Fitting it all in...

Ok, so this year I am tackling my first sprint duathlon (late April) and a couple of century rides, too...in addition to running a 25k, a trail relay, and a couple of half-marathons.

What I'm "running" into is figuring out how to set up training plans for these things. Even the more difficult plan I have for a sprint du is assuming that a person is training ONLY for that race...but 2 weeks after the du I will be doing a 25k and I think the longest run that du plan would have me do is about 6 miles. Training for my first century ride in the Summer and a HM a month later also has me scratching my head at how I should proceed.

I put together a rough-draft training plan for the duathlon, including training for the following 25k. At least one of those weeks would have me working out for 12 hours that week. Granted, I know time on the bike will be less of a physical toll than the same amount of time running...but TWELVE hours? Seriously. My concern is that my body is going to say "f you!" I think my max week training for my last marathon was about 10.5 hours of training...and I was feeling a little beat-up and burned-out by that point.

So what do you all recommend? Cutting back a bit on the running mileage? I had hoped to hit 1500 running miles this year (had 1800 last year, but without any substantial bike miles), but now wonder if I might be better off simply setting a goal of 100 miles on-foot each month. I'm guessing that the time on the bike can substitute for some of those short recovery runs, as long as I am still getting a long run and some mid-length support runs...is this right?

Thanks in advance for any insight/advice.

My LIMIT is to train 10 hours a week for anything and every type of race, sprint to HIM, some weeks are 12, some are 8, so they average 10, when I have several weeks in a row of 10+ I am wiped out and unable to work or train well, thus the conscious limiting to 10 hours. (am 39 and 10/12ths:p)
Unless you are a full time athlete with time to take naps in the afternoon and thus get more than 8 hours of sleep, I don't recommend too much training. On vacation, I DO train more, but I also take a nap everyday and don't do a whole lot else, no laundry folding, food shopping, class prepping, commuting...so I am not too tired. Life is a lot of work physically and training too much is draining instead of invigorating.

Yep, I think I'm going to scale back my running mileage goal from 1500 miles to 2000km (1243mi., heh), which amounts to about 24 miles/week on my feet, instead of 29. That will cut about an hour of training/week, right there. It will also make it easy to fit a rest day in every week, which I really think I will need. I don't know how people streak. My best friend did it with running for a while and ended up injured.

The first thing you need to do is prioritize your events. Which ones do you want to do best at? You have some conflicting goals here that are going to make it very hard to come up with a good solid training plan. Not to say that you can't do all of these. Just that you're going to have to realize that training for a sprint Du does not help you do well on your first century ride. And training for a century will impair your ability to be fast at the duathlon. You'll get it done, you just won't necessarily do as well as you might hope.

Doing well on a sprint Du requires power work and a lot of higher intensity intervals. A century requires lower effort but sustained endurance. If you train both at the same time, power and speed will tend not to improve as well as you might hope.

Once you've prioritized your races, you can prioritize your training. That makes it a lot easier to figure out what workouts are more expendable than others if you need to cut back your training load.

Also, you need to have periodized program that works in rest weeks. That way you can train more on your build weeks, then rest. This helps to prevent injury and burnout.

If you post you're prioritized race schedule, I'll try to give you some more input. Having said that, I'm super busy with my work as a PT and a multisport coach. So please forgive me if I don't get back to you.

I'm not so concerned about the duathlon/century issue--they are almost 3 months apart, so I will have plenty of time to build my mileage up for that long ride. My biggest quandry is running and cycling. Even the "faster" du program (from Training Plans for Multisport Athletes) I have found assumes that the athlete is not running much more than 2 hours/week. I have a 25k race 2 weeks after the du...2 hours wouldn't even cover my long run training for that, much less supporting runs.

What I think I will end up doing is all of the cycling workouts in the du plan pretty much to the letter, then extend the running workouts. I can't see running even the 2 5k legs of the du well on the meager mileage the plan I'm looking at suggests. I will still be cutting my overall running mileage back from what I typically do, but I'll take the weekly rest days that the plan requires. Better to be a little undertrained at this point than overtrained--that's never a pleasant thing.

This year I will see how it goes and maybe not do the 25k next year. It's not even my favorite race (it's the biggest one in the US, so it's popular locally, but I've done it twice, so it's lost a bit of the intrigue) -- a friend is doing it for the first time and I am going to keep her company, more than anything.

I used the century in my example but he du/25 km run pose the same issue. Is one more important to you than the other?

As for not running enough, if you can do some one day a week of about 8 km then a longer ride and another 8 km that will take you a long way to getting in the mileage you need for your 25 km run. I wouldn't try to run a 20 or more before the race if you've only got 2 weeks between the two.