The Triathlete Guide to Sprint & Olympic Triathlon Racing

INTRODUCTION

Iam a triathlete. That is to say, I became a triathlete. I wasn’t born one. I didn’t grow up with goggles, a helmet, and a pair of running shoes gifted to me in a transition bag on my fifth birthday. As a kid, I played outside. I rode BMX bikes. I ran around and played flashlight tag.

When it came time for the elementary school mile test, I practiced really hard in my Airwalk skate shoes, running around my house until I got too tired to keep going. All in the day before the run itself. Despite my best efforts to sabotage the result, I did really well—after all, at my school the faster you finished the mile, the quicker you got to lunch. All said, the concept of being first to get food probably drove much of my athletic career. I was an accomplished cross-country and track runner in high school; then I later willed my way onto the running program at Penn State, where an old-school coach took a chance on someone who probably should have never made the team as a freshman. But by the time I was a senior, I was one of the top guys on the squad.

In the summers during college, my athletic restlessness (and boredom) sparked my interest in a sport that combined two things I really liked (running and cycling) with one thing I really didn’t (swimming). Though I had swam back in high school, our team was more like a swimming club (I usually trained in board shorts), and I never liked it. No one would ever call me a swimmer without using air quotes.

I set my sights on the Dewey Beach Sprint Triathlon—an approximately 800-meter swim, 15-mile bike, and 3-mile run. Despite a decided lack of skill and enthusiasm, I went out to the Atlantic Ocean near our house in Delaware to try to swim for as long as I could to prepare for it. At first, I could only go a few minutes at a time. With no walls to hang onto or rest intervals between sets, the choppy, salty water basically had its way with me. Finally, I was able to swim 1,000 meters without stopping. But it was hard, and I didn’t like it.

I got my hands on a Schwinn 10-speed that was way too big for me and fitted it with some crazy horns that triathletes called aerobars. I don’t remember much about the bike except that those aerobars were a super cheap pair from Profile. They were so cool to me then, I still remember the make and model.

When the day came, I wore my old maroon high school Speedo from start to finish. I suffered mightily through the ocean swim; my thighs chafed raw during the windy bike on the flat, sandy expanse of Delaware’s Route 1, and on the run, I passed dozens of people, but I was too tired to care. I don’t remember much about the finish except that Queen’s Bicycle Race was playing as I went to collect my bike.

But I finished the damn thing. And then I slept the rest of the day like I had just gotten back from Mount Everest. I had never been so tired in my life. My result wasn’t amazing—it didn’t foreshadow a professional career, or even show promise of someone who could win their age group. It just made me really, really tired. But I liked that.

HOOKED

Triathlon was a puzzle to me. I was a good runner, but I didn’t run very well during the race. I was a decent cyclist, but guys older than my dad rode by me like I was out for a walk. As for swimming, I’m pretty sure the lifeguards had marked me as a drowning risk. But I was hooked by this gnawing sense that I should be faster, that I could be faster, if only I trained more and if I trained better.

I longed to crack the code of how to go faster and how to finish and not be comatose for the following 10 hours. I certainly improved upon the former, even if I’ve never mastered the latter throughout my 10 years as a professional triathlete and an editor at Triathlete.

So why is my story important to you—the aspiring triathlete-to-be, the mid-level multisporter aiming to improve, or the seasoned iron-vet looking to continue the sport without depleting finances, schedule, relationships, or career? Because I wasn’t born a triathlete, and neither were you, we become triathletes by training for swimming, biking, and running. Then we race. Then, we decide how to take the next step: Do we want to go longer until we hit our body’s distance ceiling? Do we want to go faster until we’ve tapped our potential at a given distance in all three sports at once? Do we want to make friends, live a healthier lifestyle, renew a sense of athletic pride that maybe we haven’t experienced for years or maybe ever? I found all of these things in the years since that first sprint tri, and if you’re reading this book, there’s a good chance you might too.

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

I went into my first race not knowing much aside from the distances I had to complete and the order of events. I had no training plan, just an idea that I should do the distance of each leg a few times each week if I wanted to survive.

Had I known a little more about training, I certainly would have performed better, and probably had a lot more fun. It took me years to understand that having a plan was more important in triathlon than any other sport I’ve done before or since. But I needed more than just a plan. With swimming, biking, and running all acting as moving targets bouncing off each other, getting the formula right is a little bit like playing with a chemistry set—you get the mixture wrong, and boom you’re in trouble.

That challenge and balancing act are also what makes triathlon so fun. Great swimmers get humbled on the run, great runners get humbled in the water, and great cyclists sometimes get humbled in both. You push a little too far in one, another gets out of whack. You don’t do enough in any of the three, and you suffer on race day. You overdo it in all of them and you run the risk of burning out completely—the human body can only handle so much. Still, it’s possible that we can learn to get better—excel even—at three very different sports. This is why triathlon is worth doing and worth doing with your best foot forward.

Solving this multisport Rubik’s Cube is what bonds triathletes together. Yes, we’re racing against each other when the gun goes off, but there’s really only a handful of triathletes in the world at any given moment who have their body’s magic formula figured out. Ask anyone in the transition area how their training has been going, and there’s always something: My run has been going great, but I’ve got this shoulder thing . . . Or, I’ve been putting in tons of swimming, but I haven’t had as much time to bike as I’d like. (Time is the great enemy of triathletes, and we’ll get to that later.) Figuring out how to balance swimming, biking, running, strength training, nutrition, hydration, rest, recovery, overall health, motivation, family, and work life is a monumental task, but it’s also the thing that binds this weird tribe together.

Finding a healthy balance among those 12 things is one of the main reasons I opted to go faster rather than longer. I believe in the healthy, well-rounded version of the multisport lifestyle that exists in short-course racing. Training and racing in relatively shorter bursts, and eschewing six-hour rides for shorter, more intense workouts, not only keeps energy levels up and a body’s structural integrity in check, but it also allows the athlete to have a life outside of the sport—with the time and energy to enjoy it.

Triathlon can open many doors—whether it be to personal satisfaction, overcoming fears, meeting new people, changing a lifestyle, becoming healthier, or conquering new challenges. But triathlon can also become physically and mentally isolating if approached the wrong way. Just like the chemical reaction described earlier, triathlon can have dangerous outcomes, or it can create something beautiful. If you want to learn how short-course triathlon can positively transform all aspects of your life, this book will be your guide.

You’ll be joined on your journey by experts with a deep, wide knowledge of short-course racing and how to excel at it.

Ryan Bolton, one of the experts featured in this book, coaches the entire range of triathletes and runners, from Olympians to age-groupers to first-timers. The former pro triathlete and Olympian has degrees in exercise physiology and human nutrition, and in 2018, he was named USA Triathlon’s high-performance technical adviser.

Though he coaches both short- and long-course athletes, his true passion lies in short-course racing because he believes the shorter time commitment and increased intensity are a healthier fit for today’s athletes.

Ryan is responsible for much of the technique work in the book and also designed the training plans, which are rooted in a coaching philosophy that prioritizes three key ideas: periodization, polarization, and race-day specificity. Periodization is progressive, systematic cycling of a training program with different phases at different times in the season. Polarization is the focused combination of very easy efforts and very hard efforts. And race-day specificity is the idea that we should train as we intend to race. Underlying it all is Ryan’s foundational belief in the well-rounded athlete, where a balance between life and training is struck in a way that sets up success in both.

You’ll also benefit from the wisdom of Casey Maguire, a physical therapist, former triathlete, and current cyclist. His career is devoted to getting people—athletes and nonathletes—back to doing the things they enjoy. Some of his favorite patients are triathletes because they’re rarely lacking in motivation (although unfortunately they’re often lacking in restraint!).

Casey urges all athletes to make a consistent commitment to a flexibility program—which you’ll find in these pages. He believes passionately in a training program that creates a strong base of core stability, general flexibility, and strength to allow speedwork to flourish. His emphasis on not overdoing volume and always respecting recovery makes him the ideal PT contributor for a short-course racer’s guide.

HOW TO CHOOSE A PLAN

Back in the days of trying to figure out my place in the multisport world, I knew pretty quickly that I enjoyed shorter, more intense training sessions over longer, slower-paced workouts. The beauty of triathlon is its versatility, meaning we can do lots of types of races at lots of different distances—you don’t have to choose just one. But to truly excel at a distance—and get the enjoyment that comes from doing something well—you need to understand and focus on its unique facets, not merely the mileage in the training plan.

To the new triathlete reading these pages: Short-course racing is a perfect introduction to this multifaceted, challenging sport. Shorter distances allow for quicker, safer adaptation, more fun, more free time, and more experimentation with training and racing. You may hear about someone whose first tri was a long-course race, but no coach worth his or her salt would recommend that pathway to someone who isn’t already extremely proficient in all three sports. The information and Level 1 Program in this book will get you safely and healthily to the short-course start line—hopefully with a newfound love for the sport and the triathlon community.

Or maybe you’ve already done a handful of multisport events and now find yourself thinking about how you can