Hello, I signed up for the trial, in preparation of a middle distance Triathlon later in 2026. Have not adjusted much, limited Mon-Friday to between 1-2hrs per day (Mo+Fri 1hr, rest 2hrs, Sat/Sun no limit).
All good, but the structure Atheletica is giving me seems a bit odd.
Tomorrow would be for example a 30min Z2 run, 30min strength and a 15m / 800m swim.
Swim in general is split into 4 weekly sesssions adding up to a total volume of 2 hrs / 6km.
So far I did that volume in two sessions. Considering that you need to get into a pool, this adds a lot of extra time just to get there, while the sessions are realtivly short.
Also the runs with 30, 35 and 50 mins seem fairly short / split-up.
Is there a greater logic behind that? Happy to stick to the protocoll, but just wanted to understand a bit more.
(Bike instead looks more reasonable, with 50,70 and 130mins sessions).
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I would think if you are limiting your midweek days to max 2 hours then it will always prescribe shorter sessions, just to try and get all disciplines trained through the week.
Maybe try increasing it to 3 hours and see what the plan comes up with. If you are short of time one day you can alter the session or skip/delete it?
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Tried to do that, but I fear it still prefers to have a lot of relatively short swims in there:
When just scrolling a bit ahead, this becoms a bit ridiculous:
Hi Christian - of course you can look ahead to see what your plan looks like 4 months from now, but know that the plan adjusts daily based on what you “do” and “don’t do”, so most likely the plan will look a bit different when you actually get to that week. That being said, that week looks good to me - what is it about it that looks ridiculous? Too much swimming? You could delete one or more of the swim sessions and/or put two of the shorter ones together if you are wanting the volume….
This looks very similar to what I would see for my 70.3 training.
If you want to do more swimming, then extend some of the sessions and the coach should pick up on that after a bit and prescribe longer sets hopefully
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Thanks everybody! I think there is still a few things coming and maybe I need to understand the plattform a bit better. Still - a 18 minute swim (which is coming up on Sunday) is still a bit odd, considering that i takes a while to get into the pool and back.
Also 5 swim sessions (second screenshot earlier) seems a bit much compared to each 3x bike / run. But maybe its a special week and not the ordinary.
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From the looks of it your top screenshot is a recovery week I think? I’ve had those short swims put in before, I tended to just swim 1.5km easy as that’s about the minimum I want to do if I’m making the effort to get to the pool.
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Hey hey 
Thanks @jockefc23 and @cmaloney both of who have very successfully used Athletica for years for your help. Great suggestions.
Here are my tips for you @christian_ffm
- are you on mid volume plan? with your availability (Monday and Friday 1hr) Tuesday-Thursday 2hr and weekend open. I would delete time restrictions for Tues-Thursday. 2 hrs is plenty. Then I would manually move two shorter swim sessions to Monday and Friday (assuming you have pool available on those days). Treat those as lower neuromuscular days to recover from weekend training. Monday swim: technique and aerobic. Friday swim: strength endurance (paddles) and maybe some tempo in there before SE.
Tuesday strength endurance bike session is priority and if you can squeeze some kind of run: great! Wednesday and Thursday likely you have some form of hiit, and second session. Again, two hours is plenty for those. My point here is that you don’t need to tell the system you have two hours. Adjust manually if you don’t have time.
- Many shorter swim sessions: I wonder if you brought your historical data? I started also with very short swim sessions but I added two together (I would first complete the first, stop watch, save it and then start a new one. Recording two session. Machine learning will get to know you and what you can do, and will start extending those swim session after a few weeks. Alternatively you can manually edit the workouts and delete the once you don’t want to do.
- looking forward you’ll see many short sessions because system has not learned to know you yet. Once it’s learned you, you’ll see the magic.
Hope this is helpful, let us know if you have any other questions.
MJ
