What should do you do over winter? Six months or so is a long time, and while you don’t necessarily want to maintain the same intensity of training you had during the season, this isn’t a time to just noodle around in training since you can make big gains on your path to next season. Think of it as pre-training before you get into focused race-specific sessions later in the year.
Winter is often regarded as the base period of training, building a big, wide platform of fitness upon which to shape great race performances, which is true. Base training can mean many things to different people, and in my book it is not just about doing easy, steady state sessions. Rather, base training is where you build multiple aspects of fitness – speed, power, strength endurance, speed endurance, etc. – working on your weaknesses while also enhancing your strengths.
Base training is where you work on your all round fitness, with the specific emphasis varying depending on the individual characteristics of the athlete. Base training is also where you can set mini-goals as a means of measuring your progress, as well as developing skills to help you during the actual race season. Here are some things you can include in your base period:
Sprint and Short Course
Triathletes tend to be endurance machines by default, since triathlons are an aerobic sport. However, sprint and short course racing requires good capabilities in speed, power and speed endurance, as well as associated skills in executing these performances. So these athletes should spend time working on developing speed, and the two components of speed – biomechanical skill and fitness. The first comes from just practicing moving fast in a relaxed way against low resistance – small gear on a bike, and slight downhill on the run. You want to be able to move smoothly at speed, which is a practiced skill, and precedes the fitness to be able to go fast. You build the fitness starting with short efforts (e.g. 20-30sec with 2-3 x recovery). Holding good form is essential. Don’t go for any longer or harder than you can hold good form for. Once you can, then introduce hills, starting with short hills – the pathway to power development!
Speed endurance takes your basic speed and extends it out to three-to-four minute efforts, with equal recovery. Do these at close to maximum effort you can sustain across a total of 15-to-25 minutes cumulative interval time in a single session. These are gut-busting, high-octane sessions, but deliver great results over four-to-six weeks.
Good goals for sprint and short-course athletes to aim for are over 10-to-20-kilometre bike TTs, 5-to-10-kilometre running races, and short duathlons which you can afford to do several of. These allow you to test your fitness, assess your development and practice race skills. It’s OK, race fast during winter and aim for PBs, but remember when your goal season is.
Long Course and Ironman
Many of the winter goals for sprint and short course athletes also apply to long course and Iron-distance athletes, but in smaller amounts. For these athletes, the winter is the time to develop strength endurance and lactate threshold, and should follow on from speed, power and speed endurance – the linear order allows for good progression of fitness.
Strength endurance is sustained strength training for endurance athletes. The practical implementation of this for cycling is big-gear sessions, and for running is longer uphill efforts. On the bike, efforts of five-to-20 minutes are most effective, at cadence of 60-to-70rpm. The effort level is key: do these at close to Olympic-distance triathlon effort (or power), but note that this is a muscular-endurance effort and not an anaerobic effort. You want to feel muscle burn, not oxygen debt! For running the principle is similar, with efforts in four-to-10 minute range, ideally up a gradual hill of perhaps four-to-six percent, not so steep it is a struggle to run up. Recovery is easy, between about 50-to-100 percent of interval time.
The other aspect to focus on is lactate threshold work, which equates to about one-hour TT effort/power on bike, and for running your maximum average pace for a 45-minute effort. Once that is established, the sessions are based on short-recovery intervals with work:rest ratio of about 4-to-5:1. On the bike you might do 30-to-40 minutes of intervals in lengths of five-to-20 minutes, and on run 20-to-25 minutes of intervals in lengths of four-to-eight minutes. These are sustained sessions, and require concentration. Good test events include 20-to-40-kilometre bike TT and up to half-marathon running races.
Of course, these are just snippets of what might be included in a well-planned program, but hopefully provide some ideas of what you can include in your training over winter so you make some positive progress before you even focus on your racing season.
