Question about the programm 20 week Olympic Distance

Since the free programs are just volume builders, the leave it to the individual user to determine pace. That way they are applicable to anyone who wants to use the plan as a "complete, not compete" type of plan. For me personally, I've been doing the 16week bike focused for my early season ramp-up to a race this weekend.
My approach has been to incorporate as much interval work onto the bike sessions as I could, since I was doing those almost solely on the trainer in the winter months.
For the runs, I've almost always been a Z2 runner for my training (with pretty good gains as a result in previous seasons), and so I continued to do that and adjusted the minutes to build at 10%/week from where my fitness was in week 1. This resulted in a lot more running minutes than the plan had, but was tailored for my fitness level.
I've left out most of the swimming in lieu of an additional run session each week. I have a background in swimming, and since this early-season race is only a pool swim anyway, my swim training can be next to nothing and still put me in the FOP.

So, if you truly are just looking to build volume with the plan then you can do the minutes as prescribed at lighter effort and end up being able to complete the race. If you are looking to hit certain time benchmarks then you may need to adapt parts of the plan to be more speed-focused (such as bike and/or run intervals and things like that). All of that depends on your personal fitness levels and goals for the race, of course.

Edited by CycloneVM 2014-04-23 10:41 AM

Thank you very much Mr Veteran

I'll train then always in Z2, This is a great recommendation.

Cheers

Carlos