Bike to train for running??

Unless you are completely untrained, pretty much false.

Shane

Well I pretty much am completely untrained. I swim pretty regularly but I'm extremely new to that too. Perhaps I misunderstood what I read or maybe they were just full of s#&t. I don't have a lot of time to train so I am just looking to get the max for the minimum if I only have 45 min to an hour to train.

Going from completely untrained I actually noticed a huge improvement primarily cycling! I highly don't recommend it, but it will help you with your endurance without the impact of running.

For someone who is untrained, aerobic gains in any of the three sports are likely to help in the other two. However, once one gets to the point of not being untrained, then any further adaptations are going to be specific to the sport.

Since you are new to biking and running, it is likely that you'll be able to spend more time riding than running since 45 minutes for a novice runner is quite a long run but should be a doable ride. Depending on how long you are able to run, you may be able to add some riding to your run days for some extra training stress. So if you're running for 20 minutes, then you could add 30 minutes of riding after your run and still be in the 60 minute window.

Shane

Which is why I said "unless...completely untrained...false."

Shane

Are you talking on an occasional basis or as a regular training routine?

Running in general is harder on the body, but you get more fitness bang for your buck in a workout of the same length. So I would say if you "only" have 45-60 minutes to train, then you'll benefit more from running assuming you can run that far.

But ideally you'd be doing both on a regular basis, because there is nothing better than sport-specific training.

Well when I say "only" 45 minutes it's a lot less than that. I spend 10-15 minutes of that stretching, warm up and cool down. So that leaves 30 minutes total . I don't run for 30 minutes straight when I train though. I'll only run that long if I'm doing a 5k race, which I havent been doing this season. I trained for a super sprint Tri that was back in July. I had more time to train then though. I have another super sprint in two weeks that is very short. 200 m swim, 6 miles bike, 1 mile run' (yeah I know, probably the shortest Tri ever but 100% longer than sitting home on the couch.) I haven't been training as much as I've wanted to but at this point, I'm thinking the bike would be my best bet to make up some time, being that that is by far the longest part of this tri.

Yeah I know this tri is baby steps, but I want to be competitive before I move to the sprint level. At this point I want to see how close to the front I can finish because I have a tendency to raise the bar too fast and then just hover around the back of the pack. This time I'm going to get good at what I'm doing before I move up to longer distances. At this point in my life I don't have time enough to train for the long stuff.

Edited by Somnospeed 2015-08-23 2:27 PM

If you don't have time to do both, why not just do one and be content with that? If you focus just on running, there are a ton of events you could train for and compete in. If you focus just on cycling, you'll be able to find 'some' events, but the fields will be smaller and more challenging at first. It's not realistic to just train one and expect to compete in both.