B..A..L..A..N..C..E..balance!

You remember that scene in Highlander when Ramirez is rowing the boat, and McCloud is standing, and Sean Connery is singing...of course you do - Highlander (the first one...) is one of the best movies ever made - anyway. Ramirez is singing about balance.

There's been some talk recently about which part of triathlon is more important - swim, bike or run. There's argument about putting time into swimming so that you are fresher for the other events, and then there's counter argument that fitness in swimming does not cross over to the other events. Some folks use the mantra, "its all about the bike", and there are many who aspire to save their legs on the bike so they don't crack on the run.

Personally, and I'm no coach or fitness expert, I think it's all about balance. We should balance our workouts to the effort required on race day (with an exception I'll bring up later). I think it relates to the concepts of specificity - train like you race. I've read about guys and gals who spend time in the gym doing squats and leg presses arguing with the guys who say it's best to press big gears in steep hills to build leg strength...just for one example.

For an average age grouper, I guess, in an Olympic, a swim time might be 35 minutes, a bike would be around 1:10 and a run in the neighborhood of 55 minutes, for a 2:45 time. Of course the times would vary, but in this set of "ifs", the swim accounts for 21% of the overall time of the race. The bike is 42% and the run is the 33%. (interestingly, pro-triathlete Normann Stadler's percentages at the Ironman World Championships were 9% swim, 52% bike and 36% run) This means that if you have time for 10 hrs of training each week, you should be spending about 2 hrs swimming, 4.5 hrs biking and 3.5 hrs running. This assumes that you are not relatively "weak" in any one area, and does not account for your natural abilities. If you are weak, or feel that you are, then concentrated blocks of time - weeks - spent with more focus on the weakness makes sense. For planning purposes, however, the balanced approach makes sense to me.

As a Clydesdale, in the first year or so of training, I spent as much time off my feet as I thought I could get away with. As the exception I alluded to above, I figured that I would lose as much weight as possible spending more time on the bike and in the pool so that I would lesson my chances of injury while running. this approach worked pretty well for me - aside from the the obligatory plantar fasciitis on the right foot, I've stayed injury free. After losing the weight, and becoming more "competitive", I've switched to a more balanced approach with running as well. If you compare my running volume to my recent history, it would look like (and it feels like) I'm focusing more on running now. I'll bet that for anyone (like me) who's weak in a certain area, they probably have spent less time training in that area and the challenge would be to be more balanced. I don't know where that point would be for your training - for me it was at about the year mark, after a couple of Olympic races and a couple of disheartening "death-walk" finishes.

Most of us like one event over the other two. We probably came from a particular sport where we were good at what we did - unless you were a Linebacker or Shot-putter - but even big guys, since we can swim pretty well compared to our run, and we can bike, on the flats, pretty well compared to our run, have parts of the triathlon we like better than others. Once the inequity between ability in one sport compared to another becomes too great, that period of "off-sport" focus becomes essential to achieving that necessary balance. You can bet that the weeks leading up to Escape from Alcatraz, I'll be having a swim focus period...big time!