Potential and triathlons (Page 2)

Well, consider that the people who wrote the training plans on here sort of know what they are doing. I"m assuming you are talking about the fact that they do not have enough swim volume. You are swimming 5x a week. But most triathletes, esp. beginners do not necessarily swim that many times a week. Most plans are set up to give you volume in each sport that prepares you for the percentage of time you are going to be spending on each sport during the race. The swim is the smallest piece of the race. Swimming 3x a week will give most people a pretty good base and will maintain fitness for better swimmers. If you want to continue to IMPROVE your swim, then you'd swim more, but those sorts of things are better to do in the off-season, I think. I'm a decent swimmer; I've seen some good gains swimming 3x a week.

Um, no one says you have to follow the plan to the letter. If the swim workouts they prescribe are "too easy", substitute in your own swim plan and just tailor it to the number of minutes or yardage they have - the BT police aren't going to come and pull you out of the pool for doing different drills If the biking is too hard, it means that you probably need to build your bike base/strength. Biking is certainly my worst sport. And really the only way to get better is to RIDE LOTS. I try to ride lots and following a plan has helped. This week I've sort of fallen off the wagon but if you look at my graphs for the last couple of weeks, the bike takes up a big chunk. And again, if you can't handle all the bike drills, then do what you can. Simply building volume will help you gain some strength if you do not have a cycling background. And biking can take years to get really good at, as most around here will tell you.

You seem to REALLY like to swim and that's great. However, there is a saying around here that says "traing your weaknesses, race your strengths". So if you had to cut back on training volume in a sport in order to work more on something you were less good at, swimming would be the first thing to go, imho. But since you're on a team (and I'm gathering that you're pretty young, high school or college) that's not possible unless you quit. So you're going to have to prioritize if you want to do well in this sport. It's not easy to get the balance right sometimes, or at least within that balance be doing the right things. I recently picked up some good tips for bike drills on the trainer, which I plan to incorporate asap and through the winter.