Hello,
I really hate creating a thread all for myself, but I couldn’t find anything specific concerning this, so here goes.
With all the main races over, I wish to start training for a sprint triathlon happening around mid-april 2021. A bit of background, I did three seasons (2017, 2018 and 2019) of Olympic distance racing and 2 last seasons had almost identical finishing times with 2:32 being my PB. I decided to take a break during 2020, try my luck in running, but a hip flexor injury made me stop running altogether and I primarily raced road cycling races (talk about an existential crisis). Now, I feel as if my injuries have healed, my swimming and running times are terrible, but I also feel like I can get them up to the level I had pretty quickly. Also my plateau in Olympic distance made me want to try my luck in sprint distance.
Moving on, I built a plan using plan builder that looks like this:
I treat this as off-season with 2 strength workouts per week:
- Sprint Triathlon Base - Low Volume;
- Sprint Triathlon Build - Low Volume;
- Sprint Distance Triathlon - Low Volume;
And this is where the season starts, with 1-2 strength workouts per week (ditching one as build phase begins):
- Sprint Triathlon Base - Mid Volume (starting January 12th and moving up to mid volume);
- Sprint Triathlon Build - Mid Volume;
- Sprint Distance Triathlon - Low Volume (ending April 24th)
Now I really loved the plan looking through it, BUT then I found this article, suggesting that I should go for Sustained Power Build, General Build or Short-Power Build during the off-season. And since I loved road racing this year and would love to do it some more next year, I feel like general build would be perfect for me.
So the question would be, how do I integrate the General Build plan into the sprint triathlon plan made by plan builder? I’d love to keep the swimming and running workouts because it just makes my life that much easier. One way I’m considering doing this is just manually removing the cycling workouts and adding a cycling plan on top of already determined swim and run workouts, but this seems like a half-assed way of doing it. Also, do I keep doing sprint triathlon base, but then move to general build? Or do I go for sweet spot base, general build and then sprint distance triathlon specialty?
Bonus question: how possible/sane is it to train (while racing sprint triathlons about twice a month) to FINISH a mid-September Ironman distance race starting to train May 1st (21 weeks)?
Thank you for your answers!