We’ve all learned a few lessons from our time in racing, be it many years or a few years, that approaching a race where we want to perform well without a plan will likely lead to a sacrifice in performance and results. So most of us develop a training plan, or hire a coach, or pull a plan from a website and proceed on our merry way. Far fewer people track their adherence to the plan, or even track their training results in general. There are valuable lessons to be learned in so-doing.

For long course racing (Half Ironman or Ironman), the major determinant of performance is training volume. Training volume outstrips other “popular” factors such as speed potential, cycling power output achieved, increasing speed or VO2max, FTP and a host of other popular techniques. Why are other factors more “popular” and frequently more publicized? Probably due to one undeniable, unchangeable restriction, most age group triathletes simply do not come anywhere close to putting in the critical volume of training necessary to reach their potential in long course racing due to restrictions in their time schedule caused by “life!”  We are not professional athletes, therefore sacrifices have to be made, and these are typically made to our training schedule.

But it is also a known fact that tracking training volume increases our awareness of this factor and can (if not will) lead to increases in volume and by extension improvements in performance. There is no end-all method to charting this volume; there are a number of applications, websites and methods, including perhaps the easiest and most effective, writing your results down in a notebook! The important thing is that we do this! But what can we learn and how can we improve once we start collecting some data? This is another area in which most age group athletes fall short…”I have 6 months of data on Strava, but I’ve never used it to understand what I’m doing right, wrong, or to make improvements in my training and performance.”

QT2 Systems coach Jesse Kropelnicki provides excellent guidance on this topic. His simple to remember 9/8/7 critical volume formula is brilliant in its ability to give us a benchmark that is both used by the pros, and capable of giving age group triathletes something to work with. Simply put, the critical training volumes for long course races are:

• Swim: 9/3 of race length per week
• Bike: 8/3 of race length per week
• Run: 7/3 of race length per week

Let’s use the example of a typical age grouper training for an Ironman. Applying these formulas to Ironman distances yield training volumes of 13,000 yds swimming, 300 miles of cycling and 60 miles of running per week. For a pro, this indicates a time investment of 25 or so hours per week, and the typical age grouper would require 30 to 35 hours. (Read about or ask a pro at you next major race about their training volume, and don’t be surprised at how frequently the answer hovers around 25-30 hours per week) Need I say that the typical age grouper will likely fall short of this benchmark? However, and this is important, the age grouper’s percentage attainment of this benchmark will be the largest determining factor in her performance at the long course race for which she has already signed up! So we cannot simply throw out this benchmark saying it is not practically attainable!

My experience is that many age groupers put in 10 hours or so of training per week, or around 30% of critical volume. How does this manifest itself in Ironman? Very simply in the hundreds upon hundreds of participants observed walking the marathon. Without the penetration into the critical volume necessary, the body simply cannot sustain the effort required to run the entire event. Coach Kropelnicki believes a critical volume penetration of 75% can yield effective benefits in allowing an age grouper to perform at levels approaching their potential. Another observation of mine is that the athlete who approaches 20 hours per week (60-65% critical volume) during the key periods of training leading up to the event can perform much better than an athlete of higher potential or raw speed, who hovers in the 10 – 15 hours (30-50%) per week range.

My recommendation is to track your hours, and then take it one step further and compute your % penetration into critical volume. The higher you can keep this number, the better, obviously! But perhaps more importantly, many age groupers are caught off-guard by how much they have to walk in the marathon, saying they did not have a good day or assembling a list of factors that went wrong with the race. My belief is that you can go into your long course race with a better indication of how much walking you might do in the run portion, with a better understanding of how far short of critical volume you achieved during the key period 6 weeks prior to taper.

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