Welcome to the Training Tips homepage for all Castle Race Series events. The Top Tips on this page are suitable for competitors one month out from their race.
Using our extensive experience coaching athletes of all levels of ability we have put together our top training tips for novice, intermediate and advanced levels of athletes.
As always, if you have any questions regarding training or racing then please don’t hesitate to get in touch and arrange a free coaching consultation with one of our professional coaches.
Select your level below to be taken to the most appropriate training tips for you:
Swimmer Tips
If you have signed up for one of these open water races, you need to consider the open water swim skills to make your life easier.
So far, we will have focussed on getting up to swim distance and being comfortable with the conditioning of going that distance. Next, the aim is to make you comfortable in the open water.
The single most important skill is navigation: this is achieved through good sighting. Unlike a pool, you will need to look up and see where you are going. This can be practised in the pool but should also be done outdoors too. In the beginning, sighting may feel like it adds fatigue. However, if you swim in a straight line, you swim the shortest route and will end having a faster time and being less tired! The most common comment is, “The swim course was wrong – I swam 2,200m for a 2,000m route." Now you know how important sighting is, you can see where the swimmer may have gone wrong!
Runner Tips
Aside from the city half marathon or marathon, run racing is usually a fairly low budget affair. When you attend a race at one of the Castle Triathlon Series, it may come across as a very significant race with all the bells and whistles, which can be quite intimidating. Furthermore, there can be a lot of kit in triathlon events, and people look a lot more serious than they are.
Don’t be put off by this – focus on your challenge ahead of you and look forwards to it. Ignoring the seeming enormity of the event means we should focus on your event. A running event will require less equipment, is easier to pack for and usually means less faff, but don’t let that mean you turn up unprepared. Make sure you know about the event logistics, where to go, where parking is, what time you are off and allow plenty of extra time for both a warm-up and the time in the portaloo – there are always huge queues!
Finally, make sure you know your route. It will be easy to get distracted in the heat of the moment and lose track of where you are, which lap you are on or other useful pieces of information. Knowing where you are on the course will mean you know where the hills are, the technical sections, or where the wind is coming from. The more you know the loop, the easier it is. If you have the time, try and walk parts of the course as well. The more you know in advance, the less overwhelmed you will be and the more you can focus on enjoying yourself. Use this month to have the ‘home ground’ advantage.
Triathlete Tips
One month to go, and it may be you are starting to get a little nervous about the big day. The great news is that those nerves are a sign of great expectations.
Now is a great time to work on your transitions. This can be broken into two areas: are you comfortable with the physiological change in effort; and, are you happy with the action of changing sports?
If we consider the physiological changes, they can be prepared for by running for 5-minutes off every bike session you do to help you get rid of that feeling of jelly legs when you run off the bike. It is harder to prepared for that swim-bike sensation in training. One tip is to focus on kicking harder in the final hundred metres to move blood to the legs. When moving from bike to run, spin easier for the final 5-10 mins and a little faster to help make that transition into the run.
Practising the actual process of transition is a huge time-saver. This may mean at the end of any open water swim practice where you are wearing your wetsuit; you strip off the wetsuit in as quick a time as possible to practice taking it off. You can practice running with your bike, mounting your bike with a scoot mount or flying squirrel, as well as rehearsing the dismount too. You will also want to consider elastic laces for your running shoes to make the change to running clothes as quick as possible.
If you have a trainer and a safe place to practice, multiple repeats of bike-run-bike can really make the difference to both your tasks in transition as well as normalising the feeling. The skills of good transitions are practice and simplification.
Tips for a swimmer, runner or triathlete:
Tapering has similarities no matter which sport you are doing, so we have merged these tips to help all the sports learn from one another. Just substitute your sport in the place of others!
Tapering is often considered a mystery by many people. Still, the principle is straightforward: reduce your training load and enable your body (and mind) to recover, which means you perform in a fresher state. The mystery is how to balance this without losing fitness or performance by becoming stale or undertrained.
There are four main types of taper:
Volume reduction – if you normally do a 1-hour run, do a 45 min run or 30-minute run.
Intensity reduction – if you normally do 100m reps in the pool at maximum effort, make them threshold.
Do nothing – You really slow down and do very little in the final stages of the plan.
Panic taper – you realise you are racing in four weeks, and the reality means you need to do more training!
Options 1&2 are reducing load moderately; option 3 significantly reduces load, and option 4 is hopefully not the state we are in now! Most coaches will prefer option 1, looking at reducing volume by 25-50% in the final couple of weeks of training. This is because it keeps the intensity while reducing the overall time training. This will result in more time for the athlete to recover; it will fire the different energy systems. Therefore, check everything is working as it is and reinforce a feeling of getting faster – the sessions will become easier.
The balance of feeling fresh and not becoming stale is the hardest part to replicate, which is often the most difficult to get right. Depending on the distance you are racing, this could start 3 weeks out or only a matter of days. Some people prefer to be fresher than others, and almost all athletes hate the waiting around! one way to combat this is to keep the frequency of training sessions reasonably high so that the athlete is still doing training but not having the time to go too hard in the session. If you swim three times a week, we may look at reducing the distance or duration of those swims, so you don’t feel that you have had time out of the water. We'd look at telling athletes to finish a normal workout, knowing they could do the same again, but choosing not to. If you were doing 400m repeats on the track, you may get closer towards race week and know you could do more before you are knackered but deliberately choosing to stop there. Save it for race day.
As you make your journey through the sport, take the time to see what you do in training and nutritionally before each race and see if you can identify a pattern of successful races or ones that didn’t quite go to plan – this will help you personalise and refine your taper. Good luck!
Swimmer Tips
Reaching the final few weeks of an open water swimming training plan, there is a sudden change in focus. Last month we spoke about the key open water skills like navigating, drafting and swimming in a straight line.
As we reach the final stages, your conditioning should be coming together nicely, and you should be comfortable going the distance and be able to apply a change of speed when required. Now let’s consider some of the final training skills you could practice, which will add finesse to your training:
Practice swimming around a mark or buoy
Practice swimming in a group – can you start on the left side and end up on the right side of it?
Can you lead people the wrong way and then change direction creating a gap?
Can you do open water fartleks (speed plays) where you change your speed effectively?
Can you do deep water starts?
All these are usually done best with others and practising the skills in a group. It can be a lot of fun – which is an ideal environment for learning. Find a group of friends and practise swimming in the smallest areas you can; you will find your open water skills and confidence in the water skyrocket in preparation for your big day.
Runner Tips
Classically, with spring marathons in April, March is the busiest time of year for physios as athletes come in with injuries only a month out from their main race.
Now is a crucial time for most training programmes: there are big training weeks and key workouts. However, these big sessions often ignore the increased risk of injury, especially in running. Now is the time where we would urge runners to keep an eye firmly on how they are feeling, keeping track of any niggles or injuries that feel ok to run through and making a call on if it is better to see a physio before it becomes an injury or if it is ok just to run through.
This may be a high-risk decision for an athlete and one that we have seen athletes make incorrectly time and time again, especially when they make a move up to competing rather than completing events. Each session can seem significantly important – and they are, but they are part of a plan. Moving the session by a day or skipping it may mean you can rehab any tiredness and niggles and continue running all the way into the event. Ignoring them may spell disaster. Listen to your body.
Triathlete Tips
Above we talked about the theory of tapering – it may be worth checking back over it if you want a recap.
If you have been in the sport long enough, you will have ha some great results, and some less great results. With a taper, the idea is to replicate the great ones and avoid the bad ones.
Look back at all your noticeable races (both good and bad) and try and recollect what you did in the lead up to the event (training, rest and nutrition) and the morning of the event. You may want to consider the general state you were in from a "life" perspective as well – had you come back from a holiday, were you working flat out? You then need to identify the common factors of both the good races and the bad ones. If you have a training diary (we use Training Peaks) you can use objective measurements of data with their metrics in training load and balance (fitness and form) values to work out how fatigued you were. You can manipulate these values in the lead up to your race, and replicate your nutrition and lifestyle plan to ensure you feel "awesome" and perform every single time.
If you have yet to have a truly successful race, perhaps there is a chance to see if you can tweak some of the metrics, or try something different and notice any change. It may be that changing something deliberately in the lead up to the race can have a significant impact on your race. Make sure you do so deliberately so you can learn from this experience.