Duathlon base period question. My wife is looking at doing some Sprint or Powerman Sprint Duathlons (I’m not a multi-sport athlete. I’ve only road raced, so I hope I have the terminology correct.) I was looking at the plans, and noticed that the Triathlon base plans are much shorter than the cycling base plans. She just completed Sweet Spot Base 1 Low volume. I was going to start her on Triathlon Base mid volume minus the swims followed by Olympic distance base Mid Volume minus the swims. However, I’m not sure where to go from there. How would you guys approach this? Am I totally messing things up doing the Olympic plan?
Thanks in advance.
Powerman is a race organizer like Ironman but for duathlons. So I’ll assume that she’s focusing on the shorter “Sprint distance” races this season. That probably means either 2 5k runs with 20k bike or even shorter. Olympic races are generally a 5k-40k-10k or sometimes 10k-40k-5k. But there’s a lot of variation. Nationals is something weird like 8.5k- 40k- 4.25k.
Basically there are 2 ways to look at it. Pick your distance (sprint or olympic) and do the Base-Build- Specialty progression through the triathlon plans and delete the swims from the calendar (I’d pick the longest distance she would do [olympic] and just stick to that). The other option is to do the cycling plans and add in the runs in yourself. So It would be SSB- Sustained build- 40ktt plan.
I’ve had good success with the cycling plans and doing my own running in the past. I did the 40ktt specialty for long distance nationals and the next season (2018) wen through and did the century specialty plan for Long distance world (Powerman Zofingen in Switzerland… it’s bit short of ironman distance)
The advantage to the sweet spot base plans is that you get a longer base period vs. the triathlon plans like you pointed out. If she does the sprint try plans I’d do mid volume so she gets 3 bikes a week, but If I did the olympic plans I’d do low volume. But that’s really dependent on where she is fitness wise as well as time constraints.
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Thanks, I’m also leaning towards the Olympic distance because it has longer runs. If I start her with with the sprint base and build up through the Olympic base, build and specialty. The TSS should ramp appropriately. She won’t be competing until spring, so time isn’t a major issue.