Long rides / runs on consecutive days? (Page 2)

During my Florida build up last year I started by attempting to do a long ride, long run weekend because of time constraints.  But more often than not I was bagging my long run because I was too wiped from the rest of the week.  So I moved my long run to Tuesday and either made Sunday a full on rest day or a shorter run.

Worked wonders for me and I was not over-cooked anymore.

As has been mentioned numerous times, with 2 or 3 days of recovery in between your key quality workouts you gain more from them over the long run.  You don't really need to show your level of HTFUpness and suffer through the "brutal weekends" that were a thing of the past .... UNLESS you are truly time constrained.

Everyone used to run 200 mile weeks because that was the way to win marathons .......... until a couple people said, "WTF??" and researched what the body does and then guess what ........ they got faster from having quality sessions with proper recovery on 125 - 150 mile weeks.

I do tend to put a little bit of credence in what the top coaches have done and researched even if I don't necessarily follow one myself.

For some elites that may be the case, but for the average joe/jane triathlete there have been more than enough coaches/physiologists that would land on the take-time-between side of the fence.

I think you should reserve your judgement on the topic until after Vineman as you mentioned, then you can give a solid first hand take on what you felt worked better.

From a purely physiological standpoint it does more harm then good though.

I mean you could have your training produce better results come race day.

"Results", as in finish time.  Sorry, I was unaware there was some other kind of result that was a major concern for you on race day.  Nothing "squishy" about it from my view.

To try to be clear, IF you wanted to maximize your performance on race day then a 'big' weekend with a light volume mid-week is unlikely to produce the best results.  But if that training balance works well with the rest of your life and produces satiosfactory results for you in races, then you shouldn't worry about it.

Maybe we are beating a dead horse here, I don't know, but here's one other thought.

I totally agree that time between quality sessions is physiologically a good idea, for the sake of recovery, and thus better training sessions.  The point I'd like to suggest is that which training session is one's 'quality' session could be different at different stages of the training cycle, and could depend on one's goals at the time.

(Disclaimer:  (my training has included running only until this year -- so I'm totally experimenting when it comes to multi-sport -- and anyway I'm recovering from injury right now.)

For example, at some times in my training my hardest session by far is an intervals session that I run typically on Tuesdays, and the rest of my training was more or less designed around that session -- so I'd 'pad' it either side with easier/recovery days.  So if I were to do a long bike, long run, and intervals, I'd probably prefer to pad the interval session rather than the long run session.  Of course, logistics can get in the way, but I'd consider something like Fri long bike, Sun long run, Wed intervals, or some such thing.

Anyway, my point, for what its worth, is just that the sessions that require the most R&R might not necessarily be your longest sessions.