Triathlon - Finally stopped talking about it...

My friend and I finally decided to start training for a tri. We plan to do our first next year. I have a few varied questions that i hope you guys and girls can help me on...
1) when I train, should i train in the gear I will be using on race day I.E. tri-suit?

2) I'm doing this on a road bike ( non tri). I just can't afford ( or justify at this point) a new tri bike. How bad will this affect me for the run.

3) When people train for these things, how often do they train each component seperately and how often together??

A little FYI, the first tri will be a sprint, then an olympic. I weigh 217 and am 6'0" tall. I do have a little weight to lose, but i'm pretty sure i'll be able to lose it during training. Oh ya, last q, where can I find a custom tri-suit. My work is sponsoring me, so I wanted to put there logo on my suit, thanks in advance...

1. Use your race day gear a few times during training workouts to ensure it all works, but you don't have to "suit up" every day.

2. Do some brick workouts, where you ride hard on the bike, then run. (Usually less than your full bike and full run workout distances) This will let you know whether your non tri bike is a big factor for you.
Note: That first brick hurts, but they get better :)

1) use your full gear every once in a while...just get familiar and comfortable with it. when you race is coming up, i'd definitely try it all out a couple times with all the gear...going so far as to practice transitions as best you can. for the vast majority of your time, just train with whatever...just get fit, build endurance, get strong, get fast, etc.

2) i don't care what people say...man, it does NOT matter what bike you ride. your legs are jelly either way!!!!!!! i have both a tri and road bike...i still feel like killing myself when i start running, regardless of which bike i hopped off of. so don't sweat it!

3) i'm not pro, not by a long shot. and i'm certainly no fitness trainer either. but i practice them mostly separately to start. i'll go run 10 miles one morning...then i'll go bike 40 miles another day...and then on a weekend, i'll go swim till i feel like dying because i suck as swimming. a week or two before the event, i'll do a run-bike-run trial where i do the bike and second run the full length of whatever the race is going to be. but i'll scale back a little right before the race to be ready. i wish i could do swim-bike-run strung together before the race, but i don't really have a place locally to do that...so i substitute some semi-arbitrary length of run for the swim.

good luck!

1) As others have said, chances are that your race kit is expensive, so wear your race kit a few times to make sure it doesn't chafe or anything. Otherwise, biking attire is fine (unless you'e running off the bike, in which case wear some tri shorts).

2) Invest $150 in some clip-on aerobars and a forward position seat post (either a zero-offset post or a Profile Fast Forward seatpost). That will get you 98% of the way to a triathlon position on your road bike. (The remaining 2% is the fact that the tri bike will handle better and be more aerodynamic than the road bike.)

3) Training time depends on (a) your personal strengths/weaknesses, (b) time of year and (c) distances in goal race. That being said, if you spend 40-50% of your time biking, 25-35% of you time running, and 20-30% of your time swimming, for a total of 6-12 workouts (6-18 hours) per week, you'll probably be doing just fine.

thank you guys. I just started lifting again, ( back injury) but have been able to bike for a month or so now, and I signed up at the local rec center to use the pool. So things are falling into place. It's nice to do squats again, but I can't believe how much that injury took out of me. I feel like i'm starting from zero.....