Planning Your Whole Triathlon Training  Annual Hours

You want to do all your training in hours and not distance, swim for an hour, run 45 minutes, bike 6 hours, etc.  So you want to set your annual hours for your training for the coming season.  This will determine your training work load.  If you set it to high your likely to over train and cause yourself injury.  Too low and you will not perform at the level you are hoping for.

Setting Annual Hours-Critical Step

So this step is critical to setting yourself up for success.  So here is how to determine or predict your logical annual training hours.  Look at your last 12 months and figure out your hours, to the best of your ability, what your hours were.

Triathlon Training Tracking

If you haven’t kept track of hours you will have to use distance, hopefully you have tracked what you covered for distance last year.  If you have such a record, divide the total by what you guess the average speed was and you should be able to get close.

If you have nothing just do your best to figure out an annual hours trained and what we want to do is increase the amount by 10-15%.  Here is suggested annual training hours based on race distance.

Race Distance                                                  Annual Hours

Ironman                                                              600-1200

Half Ironman                                                     500-700

Olympic                                                               400-600

Sprint                                                                    200-350

Carefully limiting your training hours you train will help you get much better results than struggling through an overly ambitious calendar.  You can always adjust as your season progresses based on how it is working out, especially if this a new concept for you.