend going back and reading my last post.
One of the good things about the sport of Triathlon is simply that it involves 3 sports in one, and this point alone is good for multiple reasons. The point I would like to highlight is cross training. Whilst recovering from my Achilles injury I was forced to take some time completely off running. For any triathlete, especially those that really enjoy running this is extremely tough news to deal with. This brings me to my point; I still had swimming and cycling to train. A little juggling of programme changes and I had 2 sports to put all my energy into. For many sports an injury can mean having to take time completely away from your sport, but because of the cross training ability in triathlon, this is not always the case.
Becoming the best triathlete you can be is a lot harder than just giving 110%. It’s a fine art. Balancing three disciplines, getting adequate recovery, nutrition etc. For many this is where a coach is invaluable. They can help you take out the guessing of when to space key workouts, how many recovery days you need and how to generally structure your short and long term programme.
This idea of cross training virtually never leaves a triathlete with nothing to do (remember recovery is doing something) and so being able to train across multiple sports is beneficial in the injury setting, it can also be a double edge sword, that leads us to getting injured.
To be a top triathlete, you would like to swim like a swimmer, cycle like a cyclist and run like runner. Many world-class triathletes can hold their own against a world-class athletes in a single discipline. But we can’t train a full swimmers programme, a full cyclist programme and then a full runners program… trust me have tried. We must take into account the significant cross training benefit in order to be a triathlete and allow ourselves the right balance in training and recovery. For many age group athletes, I believe that means cutting out a lot of junk miles they do not realize they are doing. I’ve seen many age groupers that are just as fit as me, but yet they never go anywhere near as fast. I believe this is partly to do with quantity over quality.
Thus my next point I am making here is Quality. We are triathletes, we train a lot! Understand that we are getting gains from cross training and reduce some of those junk miles, and put quality into it. Instead of a long steady-hard swim set, put in some max/threshold every now and again. I can hear people already saying “but im not a sprinter”. Correct, you are not, but doing one or 2 quality speed sessions a week in each discipline does not make you a sprinter, but what it might do is increase you max speed ability, raise your natural comfortable speed, and raise your threshold pace. It also gives the body and mind a different stimulus to hours and hours of the same thing.
Give it a go. Change one session in your swim, one in your cycling, one in your run from a medium long format at a steady pace, to a short sharp intense session. Space them out across the week, allowing recovery time, and it might just spark you into life and out of the funk you may be in and send you towards PBs.
I realize this may be a different angle created by thinking about cross training than you may be familiar with, but that’s why I am writing this. It may scare triathletes to get out of that regular rhythm they are used to, but that’s not a bad thing. New Stimulus can do great things. Be adventurous. Get stuck into it.
