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Planning for perfection: nail your early-season peak

Written by Matt Fitzgerald and published in Triathlete Magazine

Last summer one of the brightest young American long-distance running talents to come along in a generation decided to train for his first 26.2-miler. As part of his ramp-up for the New York City Marathon, Dathan “Ritz” Ritzenhein ran a half-marathon tune-up race. He blazed to a 1:01:25 clocking and a third-place finish at the highly competitive Great North Run in England.

Given the fact that he achieved this performance without any taper and with a full month left to take his fitness to peak level for his assault on the Big Apple, Ritz looked set to run perhaps the best debut marathon ever by an American runner.

That’s not what happened. After a strong start—running all the way from Brooklyn to Fifth Avenue with the race leaders—Ritz faded badly in the final miles, crawling through Central Park to a disappointing 11th-place finish in 2:14:04.

This sort of thing happens all the time in distance running, and in triathlon, too. Athletes turn in a highly promising tune-up race performance only to fall flat on their faces a few weeks later in the peak race they really care about. In other words, they peak too soon—or not at all.

Why do endurance athletes, and especially the most competitive endurance athletes, so often mistime their peak? In most cases, I believe, it happens simply because they try to sustain peak-level training too long before their chosen peak race.

A true fitness peak is a delicate and ephemeral thing. Without question, the foundation of a successful peak is a lot of hard work; in fact, achieving a true fitness peak requires that you build your training to the point where you’re working absolutely as hard as you can (without harming yourself) in training.

But that period of maximum work must be very brief, or else your fitness peak will take the form of a great second week of peak-level training or a terrific tune-up race performance instead of goal achievement in your most important race. Competitively minded athletes get into trouble when they too crudely equate fitness with hard work and thus sacrifice quality of hard work for quantity of hard work in their training. (I don’t know whether this was Ritz’s error, and I suspect not, because his coach, Brad Hudson, is a genius. It was probably just a case of marathon inexperience.)

Striking a Balance

Now, I’m sure there are a few competitively minded triathletes who read the preceding paragraph as an argument against hard work. I am not arguing against hard work. To the contrary—I am arguing that you can work even harder, and therefore reach an even higher level of fitness, if you apportion and time your hard work appropriately. The benefit of limiting your peak-level training within the context of the overall training cycle is similar to the benefit of limiting the number of hard training sessions you do within any given week.

If you try to train hard in every workout, you will never be able to train as hard in any single workout as you could if you limited yourself to just a handful of key workouts each week and took it easy in your other sessions. You’ll come out way ahead in the long run if you afford yourself enough recovery between hard workouts to perform at a higher level in those workouts and to adapt more fully in response to each before taking on the next one.

The same principle applies to the full training cycle. Your training workload should be somewhat restrained until you’ve built your fitness to the level where you can really take advantage of a judicious dose of very hard peak-level training. This period of peak-level training should be short enough so that your performances are still improving when you sharply reduce your training workload once more to taper for your peak race. If your peak-level training lasts long enough for your performances to level off, you’re in trouble.

One of the simplest ways triathletes can avoid peaking early and subsequently going stale is to plan two separate fitness peaks per triathlon season—one early and one late. The typical competitive triathlete begins serious base training for the coming triathlon season sometime in January. Those who do are ready for peak-level training by early June but might not race their most important triathlon of the year until August or September. There isn’t a triathlete on earth who can build fitness steadily for seven or eight straight months.

Thus, a more sensible approach is to build fitness through the late winter and spring for a peak race in, say, May or June (or earlier if you started your base training earlier), then start a new training cycle culminating with a peak race in the late summer or early fall.

If you take it easy for a week or 10 days after that early-season peak you can build back up to peak-level training very quickly without much risk of overtraining or going stale. You’ll be able to get away with executing a very short base phase in that later-season training cycle because you will carry over a high level of fitness from the preceding peak. (But it will only work if you take at least a week to recharge the batteries after the first peak.)

The two-peak strategy may be adapted to various race schedules. You could, for example, travel to a warm place for an early-season peak race in April or May and follow it with a longer ramp-up for your late-season peak race, perhaps in October or November.

Whether your late-season peak race is more important than your early-season peak race or vice versa, or whether your early-season training cycle is longer or shorter than your late-season training cycle, the point is to increase your chances of peaking when you want to by dividing the triathlon season into two training cycles and thereby avoiding the common pitfall of trying to sustain peak-level training for too long.

The Three Ingredients of the Perfect Peak

Simply dividing the triathlon season into two separate training cycles will not guarantee that you peak when you want to. The perfect peak has three main ingredients. Be sure to include all three in your training recipe.

1. A Long, Gradual, Restrained Ramp-up
Let me be clear: The fact that competitive endurance athletes often train too long for a peak race—or, more accurately, sustain peak-level training too long before a peak race—should not be taken to indicate that the ideal ramp-up for a peak race is short.

To the contrary, a training cycle should last as long as you can continue to increase your training workload without getting injured or sick. For most triathletes, that’s 18 to 24 weeks, assuming the training cycle begins after an off-season break (hence at a relatively modest base-fitness level). In the case of a late-season training cycle begun at a high level of base fitness following an early-season peak (and a short break), 12 to 16 weeks of increasingly hard training is the limit.

Trying to ramp up to a peak level of training too quickly is no better than trying to sustain peak-level training too long. The way to ensure you are actually able to handle and benefit from the short period of peak training you do at the end of the training cycle is to build your fitness toward that level as slowly as you can without standing still.

A good model for the proper buildup to a perfect fitness peak is the hunting strategy that tigers use. If a tiger spends, say, one hour hunting an antelope, the first 59 minutes of the process consist of creeping through tall grass unnoticed to get as close to the prey as possible. The final sprint chase and catch lasts only a minute. While that dramatic final chase may seem like the most important part of the hunt, those 59 preceding minutes of restrained sneaking forward are really no less important, because they lay the groundwork for a successful catch.

The base and build phases of triathlon training are like that first stage of a tiger’s hunt. Patience and restraint are the watchwords as you gradually build your fitness to a level where you are able to pounce and really take advantage of peak-level training. Starting your peak-level training too soon is like a tiger starting his sprint too soon and bonking before he can catch his dinner, or rushing the sneaking-up process and warning the antelope of his presence before he’s within striking distance. Your peak phase of training should be a late, quick strike that takes advantage of all the work you’ve done up to that point.

2. Race-specific Peak Workouts
Your peak phase of training typically should last six to eight weeks, including your taper. During this phase, perform key workouts (in all three triathlon disciplines) that are highly race-specific, meaning they challenge your ability to sustain your goal race pace in swimming, cycling and running.

For each of us there is one week of race-specific triathlon training that represents the heaviest workload (workload = training volume x average training intensity) we can handle at our current stage of athletic development without destroying ourselves. When you plan a training cycle, you should have a solid sense of what that peak week should entail given your training history, present fitness level and goals. Schedule your peak week as the last week of training before you start your taper; in other words, make it the second-to-last or third-to-last week of training before race day.

Exactly one week of training at that peak level will suffice to enable you to race at your peak performance level. The mistake many competitive triathletes make is to hit this level of training many weeks before their peak race and then sustain it, which all but guarantees that they leave their peak performance out on the roads and in the pool.

While your peak phase of training may last as long as eight weeks, and while all eight weeks of this phase can and ought to be very challenging (except for one or two recovery weeks), only that final pre-taper week should constitute a no-holds-barred effort to absorb the absolute maximum workload you can at this stage of your triathlon career.

3. An Extreme Taper
The third ingredient of a successful peak, which many competitive triathletes also have trouble executing, is an extreme pre-race taper: that is, a drastic reduction in training volume in the final week to two weeks of training. A lot of triathletes train more or less as normal until one day before their peak race, then take that last day off and call it a taper. Twenty-four hours later they wonder why they feel totally flat in the moment of truth.

The problem, of course, is that it is very difficult for the training-addicted competitive athlete to truly accept the idea that rest can be beneficial for performance. Everyone understands this fact intellectually, but only a small minority of competitive triathletes embrace it emotionally, which is the only thing that matters when it comes to actually acting on this knowledge.

I was turned onto the practice of extreme tapering by a fortunate accident. A cross-country business trip forced me to curtail and cancel several workouts during the week preceding a half-marathon running race. Irrationally, I viewed this enforced extreme taper as a setback and arrived at the starting line wracked by the insane fear that I had lost fitness in the preceding several days. My personal best half-marathon at the time was 1:17:59. My goal was to run in the 1:16s. I ran 1:13:31. I have been an extreme taperer ever since.

Exercise scientists have performed numerous studies demonstrating the physiological benefits of tapering and comparing the effectiveness of different tapering protocols. It’s all very interesting, but it boils down to common sense.

When you cut way back on your training in the last week to two weeks before you race, your body gets a chance to fully adapt to all the hard training you’ve done and to rest up for race day. You should do more or less the same number and types of workouts during your taper as you did in the peak training week that preceded it, but progressively slash the duration of each workout.

The longer your peak race is and the higher your maximum training workload was, the longer your taper should be. A four- to five-day taper is adequate for low-volume trainers peaking for a sprint triathlon. High-volume trainers peaking for an Ironman should taper for two full weeks.

Following is an example of how your final two weeks of training for a peak Olympic-distance triathlon might look if you train according to my recommendations—and supposing you normally train on a weekly schedule of three swims, three rides and three runs per week. The final workout is a very short, very high-intensity bike session designed to trigger a muscle glycogen sponging effect that you can take advantage of by eating lots of carbohydrates in the final 24 hours before your race.

Two-week Peak-training Schedule

Peak Week

Monday

Tuesday

Swim: 2,800 yards — Main set: 4 x 100 sprint; 4 x 400 @ 1.5K race pace
Bike: 40 minutes @ 40K race pace (80 min. total)

Wednesday

Tempo run: 30 min. @ 10K race pace (50 min. total)

Thursday

Swim: 2,400 yards — Main set: 8 x 200 race-start simulation (100 sprint/100 @ 1.5K race pace)
Bike: 1 hour easy with 6 x 20-sec. accelerations

Friday

Run: 40 min. easy + 6 x 20-sec. strides

Saturday

Ascending long bike: 2 hrs. (Increase pace every 20 min., last 20 min. @ 40K race pace)

Sunday

Steady-state run: 60 min., with 40 min. @ marathon race pace
Swim: 2,200 yds. @ Ironman race pace

Race Week