Instant Speed Boost by Tidying Up Your Training Week

Being a coach comes with certain responsibilities, and one of the best ones is sitting down with an athlete, looking at the whole mess, and finding the thing nobody else noticed.

A while back, an athlete reached out after hearing me talk about training less but smarter. She was smart, driven, and had a good coach, so I figured her training was probably already set up pretty well and I'd just be tweaking her swim.

I was wrong. And her story is worth telling, because I think a version of it is happening to a lot of you. I got her permission to share it, with a few details changed to protect her privacy.

It Was Just Too Much

Her triathlon coach had her on a 15-hour-a-week plan. On paper, that's a serious, ambitious athlete's schedule. In real life, she had a demanding job and kids, and those 15 hours had to come from somewhere. So they came from sleep, from family time, from any breathing room she had left. She couldn't get all the sessions in. And the ones she did get in, she was so fried that she couldn't execute them properly. Hard days weren't hard. Easy days weren't easy. She was just tired, all the time.

And her body was starting to tell her so, loudly. Missed cycles. Bloating. She was losing muscle. Her hair was thinning. The kind of signs that deserve a doctor's attention, not just a coach's. And she was terrified to cut back, because every time she opened Strava, somebody she knew was logging more than she was.

What Is Stress?

So we sat down and looked at everything. I don't coach the bike and the run, but I looked at her week as a whole, because your body doesn't get to look at it any other way. And what I found was a lot of overlap. Sessions stacked on sessions, working the same systems over and over. Long aerobic swims on top of long aerobic rides on top of long aerobic runs. She wasn't building three sports. She was building one aerobic engine three times, and paying for it with everything else in her life.

Here's the part I had to explain to her, and it's the part I want you to remember. Your body doesn't differentiate stress. A hard interval set, a brutal week at work, a sick kid, a fight with your partner, a night of bad sleep, it all lands in the same bucket. Your body doesn't know which stress came from Strava and which came from your inbox. It just knows the bucket is overflowing. And when it overflows, you stop adapting and start breaking down.

So we emptied the bucket.

Cut It Out

We cut her swimming to two one-hour sessions a week, and I told her exactly which sessions to do, with the focus on speed, since her cardio was already coming from the bike and the run. Instead of a third swim, she lifted weights and did mobility work, which helps her swim and helps her body hold up to everything else. And I told her to cut back her run volume, to lower her injury risk and give her real time to recover and be with her family.

All in, her training dropped from 15 hours a week to about 10. A little over an hour a day on average.

She was scared. Scared she'd fall behind her goals, scared she'd fall behind her friends. I told her the time off wasn't lost fitness. It was where the fitness actually gets built, because adaptation happens in recovery, not in the session. She was still doing plenty. She was just finally doing it on a body that could absorb it.

She listened. And it worked. She hit her goal time. She dropped 10 seconds per 100 on her swim. She got her evenings back, and she stopped trading her health for her training.

The Fear Of Doing Less

Now, I'll be honest. Her case is extreme. Most of you aren't losing hair over your training plan. But a milder version of her situation is everywhere. The plan that looks great on paper and doesn't fit your life. The overlapping sessions nobody ever questioned. The fear of doing less because everyone else online seems to be doing more. The slow slide from fit to fried.

If any of that sounds familiar, you might enjoy a little tidying up of your own. Look at your whole week, not just your swim. Find the sessions doing the same job twice. Remember that work and family and sleep count as stress too. Then cut until your body can absorb what's left.

Triathlon training doesn't have to wreck your life to make you fast. For a lot of people, the fastest thing they'll ever do is train less.

And if you've got your own situation you want me to look at, send it in. Maybe we'll make an inspirational story out of you too.

‍