When should I schedule my long bike and long run?

Most triathlon training programs (including most of the programs I develop for my athletes) include a long ride and long run, to train the body to complete the longest distances one is racing. Though the inclusion of these longer workouts is ubiquitous, the placement of these workouts in the course of a training block is not.

Assuming that an athlete is working with a seven-day training cycle (which, though not always optimal from a training perspective, is often best from a logistical perspective), there are two general schools of thought:

1. Do the long bike and long run on consecutive days (usually on the weekend).  This is logistically often the easiest, and trains the body to “run on tired legs.”
2. Separate the long bike and long run by as much time as possible.  This allows for maximum recovery between these two taxing workouts.

I tend to side more with the second school of thought–the recovery benefit from separating the big workouts tends to outweigh the training benefit of doing the run with tired legs. Also, it’s very important to complete the long runs with proper technique, and any fatigue makes it that much more difficult to maintain form over the course of 2+ hours of running.

However, I can appreciate the logistical difficulty of trying to squeeze a long run into a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, when one may be working 8 hours, commuting another 2 and have family obligations. So, there’s no one obvious solution.

Here are some ideas I consider when trying to deal with this conundrum of conflicts:

1. Remove the long run from the schedule entirely.  Instead, increase frequency and duration of the other runs.
2. Do a double run on a mid-day week.  Instead of a 14 mile run, two 7 mile runs may be easier to schedule.  The training benefit isn’t quite the same, but sometimes this is better than the alternatives.
3. Do two “sort of long” runs, one mid-week and one on the weekend.  A 10 mile run on Wednesday and again on Sunday may be easier to accomplish than a 14 mile run on Wednesday and a 6 mile run on Sunday, or vice versa.  This has the additional benefit of avoiding the common fallacy of making one’s long run too great a proportion of one’s weekly miles.

In the end, there is no one solution to this problem.  It really depends on the needs of each individual athlete.  However, for coaches and athletes alike, it’s good to keep these sorts of things in mind as we plan our schedules.