Pro Triathlete Training Week

It’s always interesting to hear how fellow athletes train. It puts your efforts into perspective and also motivates you toward better outcomes.

A while back I found Mo Farah’s typical training week hidden away on the net. You never know if these sources are really what the athletes adhere to, especially in the likely-to-be-secretive training world of Mo’s coach, Mr Salazaar.

Mo Farah’s Running Technique in Slow Motion

This time I have a good source and it’s Emma Pallant’s training camp week via Polar (who sponsor her).

I have sometimes trained in the same pool as Emma and her coach/mentor Olympian Stuart Hayes, although I have to admit to exiting the pool’s fast lane on their arrival.

Here’s Emma’s training week whilst at camp. It’s probably over 30 hours…try fitting that in around work 😉

• Monday: Key swim, 4-hour bike ride into 1-hour run
• Tuesday: Hard hill reps into a time trial on the bike, 30-minute build run-off, steady strength swim (more arm swimming)
• Wednesday: Key swim, 4-hour bike ride into 1-hour run
• Thursday: Steady swim, hard treadmill session (10 km of reps), steady 2-hour recovery ride on the bike
• Friday (easy day): Morning yoga with easy treadmill warm-up, easy swim
• Saturday: Turbo session on bike into a 2-hour run
• Sunday: Strength swim 3K, 6-hour bike ride, 30-minute run

This is likely to be in support of a 70.3 race goal.

You might be able to make out in the image above that Emma uses a Polar Vantage V as she is sponsored by Polar. And it looks like has started using Polar RUNNING POWER calculations from on the watch in her training. FYI Emma previously used a Polar M430.

As a slight aside. I also talked recently to LW from Coros (Coros APEX) and briefly touched upon how much athletes receive when sponsored to wear a sports watch. Clearly, Coros have more limited funds for sponsorship than Polar but the basic sponsorship amount was ‘very small’. However, the deal Coros made was tied into athletes’ performances in races to boost payments – I would imagine that is standard practice.

Let’s say we are talking single thousands of dollars of sponsorship per year – as opposed to tens of thousands. If you think about it the sponsor has to sell a LOT of watches to pay for the sponsorship. If you assume $50 profit per watch then that’s 20 watch sales to cover every $1000 of sponsorship – and that doesn’t include the costs of somebody managing the sponsorship. LW@Coros also took the view that a great many more people would buy a sports watch based on what a ‘significant athlete’ wore than would buy a watch based on an internet review…ahem.