I am training for my first tri (olympic distance) in Aug. To practice for the bike leg I have been riding with a local bike club. We do road races once a week and Time Trials once per week. I have done 2 TTs so far. The first one I held back a little bit. The second one I went as hard as I could. Do you go at your max heart rate for the whole time? My calculated max is 182 BPM. My average for the 10 mile TT was 155. Should I try to push the HR up to 180? How do you get faster?

chevy57

There are a couple of loaded questions there. I'm just doing my first Tri, but have been training with heart rate for a while. So feel free to take this advice or not.

1) Do you go at your max heart rate for the whole time? No. There's no way to ride the entire 40K bike leg of an Olympic Tri at your max heart rate. What you'll want to find is your LT heart rate, the point where you are on the edge of going anaerobic. Somewhere around that heart rate is what you might strive to maintain, depending on terrain.

2) How do you get faster? Don't I wish I knew!! I've had best results with Intervals, Over/Under drills, and SteadyState workouts. The thing these have in common? They all train for power at LT. The idea is to make more power before having to go anaerobic, so you need to train right on that edge. Obviously, I'm way over simplifying, but that's the short version.

You mention your calculated max HR. The calculations for those are typically wrong, on the low side. I calculated mine and the output was something like 20 beats low of my actual max. So you really need to find what yours is through on the bike testing. LT is the same way, there are calculators for that too, but I found my LT a tad higher than the calculators suggested. It's a bit of trial an error, but well worth the time invested. And the plus is, while you're doing these tests you get to ride your bike!!

Steve