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How to Structure Your Triathlon Season for Your Best Race Results| The Triathlete Blueprint #133
- Yan Busset
- 15 minutes ago
- 9 min read
Read time: 5min.
By Coach Yan Busset
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Organizing Your Triathlon Season: How to Set Yourself Up for Success
If you want to get the most out of your triathlon year, organizing your season is one of the smartest things you can do. Why? Because it gives structure to your training, makes sure you have enough time to actually reach the goals you’ve set, and helps you build a logical sequence of races that support your main objective. Of course, real life is never perfect. Sometimes the race your heart chooses is not the most reasonable one. And that’s fine. The key is to find a balance between desire and reality, and to avoid the classic mistake of underestimating how long it takes to truly prepare.
Take the example of someone starting from zero who wants to prepare for a marathon. For the musculoskeletal system to be fully ready, for the tendons, joints, muscles to adapt enough to perform and finish safely, it takes about three years. Yes, that sounds huge, but I’m not here to sell fairy dust. I won’t pretend to have the secret 15-day marathon plan hidden up my sleeve. That doesn’t exist. So what we’re going to look at here are the general principles of building a season that is relatively optimal. Hopefully, this will help you make smarter decisions for your goals.
Choosing Your Main Objective (Your A Race)
First thing: choosing your A race. You need to be realistic with your timeline. Look at what the race requires. Is it a short, fast effort where performance depends on pure speed? Or is the biggest challenge simply covering the distance? The time needed to prepare for a fast 10 km or sprint triathlon is very different from the time needed to finish your first half or full distance.
Generally, the more time you have, the better. If summer is free for you, that’s ideal, especially here in Finland where long outdoor bike rides are way more enjoyable in July than on the home trainer in January. So aiming for an A race in August or September is a very comfortable setup.
If your race is early in the season, end of May or June abroad for example, then your preparation will look quite different. You’ll need to do long home trainer sessions, adjust your open water expectations, and accept that some parts of the preparation will be less optimal.
Let’s take the classic example: your A race is in August. Before a big goal, you'll have a taper period. Usually between 15 days and three weeks. During taper, you deliberately de-train to freshen up and arrive with high readiness. This is why you can only do a real taper once or twice a year. If you taper too often, you’re constantly de-training.
You can have two A races in a season, but only if they are very far apart. Something like one in May and one in October. That’s the kind of gap that allows for a full build, a taper, the race itself, recovery, then a second build.
Another element I like to place for my long-distance athletes is what I call the Big Training Day. This is done four to six weeks before the race. You can’t fully simulate an Ironman, but for a full distance, a day with one hour swim, five hours bike, and two hours run, with long pauses to eat and change completely, gives you a good reality check. And with four to six weeks before the race, you have time to recover fully from it.
Why You Need Prep Races
A very common mistake is doing too few preparation races. Triathlon is a weird sport in that sense. When you train tennis or golf, you play tennis or golf. A triathlete trains by swimming, biking, and running... but only rarely experiences the real sport. You never truly replicate swim-bike-run in real conditions. If someone has never raced before, they discover the actual sport on race day.
So it’s important not to underestimate shorter races. They teach you the ABCs of triathlon. Swimming in a group, open water starts, sighting, navigation, transition parks, on-course nutrition, and the mental side of switching from one discipline to the next. Doing several prep races is extremely valuable.
But they need to be included in the plan without destroying the training consistency. What I recommend is not doing a taper before these small races. Maybe a day of easy training or one rest day before. Not more. If you taper too much, you de-train. And if you don’t taper, something counterintuitive happens: you recover faster after the race because you don’t race at 100 percent. You’re maybe at 80 or 90 percent because of fatigue, which is fine since this is a prep race.
Sprints and olympic distances make great prep races. Shorter running events like 10 km or even half marathons are also fine because recovery is fast. Long cycling events are also good. Here in the Nordics, for example, the Vätternrundan (315 km in Sweden) or the Saimaa Cycle Tour in Finland are excellent preparation events for someone aiming at an Ironman later in the season. Even though the distance looks huge, recovery is faster than from a marathon because the muscular impact is much lower. Unless you eat the asphalt, but that’s a different story.
What I strongly advise against is doing a marathon before your first Ironman just because you want to “see what a marathon feels like.” A marathon is not without consequences. Recovery can take weeks. It disrupts the entire preparation. And the worst part: you won’t learn anything useful. A standalone marathon has nothing to do with an Ironman marathon. The intensity, the fatigue, the context are completely different. If you really want to do a marathon, place it at the end of the season. You’ll benefit from the aerobic base built during your triathlon training, you’ll recover from your tri race, and then you can do a proper running block. That’s how you smash a marathon.
Understanding A, B and C Races
An A race is your main goal, the one where you want to give your absolute best and arrive fully tapered.
A B race is still important, but not as important. You might do a mini-taper of one week. Not two or three. You won’t arrive at 100 percent, but maybe at 90 percent. That’s enough to perform well without sacrificing your main objective.
C races are pure training races. You fuse them directly into your regular training week. No taper. No special preparation. You just go, you race at the level of fatigue you currently have, and you come back into training normally.
The Specific Block
At some point in the season, you need a specific block. This is the time where you spend hours on your triathlon bike, you practice open water swimming, you do prep races, you dial in your nutrition. Specificity matters. And for this block, it helps a lot to have good weather. That’s why northern athletes benefit massively from having their race late summer. If the race is early, that block happens on the home trainer, or you need to travel abroad.
Constraints of Early-Season Races (Especially in Finland)
If your race is early in the year, long outdoor rides become difficult. Five or six hours on the road in March in Finland? Not the most pleasant experience. Doing this on a home trainer is possible, but after three to four hours most people have had enough. The same goes for open water swimming. Lakes won’t be warm enough early in the season. You can swim with a wetsuit in a pool, but you’ll overheat and it’s not ideal. If you’ve never raced before and you lack experience, these realities matter even more.
The difference between riding a watt bike indoors and handling a real road bike outside is also huge. Someone who is not comfortable on a road bike will need extra time to simply learn cycling technique and confidence. Same for swimming in dark Finnish lakes where you can’t see the bottom. Open water anxiety doesn’t magically disappear.
Adjusting Based on Race Distance
The principles are the same whether you’re preparing a sprint, an olympic, a half or a full. But the timelines change. A sprint or olympic can be placed earlier in the season because they require less volume and less time building the aerobic engine. A half requires more time. A full requires the most time, especially for beginners doing it for the first time.
Recovery
Recovery after big races is essential. Depending on the distance, it can take from a week to over a month. If you have two big goals in a year, they can’t be too close together because you need to recover, then ramp back up. Ignoring recovery is one of the fastest ways to sabotage your season.
Flexibility: The Plan Meets Real Life
Everything looks beautiful on paper. But then life happens. Work, family, sickness, sudden obligations. And that’s how it is. C’est la vie. That’s why having a B race later in the season as a potential backup A race is smart. If something disrupts your main plan, you can shift. That’s not failure. That’s the life of an athlete.
And you need to be careful not to be too goal oriented. Otherwise, if your race gets cancelled or you get injured, motivation goes out the window. We saw this during corona. There were two types of athletes. Some were so focused on their goals that when races were cancelled, they stopped training completely and spiraled down. And others continued business as usual because they simply love the training. They don’t need external validation. In reality, you need a bit of both. Races are excuses to keep training, not the ultimate reason for doing the sport.
My Own Season Plan (Because I Should Also Do What I Say)
To make this a bit more personal, and also to show you that I try to follow the same principles I preach, I wanted to share my own goals for the coming season. I’ve actually written them on a glass wardrobe door next to my desk with a marker. It looks like a detective board, but it works. They’re in front of me every single day. It’s one of my secrets for keeping myself accountable.
So here’s my season.
In March, I have a small personal challenge. I want to hit a good 100 m time in swimming. It’s a very short race, but it’s something I wanted to attempt a couple of years ago and it fell apart. This time I’m going back to it. A pure little challenge for fun.
I also have a health goal. Over the years, spending a lot of time on the pool deck coaching and not training enough, I’ve gained some kilos. If I want to have a full season, I need to get back to a proper race weight. But not just for that but more for a health point of view. So one of my side quests is to reach a good weight by May.
In June, I will join several of my athletes for something very cool: the Vätternrundan in Sweden, 315 km. A perfect preparation ride that will force me to get real bike volume into my legs. It’s one of those events that fit perfectly into a triathlon season and I’m really looking forward to it.
My A race of the year will be the 70.3 in Turku. It’s the big goal for our club, many of us are going, and I’m very motivated for it. Last year I was supposed to race it but had to push the goal because of a shoulder injury that kept me from swimming. Exactly what I talked about earlier in this blog: sometimes life decides for you. So this season, 27 July, Turku 70.3, I’m back.
And then I have a little cherry on the cake: a marathon in October. The bar is a bit high for me right now, but I want to challenge myself. And since it comes months after Turku, I’ll have time to recover and then do a proper run block before it. This fits perfectly with everything I explained earlier.
So that gives me 4 months to get ready for my swim challenge.6 months to reach my target weight.7 months before the big bike event.8 months before my 70.3.And 11 months before the marathon.
I’m typing this blog with those goals right in front of me, which makes the whole thing even more real. Now that I’ve shared it here, I guess I really need to do it.
I’ll try to document parts of the preparation on social media, maybe here on the blog, maybe on YouTube. Feel free to follow along on Instagram @yanbusset or check my YouTube channel ( below). And if you haven’t subscribed yet to this blog, do it. It’s updated every Saturday. And if you want to send a message or keep me accountable, go ahead. Sometimes the coach also needs someone to coach the coach ;)
Check out my Youtube Channel:
How to Swim Straight in Open Water Every Time !
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