Getting my Duathlon overall time down?

BMKN

I am in the middle of Duathlon season did my first last night of the year, in a year I managed to shave 6 mins off my overall time, my cycling has increased by 2mph and running has rocketed, the course is 2.7km run 13km cycle and 2.7km run, I managed the run in 11:10 cycle in 23:50 and 2nd run in 12:05, I would like to get my run down by a minute on both runs and my cycle down to 22mins, is this achievable in a month and is so how can I go about it?

ChrisSA

Good effort.

How are you training for each leg?

For the bike I'd suggest lots of FTP efforts - 2 x 20min, 3 x 15min and a few longer easier rides.
For the run you need to work on getting your 5km time down - lots of tempo and track work plus some longer easy runs. Plus you'll need to do some brick work - go hard on the bike then a quick hard run - 1-2 km at proposed race pace.

4 weeks might be a big ask as you'll only begin to see some improvement over that time, plus the last week will be a taper week.

danlikesbikes

^-^ good advice above.

For shorter run events & always a good session to get your leg speed up is the above race pace brick. Hard bike effort & off on an above race pace 1-2kms run.

Where I live getting track session in can be hard, but we have plenty of lakes with foot/cycle paths & easy to replicate track distances just use your GPS (sure you posted about having one before?) to work out where your 250m markers are. A good session for running speed and easy to do on your own is the pyramid. 1km hard run, 30's rest 4X250m run with 30's rest between each leg, 2X500m run with 30's rest between each leg and 1km hard and rest.

BMKN

well I do long spins with my triathlon group at a fast enough pace as often as I can, I do speed work twice a week and usually through in hill reps, for the bike I commute but I push hard so I use it as training, Running im using the 2*800m down to 4*200m sprints, my 5k has improved to 22mins as of the race yest, used to be 23mins, I suppose Ill work on running more than bike?

danlikesbikes

Sounds like your going in the right direction though if your times are down? For me was more about changing what I did in my run but not the time given to each. For shorter run legs (my local is about 2M each leg) was really about developing a kill short run distance. That and being able to get a sprinters kick which I was only good at for about 50M before but doing split runs with the shorter legs at higher than race pace I found that really helped.

ChrisSA

What Dan says.

Your track (or speed) sessions seem quite low on quantity. 200m hurt but only 4 of them may not have much affect. A 'standard' track session would be 10x 400 off 60s RI (4km of speed work vs your 800-1600). Including a WU and CD we do about 11km on a track night. Run wise you've got to learn to hurt, but don't get hurt.

The first run in a du needs to be paced well, but without going nigh-on all out (i.e. 99.7%) you're not going to put a dent in the field. Like Dan I found that I can final kick a lot further out than I thought.

mrc1

Loads of good advice here.

My only input is to plus 1 the brick sessions (I used to do a spin class then jump straight onto the treadmill) and ask what sort of distance you are doing running wise per week? If you are not doing much distance then my view is that you might be trying to build speed on too small al base but that depends on your circumstances!

Good work though well done.