Ironman Distance Training Schedule

Triathlon for Beginners – The Events….Continued

Triathlon for Beginners – The Events….Continued

After my last article, which brought to you some background on the Super-Sprint and Sprint events, I’m back to continue where we left off. We’ll be taking a look at the Olympic event, and then, in future articles the Half-Iron and then the ultimate triathlon challenge, the Iron-Man event.

Olympic

This is, as the name suggests, the event that is agreed upon and sanctioned by the Olympic Committee, to be an event in the Olympic Games. Often referred to as the ‘Standard” distance, it’s still not as popular as the Sprint events.

With Triathlon being a relatively new sport, the first Olympic triathlon didn’t take place until the 2000 Olympics. If you want to compete in the Olympic distance, you will need to swim 0.9 miles (1500m), ride 24.9 miles(40km) and finish it all off with a 6.2 mile (10km) run. It’s going to take some time to get ready for such an event, 20 weeks or so should be enough with consistent training. If you’re out of shape, at least 6 months is probably the way to proceed.

An elite triathlete will be completing this event in well under 90 minutes. If you’re pretty fit and well trained, between 2 and 3 hours is the right sort of ballpark figure, many take 4 hours to finish.

This event does call for some pacing, you can’t just go out there ‘hell for leather’ as you ‘may be able to do in the short events. You’ve got to bear in mind that there is no ‘sprint distance’ in this event, sprint too soon and you’ll be hitting the wall pretty damn quickly. You need to particularly make sure that you have energy left for the run, so pace yourself on the swim and bike sections. You are definitely going to need to hydrate throughout the event and to refuel with some sports gels or similar .

If you have a fair bit of experience in endurance events, you’ve ridden long distances or been a good swimmer or runner, then it’s acceptable to make the Olympic Triathlon Event your first triathlon. You need to d o some serious inward analysis, don’t try to kid yourself that you’ re up to it if you aren’t.

In later articles I’ll be going through training schedules for each of the events so hang on in there.

Next article takes a brief look at the Half-Iron event. We’re heading into the serious endurance events now and culminating in a look at the Iron-Man, the pinnacle of sporting accomplishment for many triathletes. See you next time.

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Triathlon Training : Triathlon Training Schedule