IRON DISTANCE TRAINING PLANS

Oxygenaddict Iron distance Training Plans

Each oxygenaddict.com Iron-distance training plan has been written to get you to the start line of your chosen race totally confident in your ability to reach your goals.

How much time do you have to train?

There's no question that training for an Iron-distance race is time consuming, but you need to be realistic with yourself about how much time you have to train, and how fast you can recover from those sessions. They'll only get you fitter if you are recovering each day. Otherwise, you're just getting more and more tired, which will either lead to injury or burn out - or both!

Leveraging Technology

Each Iron-distance training plan will be delivered to you in your own personal trainingpeaks account - the same software that we use to craft bespoke plans for our coached athletes, and the same software used by Team Sky. The software will keep track of what you have done each day. It will email you the next day's workout every evening. You can upload your heart rate, power and pace data from your Garmin or Polar or pretty much every other device under the sun. Best of all, it'll create graphs and charts for you showing you how far you have come, helping to build your confidence even further.

Swimming

We recognise that the swim will be by far the shortest part of your day, and that you'll need to concentrate the majority of your precious training time biking and running. However, the more often you can swim, the better prepared you will be.

We believe that the majority of triathletes who are confident swimmers can swim once per week for the majority of the plan, perhaps adding a handful of long open water swims leading up to the event. It's important to note though, that it's unlikely that you're going to get faster swimming once per week. If that's your goal, swimming twice or three times per week is going to be necessary.

With that in mind, each 20 week training plan includes a full 60 session swim plan, with three sessions each week: one core session that will build your endurance to the point you will be able to confidently swim 3.8km, and two other optional sessions that will build your speed and technique.

If you're worried about your ability to swim the distance within the cut off time, we highly recommend you dedicate extra time to improving your technique. In addition to swimming three times a week, a video analysis session with an expert coach is an excellent way to improve your swimming in the shortest possible time. You can read about our remote video swim analysis sessions under ‘services'.