70.3 training plan across all three sports

What a 70.3 actually asks of you

This is the distance where the run off the bike stops being a novelty and becomes the whole race. A sprint or an Olympic forgives a bike ridden a little too hard, because the run is short enough to bluff your way through. A half distance does not. It is long enough that a pacing or fuelling error on the bike gets paid for over a full half marathon, and short enough that you cannot ride within yourself all day.

So the bike leg is not the event, it is the setup for the event. What matters there is holding a sustained sub-threshold output for hours without decay, plus the discipline to hold a ceiling when you feel good and the road tilts up. Most people who fall apart in a 70.3 did not fall apart on the run. They fell apart earlier and found out on the run.

The run off the bike is a demand of its own

Running economy is measurably worse off the bike than fresh, and the size of that impairment tracks ability. It is largest in developing athletes and close to absent at the elite end. That is not a race-day quirk to be endured. It is a trainable gap, which is why the run is modelled as the run off the bike rather than as a run, and why a block can be built around closing it.

At this distance the gap has a particular shape. It is not only the first few minutes of unfamiliar gait. It is holding a pace you chose in advance for well over an hour on legs that have already done most of the day's work. Brick sessions train that, and they carry a purpose, a dose range and a stop rule like any other structure. An aerobic brick teaches the legs to settle and hold form when the stride is not yet yours. A race-effort brick locks the intended bike effort and runs off it at the intended run effort, which belongs late in the season.

None of them is a way to squeeze two sessions into one slot. They are prescribed when the run off the bike is the gap worth closing. Guided triathlon plans covers how the legs are modelled and how transitions get real sessions of their own.

Fuelling is a capacity you build, not a choice you make on race morning

At half distance you work long enough that intake stops being optional, and hard enough that you are asking your gut to absorb under real pressure. Those two things cut against each other, and that is what turns a strong bike split into a walked run.

The gut is trainable, so it gets trained. Your per-hour carbohydrate, fluid and sodium targets are personalised rather than copied, with a sweat-test workflow behind the fluid and sodium side. Tolerance is progressed across a block, in the sessions where practising it is realistic, so race day asks for an intake you have already rehearsed at that intensity. The race plan is bound to your course and your expected time on it, because a hot exposed day and a cool one differ. Afterwards, what you planned is checked against what you took in.

Three sports, one recovery budget

Three sensible plans stacked on one calendar produce a week that reads well and describes an athlete who does not exist. Swim, bike and run all want your best days, and there are not enough of them.

So hard days are spaced across sports rather than per sport. Quality sessions that each satisfy their own discipline's spacing rule and happen to land on consecutive days get refused and moved, because the recovery constraint belongs to you and not to the discipline. Shared aerobic development is trained once, in whichever sport carries it at the lowest cost, usually the bike. Run-specific work is protected rather than substituted with equivalent riding, because durability and economy in running are local.

How your plan gets built

Your history in all three sports goes in, and your thresholds come out of your own efforts rather than a table. Your course goes in, so the bike leg you are planning for is the one with those climbs and that exposure. Your available days go in, including the honest ones. The season is then solved backwards from race day through Prep, Foundation, Event shaping and Peak, the arc other plans call base and build, with a taper solved against a form band rather than counted out in easy days. The planning engine explains how a week fills once that shape exists.

What changes when your goal changes

The wizard asks what result you want, not only which race you entered. There are five levels, from getting to the finish to an excellent performance, and the plan's minimums move with the answer. Chasing an excellent result rather than a finish means roughly double the weekly training time, more sessions in the week, and a longer minimum run-up. Same athlete, same race, a genuinely different plan.

Those figures are floors for finishing, and they are destinations rather than week one. Nobody starts at peak hours.

When life gets in the way

Missed sessions are forgiven and never redistributed. Nothing gets stacked onto next week, because completed training is the objective and prescribed training is not. Illness suspends the plan and rebuilds toward the level you had really reached, then revises your race forecast honestly.

Small adjustments apply themselves. Anything significant, such as changing the primary focus or rebuilding a block, comes to you for approval with its reason attached. Pain, illness and injury are escalated for you to act on. This is training guidance and it does not diagnose or treat anything.

Questions people ask

Do I need a power meter for the bike?

No. Everything works without one, and the plan degrades the diagnosis rather than the planning. Perceived effort is first-class data, captured early in a session and again afterwards, because those readings tell you different things.

I want to go long next year

Then this season should be built with that in mind rather than reverse-engineered later. The Ironman plan sets out what changes when the day gets long enough that sleep, heat and fuelling volume decide the outcome.

My swim is far weaker than my bike and run

That is common, and it is usually a technical limit rather than a fitness one. A threshold reading alone will mis-rank it, which is why technique is assessed as its own kind of gap. The swim's real cost here is the state it leaves you in for the bike.