Shownotes

LINKS & RESOURCES

Periodising a year for both triathlon and a marathon

04:14 -

• If triathlon is your main goal, the optimal way to add a marathon is to do an autumn marathon after a summer or early autumn triathlon A race.
•  You want enough time between your last A race triathlon and the marathon, and if you also want to perform really well in the marathon and treat it as an A race, I would try to get in a good 12 week marathon build. Someone who did the 70.3 World Championship in Nice this past weekend could easily do something like Valencia Marathon in December.
• In the US, Houston in January is a big one.
• The opposite approach, which I see a lot of athletes doing and which can work but is not optimal, is a spring marathon, something like Boston in mid April, followed by a triathlon A race in June or early July.
• That often does not leave enough time to be fully ready for the triathlon if you have also really focused on the marathon.
• You will be short on bike volume even if you go fully into triathlon preparation afterwards, and that matters most for an Ironman, which needs a lot of biking.
• An April marathon can work if your A race is late July, August or September. 
• The Seville Marathon in February is another big one that works well because it leaves plenty of time until summer goals.
• Autumn is definitely easier to manage. I am not sure 12 weeks is always necessary or even optimal, though.
• If you managed a relatively good run block going into your last triathlon A race, then a shorter build may be enough.
• Sam Laidlow tried a pre-season marathon this year and it did not seem to work out that well for him, although it can work.
• The issue with an early marathon is not just the reduced bike and swim volume going in, but the recovery from a marathon, which is significant if you want to race again mid year.
• I would rather have a higher bike and swim load through the winter.
• One caveat: if you live somewhere winter riding is difficult, an early season marathon can make logistical sense. You do the run training in the winter when it is easier, then do the bulk of the riding over summer into an autumn triathlon.
• A couple of the athletes I work with are doing a marathon at the end of the season and it works nicely off a good base.
• On the second part of the question, no, it does not hurt base building. Base training is not December, January and February.
• It depends on your racing calendar, and you structure your periodisation around where your target races sit.
• There are too many scenarios to cover, but it is all about how you structure the season as a whole.

Setting running mileage when also swimming and biking

09:40 -

• Set your run targets or run load based mainly on the running load you have done previously, rather than on what a marathon plan or what other marathon runners are doing.
• Your injury history dictates how aggressively you can push run volume or shift the swim and bike load towards the run.
• Bike volume is a very useful addition and it transfers very well to the marathon, and how much you rely on it depends on how much running load you can handle.
• The swim you can drop right back into maintenance mode. It is not very productive for marathon performance, except perhaps for recovery.
• I want to echo that completely. Everyone starts from zero at some point, so you can increase, but with running think in single steps rather than two or three.
• If the most you have ever sustained consistently is 30 kilometre weeks, you can try 40 for the next marathon build, but do not jump to 60 or 70 because the sub three hour plan says so.
• That is my issue with a lot of marathon plans, which are otherwise very good: the concept of picking a plan by target time, sub three, sub 2:30, starts at the wrong end.
• You need to start with what you can sustain.
• Within that, if you really want your best marathon, maximise the run volume you can sustain. If you have a limited time budget, it is fine to drop the swim right back, keeping just enough to not lose your feel for the water, and use the bike to fill the rest of the time budget with additional aerobic volume.
• I would make that biking very polarised: easy rides and easy volume, plus maybe one high intensity session a week where you get a real VO2 max stimulus.
• I would not do threshold or tempo biking during a marathon block, because the central VO2 max stimulus transfers more than the more peripheral adaptations you get from a threshold or tempo ride.

Translating bike fitness into run fitness

13:45 -

• That is 5.1 W/kg for an hour, which is serious power.
• To draw more out of those numbers, I used a reasonable estimate of the one hour to five minute power relationship for an athlete of his level, and from the estimated five minute W/kg I ballparked a VO2 max in the mid 70s. It could be off by a few points, but it is in that range. 
• For most serious athletes of this calibre, running VO2 max is generally as high as, or one to two points higher than, cycling VO2 max.
• Even if I assume he has a somewhat lower fractional utilisation at marathon pace, there is no getting around the conclusion that his running economy is probably well below average for an athlete of his VO2 max.
• That is the only way I can make these numbers make sense.
• An average is always an average of people above and below it, and while economy is trainable, a lot of what determines it is fairly fixed: limb proportions, where the muscles sit, leg length relative to torso, lower leg length, and Achilles tendon stiffness, which has a big effect on economy.
• You cannot make your legs longer. You can to some extent make your Achilles tendons stiffer, mainly through plyometrics and probably running volume, but if your starting point is well below average on a parameter like that, at best you might get to average.
• If the hypothesis is right and his economy is low, that is what he has to work on.
• If he has historically been a lower mileage runner, staying more consistent or increasing running mileage will help over time, but that is a long-term fix, not a quick one.
• The other main things are plyometrics and heavy resistance strength training, which can both help economy.
• The biggest driver of run economy is volume over time.
• Someone with an engine like his will pick up run form quicker than the next guy, but it still takes time, and it is simple consistent mileage.
• On top of that, if the body can handle it, I would train across the whole intensity spectrum rather than getting hung up on race pace work: consistency over hero workouts, with some high-end work as well as threshold work.
• Plyometrics is not a golden bullet, but it is worth having in there, and you do not need a lot of it.
• There is a connection here too: if you are going to increase running mileage, strength training helps a lot of people avoid injury, so you might as well design it to include one or two plyometric exercises and one or two heavy lifts per session.
• That way you can potentially tap into those economy gains while doing something that is already useful for injury prevention.
• On the general question of how bike fitness transfers, central factors like VO2 max transfer a lot, because it is the same heart pumping oxygen into the system.
• Fractional utilisation transfers a lot less. Being able to hold a high percentage of VO2 max at threshold on the bike does not mean you can on the run, although I believe there is still some translation.
• Running economy barely transfers at all. You have to run to improve it.
• The metabolic side transfers reasonably well from the bike too, but economy improves by hitting a range of intensities, so variety in the run training optimises those gains as much as the sessions that are supposedly optimal for it.
• Strides, hill strides and hill sprints are all part of that.

Long run distance versus total volume

21:16 -

• Put simply, total run volume is more important than long run distance.
• Especially as a triathlete, you can use the bike and a consistent long ride stimulus over a longer period to get durations that a pure marathon runner could never replicate on foot.
• Practically, over a longer period I would mostly include medium long runs, averaging perhaps 90 minutes up to two hours, every one or two weeks.
• The really long, marathon specific runs are the icing on the cake in the last six to eight weeks before the race.
• Mikael view: But for a triathlete, or anyone already doing a good amount of cycling and aerobic volume, you can replace quite a bit of the pure running volume with cycling for the aerobic and metabolic benefits.
• What you cannot replace with cycling is the ability to withstand the pounding over the duration and distance of a marathon.
• What you are really building is resilience to muscular damage.
• So a triathlete might not need to run with as much frequency or as much total volume as a runner, but precisely because the total mileage is lower, the long run becomes more important than it is for a runner.
• In a marathon build I would make the long run the focal point and progress it gradually so that the athlete can handle the impact of pounding the pavement for 42 kilometres.
• The long runs are the priority in the last six to eight weeks, which for a triathlete is the marathon specific block.
• My concern is that this is the highest risk part of run training, and for a triathlete in particular, just throwing them in without years of run volume behind them can be dangerous.
• I agree with that, but that is also why it makes sense to start thinking about the long run further out than six to eight weeks. 
• The bigger the jump, the bigger the risk. If you are used to two hour runs of 20 to 25 kilometres from Ironman training, which is normal for age groupers and not a bad way to train, but you never go longer than that, then your marathon long run progression starts at 20 to 22 kilometres and adds one, at most two, kilometres per week. In steps that small it becomes far less risky.
• That is the best case scenario. If you start going much longer than 90 minutes to two hours week in, week out over a longer period, it tends to have a big effect on what you can achieve in the other sessions of the week and on recovery, and it can end up limiting the adaptations from those other workouts.
• If I am weighing a very long long run against a medium long run plus a threshold workout and a VO2 max workout, I lean towards the latter.

Maximum long run distance, one run or two, and intensity in the long run

29:10 -

• For marathon training, one long run. My rationale is the one above: for triathletes the ability to be resilient to the long run is the limiting factor.
• For Ironman training there is a much stronger case for two medium long runs on the same day, because the pace is slower and run performance is limited more by bike fitness, but we are talking about marathons here.
• If you split the long run up you do not get the build-up of muscle damage and fatigue metabolites, which is what drives the adaptation.
• On maximum distance, for someone aiming anywhere from just getting through their first marathon up to around three hours or 3:15, I would cap the longest run at about 32 kilometres, roughly 20 miles.
• For someone going for 2:30, I would go 38 to 40 kilometres. You can interpolate between those, so a 2:50 runner might do 35 or 36 kilometres as their longest run.
• I would not be quite that precise, but in an ideal block you are heading towards 35, maybe up to 40 kilometres, and the bigger difference at a higher level is how much intensity you add into the run.
• Distance for the most part, especially as race day approaches.
• Same for me, which is interesting because for the Ironman run I tend to prescribe by time, and those runs tend to be shorter.
• Sub three is about 4:12 per kilometre.
• I am not usually putting a lot of time at 100 percent of marathon pace. I am not trying to create a race simulation with a huge amount of marathon pace work, because the recovery demands afterwards are very high.
• But I do add a lot of blocks approaching marathon pace. A session I like is descending distance reps within a long run: within a 35 to 40 kilometre run, blocks of 6, 5, 4, 2 and 1 kilometre, starting the 6 kilometre rep 10 to 20 seconds per kilometre slower than marathon pace and descending towards marathon pace for the last two reps.
• Looked at as a whole, not much of the run is right at marathon pace, but I am not just sending people out the door at easy intensity either.
• Especially towards the back end of the build the runs need to be more specific to race day, and progressing the pace through the run mimics running hard on tired legs.
• I like to set a pace range from target marathon pace down to 10 seconds per kilometre, or 15 seconds per mile, slower.
• A simple session might be three times seven kilometres at marathon pace, but with the athlete starting at the slower end of the range.
• It is close enough that the training effect is the same, but forcing yourself to run right at marathon pace can be a bit much, especially if you are not in super shoes and the course is not as optimised as a flat, fast marathon.
• If the athlete feels great and marathon pace comes easily, I am fine with them pushing to it, but never over it.
• It is always surprising how easy marathon pace feels at the start of a long run and how hard it feels at the end, and if you go out at goal pace it can quickly unravel and knock your confidence, because the paces are not as easy to hit on a training day as on race day.

Quad soreness as the limiting factor in the marathon

37:34 -

• It is common to be sore or limited somewhere in the legs, and the underlying reason is conditioning.
• The best way to condition the legs to the demands of a half or a full is run volume and then the long run, and the biggest reason for the problem is probably not having given enough time for that.
• I would also look at pacing, because falling apart at the quads may mean you are not yet ready to run the pace that is causing the collapse.
• Specific interventions: strength training, definitely, and more hilly runs, starting easy and then adding hilly tempo, which I am a big fan of. But volume, the long run and pacing come first.
• I can really relate to this question, because it has been the story of all my marathons, and for a 1:17 half marathoner I do not think it is a pacing issue.
• My own last marathon, nearly three years ago, went this way right after halfway.
• The backstory was that I had organised a training camp, got sick on the last night, was properly ill for about two weeks and missed all my running in the final four weeks.
• I got one last long run in a week before the race, which was not long enough, so I lacked conditioning in the key preparation period.
• But I would also identify as more prone to quad soreness than most, so there are individual differences at play, perhaps muscle fibre typology.
• Running form may have something to do with it, and footwear may too.
• If you have been running in shoes with a high drop, say eight millimetres or more, try six or four.
• In theory that shifts some load off the quads onto the calves and Achilles, although you need to be careful not to overload structures that are not used to it. 
• Strength training, especially eccentric strength, and hilly tempos, yes. There is also research showing that increasing step rate reduces the work done by the quads quite a lot, so depending on where your cadence already is, try raising it.
• Finally, fuelling. Anecdotally, I think you get sore more easily if you have not carb loaded well, and there is some research linking higher fuelling within a race to less soreness afterwards.
• So look at fuelling in general, more so before the race than during, but during as well.

Other considerations for a triathlete's marathon block

44:42 -

• Being a triathlete can actually be an advantage, because you are doing a lot more aerobic duration than a pure runner, and a lot of elite runners are now adding the bike to their training for exactly that reason.
• There is a lot of potential for a great marathon if you get it right. The caveat is the swim.
• A lot of swimming builds upper body mass, and if you really want to nail a marathon, reducing swim volume can drop a couple of kilos, which is significant in a high performance marathon.
• On intensity, remember that you are not looking at an Ironman marathon. Duration wise a marathon is closer to an Olympic distance triathlon than to a 70.3, and the training has to reflect that.
• As a basic template for the phase where the long run is an important part of the build: earlier in the build do some intensity within the long run, but less of it and a bit easier, not yet at 100 percent of marathon pace, or short intervals.
• If you are a faster runner and marathon pace is quite fast, you might ease into it with LT1 type reps first and gradually add intensity.
• If marathon pace sits closer to LT1 anyway, it is more about doing a bit less and gradually adding volume.
• Then structure the week with three days of no hard running after the long run, and on the fourth day do the second intense run of the week, which in a marathon focus I would usually build around threshold-like intensity.
• Not a second tempo or marathon pace run, but something a bit faster, and I like that session to be the medium long run, the second longest run of the week. The rest of the running is easy aerobic miles, maybe with strides on one of them.
• Add the swimming and cycling as discussed, with one high intensity bike session. That gives three key sessions: the high intensity bike, the threshold medium long run, and the marathon long run. There are many ways to do it, but I like that structure, and I take a very similar approach.

Racing a 70.3 during base training

49:35 -

• The first thing to decide is what the goal of the race actually is. Ironman branded races are costly, and especially if you are travelling to one, I think in most cases it probably should be an A race.
• You can have more than one A race in a year, and there is plenty of time, six months, between December and May. So a bit of pushback: is this really a B/C race?
• If it is an A race, keep following the mid-volume base plan but take the last five to six weeks from a race specific plan rather than just the race week, so that you get a real block of race specific intensity and progression.
• General fitness is 90 to 95 percent of performance, but specificity adds something and for an A race you want every bit of it.
• If it is a B or C race, cut 20 to 30 percent of the volume in race week, since it is a mid-volume plan and not that high anyway, and cut 50 to 60 percent of the intensity, replacing it with easy volume, just to freshen up.
• Recovery afterwards is a question I get a lot from people using my plans, and it is never fixed, it depends on how your body feels.
• The general template is a rest day the day after the race, then a short swim and short bike, then another short swim and bike but a bit longer, and only on the third day after the rest day, the Thursday after a Sunday race, do you reintroduce running.
• From there you follow the plan's shape, a swim and bike on a swim and bike day, a run and bike on a run and bike day, but everything easy and shortened, ramping daily volume up gradually until you are back at the plan's volume or feel completely recovered.
• The nature of an A race is that you put everything into the prep for that one race, so you cannot have many of them, and treating the December race as an A race may take away from the preparation for the proper A race in May.
• We would need more context. You can still get a lot out of it as a B/C race without optimising the training going in, and you may not need to switch to a specific plan at all, because that might even take you away from what is optimal for the A race.
• Staying in the base block could be the right call. There is huge value in the race day logistics alone, which are an absolute nightmare at these races, and in process goals like nutrition, tactics and equipment testing.
• If you do stay on the base plan, shift more towards the race bike and race equipment in the weeks before.
• The last thing you want is to have done all your base training on a road bike setup and then jump on a TT bike and not be able to hold the position for the duration, or to have problems with race shoes. 
• A bit of aerodynamic position prep can be added within the base training if needed.
• What I am really opposed to is the idea of treating it as a training day, which in my head sounds like being on the start line without committing 100 percent.
• I take the point about B/C races, but when you toe the line at a big, high profile race, give it everything even if you have not tapered at all.
• Otherwise you might as well be training. You would still get all the logistics and experience either way, but the psychology of racing is a muscle you have to train, and if you do too many races at 90 percent, I think you are more likely to drop back to 90 percent in the A races that really matter when you hit a setback.
• You want to associate racing with giving 100 percent. That is a difficult skill.
• The flip side is that you only have so many matches to burn, and if you were racing every week an all-out effort each time could be a problem, but that is devil's advocate and does not apply to this scenario.

Returning from overtraining syndrome

59:20 -

• Seeing a medical professional is the right thing, and I would treat their guidance as the priority, because this is serious and can become something chronic, with chronic fatigue potentially one step away.
• I have worked with a couple of athletes through similar things, and for me it is about a holistic approach. Training load is not the only stress.
• Work, life and family all load the same body, and you have to manage training load in the context of those other stresses rather than in isolation.
• I would hope the doctor has done blood work and checked for nutritional gaps that could be contributing.
• The approach is long term: add training really slowly, do not progress until you have seen a long period at each step of load, and be strict with intensity control.
• That does not mean everything is easy, but when it is meant to be easy it is easy and threshold is threshold. Some speed or anaerobic work can actually help, but with control and enough recovery afterwards. 
• Overtraining syndrome is a clinical diagnosis, and it is a diagnosis of exclusion, so it takes a very large number of tests to confirm.
• Non-functional overreaching sits on the same spectrum and is distinguished only by how long it takes to return to full performance, so you do not actually know which one you have while you are in it.
• Unexplained underperformance implies there has not been a proper medical diagnosis.
• But the causes and symptoms can be the same across all of them, under-fuelling being one possible cause of every one, and the treatment does not really differ, so the term does not matter much. 
• The causes listed for that skier were training monotony without proper periodisation of easy days and periods, poor intensity control, which is surprising for a Norwegian skier but there it is, an extreme regime with low carbohydrate availability, which fits the pre-COVID era when intentional low carb training was popular, and plenty of days of double threshold training.
• What got him back to performing at world class level was a clear microcycle periodisation with easy and hard days within the week, very systematic monitoring and testing, accurate intensity control, more carbohydrate during and between sessions, and a coach physically present day to day.
• No supplement, just changing how he trained. It is a case study and other cases will have different causes, chronic under-fuelling being one example, but the interview covers more general ground too. I will link the paper, a second Talsnes paper, and a more controlled trial with 82 athletes in the show notes.
• Two things I would highlight for Stephanie to monitor on the way back.
• First, always triangulate an external measure of load, pace or power, with an internal measure, heart rate or lactate, and RPE, and watch that the relationship trends positively or at least not negatively.
• What you do not want is the same power with the same or lower heart rate but rising RPE. That can happen day to day, but not as a trend. The trend should be that the same power gets easier.
• Heart rate is the tricky one: it can go down because you are fitter, but a lower heart rate paired with rising RPE at a fixed power means you are too fatigued.
• Second, and maybe more important, track mood and motivation, both in general and towards training. A trend of more and more low days is a bad sign; a trend of more positive days is a good one.
• Having a coach helps here, and that is perhaps a plug for Scientific Triathlon, but without someone looking over things it is very easy to slip down this path. Intensity control, recovery within the microcycle and the macrocycle, all the factors above are things a coach watches.
• Something I am wary of is AI generated training plans, not ChatGPT but actual platforms, giving a false sense of security because of the amount of data they look at, when I do not think it is the right data.
• They lean heavily on HRV to judge whether an athlete is adapting or not, and I am a huge sceptic of that.
• I have myself been in a heavy non-functional overreaching state that took a long time to get out of, and my HRV was amazing throughout the training that led to the crash. 
• Platforms use whatever data they can get instead of the things a coach picks up on: mood, motivation, demeanour, the way you speak and write.
• Not everyone can or wants to have a coach, but do not be misled into thinking that feeding a lot of data into a platform makes you immune. It is more complex than that.
• My AI search engine optimisation is probably going to tank after saying this. Whether coached or self-coached, it comes down to being well planned.

Do you have to dig a hole to get supercompensation?

1:11:42 -

• No, you do not have to dig a hole, and yes, you can get to the same place with smaller but consistent steps. I would not recommend training until performance declines, and there is interesting research on this.
• One study I re-read for this had 33 trained triathletes, not tiny for a sports science study though probably not statistically powered enough to rely on fully.
• Twenty-three did three weeks of overload training into a four week taper and 11 were controls. 
• Of the 23, 11 tipped into functional overreaching, meaning performance declined after the overload and recovered after the taper, which is the definition of overreaching, not just feeling tired.
• The other 12 were only fatigued: they felt it but maintained performance on the tests. The fatigued-only group gained the most, 2.6 percent more in performance than both the overreached group and the controls.
• Also striking was infection rate: 70 percent of the overreached athletes picked up an infection, compared with 20 percent of the fatigued-only group and 10 percent of controls.
• So higher load helped, but only when it was not so high that performance declined. There are related studies I will link too.
• Practically, you do not want to train so hard that performance drops. It happens unintentionally sometimes and it is not the end of the world, but then rest and get back to it quickly.
• I would never do it on purpose. What you can do is a really good overload period that stays out of overreaching territory, and the thing to be much more careful with is intensity.
• Too much intensity, or increasing it too quickly, is usually what causes a performance decline.
• On our training camps over the years, people who normally train 10 hours a week have done 25 hour weeks, most of it aerobic riding with only a few moderately hard sessions, and they go home much fitter with no performance decline at any point.
• They definitely feel fatigued, but that is different. Even an extreme volume increase for one week can work well if intensity is controlled.
• It is about finding the sweet spot for fatigue: too little load and no adaptation, too much and you get ill or miss the supercompensation.
• The game is how much load you can get in over time while staying at that sweet spot. I remember research comparing a three to one load-deload structure against a flat load with the average matched, where the three to one outperformed.
• The important part is that average load is matched, so the load over time is what counts, and if you can get the same amount of load with a bit of a deload built in, that is at least as good.
• That said, I do like to compound training over a block, and I think some performance reduction from fatigue within that period is fine, as long as it does not tip into unproductive territory and the supercompensation arrives when the planned deload comes.
• It would be interesting to see the same comparison done within the microcycle, a three-one-two-one week structure with matched load but no weekly drop.
• With age groupers I coach, I often do not schedule fixed deload weeks, because I can pick up quickly if we are getting close to real overreaching rather than fatigue, and because life usually creates a natural deload that cannot always be predicted.
• If you schedule a deload week and then two weeks later life forces you to train less anyway, you have not maximised load.
• That works within a coach-athlete relationship. In a ready-made plan I would build in regular deload weeks, not always three to one but regular. 
• If we think about what some of the best athletes in the world are doing, they do not do specific deload weeks on a set structure, is that your impression too?
• Yes, although it depends on how much people are racing. In a winter base period there is natural progression anyway, and what most are doing is putting the deload within the microcycle, a three-one-two-one or similar, compounding training over a block and being reactive if things get slightly overdone.
• Very few athletes, even elite ones, avoid a natural forced deload from travel to a training camp or from life, and that is probably how most of them are deloaded in winter.

LINKS & RESOURCES

• That Triathlon Show Community on ROUVY
• That Triatlon Show Group Ride on ROUVY - 5 October, 18:00 CET (12pm ET, 9am PT), 25 km / 15.5 miles on the Kona bike course. Social ride, easy, everybody is welcome regardless of speed! 
• Related episodes:
  • Rune Kjøsen Talsnes, PhD | EP#427
  • Modern marathon training principles and preparation with running coach John Davis
• Studies discussed:
  • Functional overreaching: the key to peak performance during the taper? - Aubry et al. 2014
  • Functional overreaching in endurance athletes: a necessity or cause for concern? - Bellinger 2020
  • The return from underperformance to sustainable world-class level: a case study of a male cross-country skier - Talsnes et al. 2023
  • Warning signs, monitoring tools, and actions taken by world-class endurance coaches in cases of underperformance - Talsnes et al. 2024
  • Sex differences in self-reported causes, symptoms, and recovery strategies associated with underperformance in endurance athletes - Agudo-Ortega et al. 2024