This post may contain affiliate links that support the site at no cost to you.

This post is part of a beginner sprint triathalon training series.

So, I decided to do a triathlon in the spring! Not like getting this blog started is going to keep me busy or anything.

Here’s my story: I am a mid-30s mom. A couple years ago, post-COVID, I did a little lifestyle overhaul: quit drinking, joined the gym, improved my diet, started taking sleep seriously. The gym has been great for me! I joined a fancy one with good childcare options, and found some instructors I liked. I probably take 4-5 fitness classes a week these days, which is pretty good by any working parent’s standards. And I’m in pretty good shape! But I did kind of stop getting fitter about six months ago, and I don’t do as much cardio as I should, so I needed a little motivation to do something different.

Why a sprint triathlon?

Ugh, I’m not totally sure!

I run a couple charity 5Ks every year for this or that organization. I don’t like to run very much, but I’d like to like to run, if you know what I mean by that. For each of those 5Ks I tend to get out and run a little for the two weeks before. Never enough running to really push through the suck and start to enjoy it, so I never actually manage to change my opinion of the sport. I always finish the 5Ks and do okay but never as well as I would like.

I’m a pretty good cyclist and swimmer. I swam competitively in high school, so even though I haven’t hit the pool in a couple years, I expect that I’ll be able to get competent again pretty quickly. I love to ride a bike and wish I got to do it more!

So I guess I’m hoping that this process will hold me a little more accountable. I just don’t see myself doing a 10K or half-marathon, so this is a competition that I will truly have to train for, particularly with the running, but will contain the swimming and biking that don’t feel like such a slog.

The Sprint Triathlon Beginner Training Plan I’m Using

18 weeks is not that long, but it’s a long time to be grinding away at three sports. So, for motivation reasons and to have something to look forward to, I’m going to start with eight weeks focused just on running, then ten weeks of multisport training. (Someone who was weakest in swimming should focus their energy there first, etc etc!)

I am….like the opposite of an expert, and this training plan may fail miserably. But if it does, at least you’ll see that in my training logs and choose something else!

First eight weeks: 5K training

I found a great 26-minute 5K training plan online for free from a site called caffeinebullet.com. I had my husband check it (the man loves to run! Where did I find him?) and he said it was a solid plan. It gave me nine weeks of training, but I’m only going to do the first eight, since that ninth week is a taper up to the 5K that I would hypothetically be training for. (There are a 28-minute, 24-minute and 22-minute plans there too.)

So the first eight weeks of my training are going to be 5 runs a week, mostly easy. I wish I could tell you that I was overjoyed with this idea, but I am hoping that this kind of consistent training will get me to be a person who loves to run.

To the very best of my ability in this phase, I’m going to attempt a couple “bricks”–a run then a swim, or a run then a bike, as time permits. Since the run is my focus here, this will be limited to those easy runs and to days where I have the time!

Second ten weeks: multisport training

Here, I’ve gotta move into more traditional 5K training–3-4 runs, swims, and bikes per week. I’m planning to start with this 10-week plan for beginners from Triathlete.com. This is a much more classic beginner sprint triathlon training plan. I don’t know that I’m in love with it, (I don’t have enough information to be in love with it!) but I have no idea what I’m doing so I feel okay deferring to the people with the website!

I picked this one over a lot of the other plans that I looked at because many plans have swim workouts focused on drills. That doesn’t feel necessary to me. I’m sure that my form has slipped in the last 15 years of infrequent swimming, but I don’t expect it to be too hard to get back. And drills are not fun, and I’d like this to at least be a little fun. I feel like for a beginner, sprint triathlon training shouldn’t be down to cutting seconds or super-intense technique.

So, my run training starts Sunday! The triathlon is a good motivator, and I’m hoping having two stages of training will keep it from feeling like a total slog. Here we go!

(A side note: I generated some AI images for this post! I was mostly curious and reluctant to use personal photos, but I also sort of love the idea of looking back on this post in a few years and thinking, wow, that’s an unbelievably dated rendering. Just like the 00s graphics that seemed cutting edge at the time!)