The “Key to Triathlon Training”: Frequency and Repeatability

We’ve all seen athletes post some insane workouts. The details of them change but the concept is pretty consistent: grinding through a 6-hour brick session, collapsing in a puddle of sweat and gels, then posting a triumphant photo captioned, “No excuses.” Inspiring? Not really, it’s often just pseudoscience wrapped in clickbait. 

The truth is pretty simple, and existed long before triathlon was ever a thing: the best are not doing superhuman things daily, they are insanely consistent. Their secret isn’t a one-and-done max effort; it’s repeatable, sustainable training layered day after day, week after week, with just enough variation to nudge adaptation.

There is a famous quote: We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit that is widely credited to Aristotle, but was actually coined in 1926 when Will Durant was describing Aristotle’s work. 

Regardless of the origins, the core messaging is simple: achieving our best does not come from one single grand action or lucky moment. It is a result of the daily choices we make day after day. 

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The Physiology Behind Consistency: Stress, Rest, Repetition: 

Your body doesn’t improve during the workout-it adapts afterwards, during recovery. The classic formula is simple:

Stress + Rest = Adaptation.

The goal is to apply just enough training stress to stimulate progress without compromising recovery.

This principle is central to the General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) model in exercise science (Selye, 1956; Meeusen et al., 2013). In endurance sports, this means the best gains come from sessions you can recover from and repeat.

As Sylta et al. (2016) found,

“The most successful endurance athletes show low day-to-day variation in training load.”

What this means in a practical setting: 

Those insane social media workouts -the big one off days? When athletes do that the recovery needs are high. I’m talking very high. That’s why if athletes are racing week after week their overall fitness actually decreases by the final race. Because the recovery from that load is so high that the stress does compromise recovery (the compromise is needing a disproportionately long recovery time compared to the ‘gain’ of the effort exerted in the race). That is okay, because it’s a race. Something we taper into and rest coming out of. We want to be fit and ready on race day, not 10 days after race day. When we do this in training it means the amount of recovery we need from that “hero” session is larger than the actual stress, meaning no productive adaptation. 

Let's look at a couple triathlon related examples:

Day	Example One	Example 2
One	Easy Swim	Swim Intervals and Strength
Two	Mega 6 hour Brick Day	Three Hour Brick Workout Day
Three	Off	Aerobic- Moderate run and bike (not done as a brick)
Four	Walk, or easy swim	Moderate Swim, Yoga and/or Mobility Work

The load across example two is fairly evenly distributed in contrast to example one. None of the workouts in example two are similar to the demand of a race, and therefor need a lot less recovery time. In Example one, in order to complete the mega day, athletes need to enter it with a low load and take a large recovery time before they can resume normal training after.

Hero workouts might feel productive, but they often force excessive recovery time or cause compensations in subsequent sessions, compromising your bigger picture: cumulative load over time.

If we add up any metric someone uses to track training (TSS, Time, Distance etc) - there is no doubt that example two has a larger cumulative stress or cumulative load. The real way to increase fitness.

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A big thing to remember though is: Consistency does not mean Monotony. Athletes are not required to complete the same load week after week. In fact we want variability to encourage adaptations.

Repeatedly doing the same thing actually removes elements of the “stress” component.  Well-structured training still includes progression, variation, and tapering. The goal is to avoid boom-and-bust cycles that lead to burnout or injury.

What this will look like for you as an athlete is variable. Things like athletic history, goals, prioritization and more go into this. The main takeaway from this entire blog post is that consistency is the key. The fitness you bring into race day will be a result of the sum of your efforts - not your best or your worst day of training.

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The real summary:

Ignore loud voices showing glimpses of their training and neglecting the whole picture.

Just keep showing up for yourself.

Relentlessly prioritize consistency.

Save the "hero" efforts for race day.

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See you on the start line.