Consecutive Hard Days

Hi all, new to TR and am using it to prepare for an Olympic Distance Triathlon. I have reached the speciality phase and am a little concerned with the frequency of ‘hard’ work out sessions.

For reference it seems to be scheduling the next 3 weeks as follows:

Monday: off
Tuesday: Vo2 Max Bike
Wednesday: 5x3min (5km Pace) Run
Thursday: Threshold Bike
Friday: 25min at HM pace Run
Saturday: Threshold Bike
Sunday: Long Run

There is also 3 swims in there, but I usually just swim with my local Masters squad.

I am wondering if I have set something up wrong? I selected ‘mid volume’ when starting out.

Thanks for any help!

Hey welcome to the forums!

Sounds like you’re in Speciality phase for vo2, threshold, threshold bike workouts.

The long run is only on alternate weeks.

So you had 16 weeks base and build into this phase - how did that go?

Yes 16 weeks of base, which built up to 3 bike workouts (2xVo2, 1x Threshold) plus an interval run. I managed to complete all the workouts (bar a few I had to adapt whilst on holiday).

I guess my concern was just the 5 back to back ‘hard workouts’

Previous training plans I have followed a more Hard, Easy, Hard, Easy, Long ride/run format. So just wanted to make sure I hadn’t set this up wrong.

More than willing to give it ago, but just not use to this format.

I hope this isn’t too much of a tangent, but I actually had a related question about back to back days.

Let’s say you have a VO2 workout and a Threshold workout and have to do them back to back because of life. Would you guys do VO2 then Threshold, or Threshold then VO2? I feel like if I do Threshold first, the VO2 might suffer a bit because I might not have the legs to get my cardiovascular system up to VO2. Whereas doing VO2 first, I can grind myself through a Threshold workout.

For me, it would absolutely be vo2, then threshold. I need reasonably fresh legs for quality vo2 work.

On a related note, I’ve been experimenting a bit this year going into a few interval days carrying heavy fatigue. It was an approach I heard some coaches talking about on a podcast. I didn’t do back to back interval days, but loaded up big training stress before my 2nd interval day with extra Z2 work (going into Thursday intervals with 600-700tss in the legs). I’ve done it 3 times this year and the 2nd interval day was always over/unders or threshold. The first couple times workouts felt hard, but good and recovery felt good. Last week I had to go really, really deep and it was probably a mistake and left me feeling bad for a couple days (poor sleep, really dead legs). It’s hard to know if that workout did more harm than good after some proper recovery, but I’m going to say it wasn’t a good idea. Probably would have been perfect if I had quit 2/3 of the way through. Intervals tomorrow, will be interesting to see if the body has bounced back.

2 Likes