How Much Training does an Olympic Triathlon Take?

Conversations about triathlons are interesting.  The first couple of minutes are akward trying to convey what a triathlon entails.  And then there is the obligatory, "Your body seems made for that kind of thing...".  Sigh.  Another person discounting the huge amount of work I have done to build up and maintain my fitness for this type of event.

So this post should give a rough idea of how much work it takes to COMPLETE an Olympic distance triathlon.  Granted some people have the time to work a lot more and some people are not able to work so much.  This post shows what I sort of commited myself to (can you "sort of commit" to something?)

Here are my totals as of January 1st.  I did quite a bit more work prior to this (5 months), however it is not documented...So this is the accumulation of what I have documented in this blog:

Training Sessions: 70 (approximately one training session every 2.5 days).  Each training session is between 30 minutes and 2 hours.

Gym: 28 trips

Swim: 14 sessions
     Pool: 10 trips to the Issaquah Pool.  Each trip I to the pool, I completed 1 mile (33 laps)
     Open Water: 4  There have been 2 open water swims in lake samammish that were 1.1 miles.  There was a .4 mile swim and a .2 mile swim.

Cycling: 17
     Most Cycling trips were along the Burke-Gilman Trail.  Most trips were more than half of the race distance.  I did two rides that were the full race distance, one ride that was 22 miles, and several other 14 mile rides (to and from work).  I am not going to do the ride to/from work any more as it is too stressful.
     I don't think I had any rides that were less than 6 miles, while most of them were 16.

Running:11
     About half of my runs are 10k distances.  I have a few 5k distances and a few short runs that took place in the rain and snow.

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