The Norwegians Are Self-Coaching Their Way to Winning. Can You?

For the past several years, triathletes around the world have taken their cues from Norway. World-beating Norwegian athletes, including Olympic, Ironman, and 70.3 champion Kristian Blummenfelt and Ironman and 70.3 World Champion Gustav Iden, have inspired legions of age-group racers to emulate their training practices, from double threshold workouts to lactate testing. But as Norway’s success in elite triathlon continues, are there any more secrets left for the rest of us to benefit from?

The surprising answer is yes. Late last year, Blummenfelt and Iden parted ways with coach Olav Bu, and they have since been self-coached. Their younger compatriot, Casper Stornes, who medaled at the 2024 European Triathlon Championships, is reportedly also self-coached, and even the greatest Norwegian endurance athlete of all – Jakob Ingebrigtsen, who at 24 has nine Olympic and world championship medals in middle-distance running events – guides his own training. And it seems to be working: In April, Blummenfelt won Ironman Texas in course-record time. The Norwegians are not the only ones self-coaching and winning. After winning Ironman 70.3 Oceanside, Lionel Sanders shared his self-coached training strategy.

Could self-coaching work for you, too? I’ve coached endurance athletes since 2001, and I know a thing or two about the benefits of working with a coach and what it takes to be an effective self-coached athlete. Scientists have rigorously studied coach-athlete relationships and identified several key benefits of having a coach. Succeeding as a self-coached athlete requires that you find alternative sources of these benefits, and it’s doable.

The 5 key elements to successful self-coaching

If you ask a bunch of athletes why they work with a coach, you’ll get a variety of answers – and they’re all valid. The top five benefits of having a coach are accountability, encouragement, expertise, perspective, and support. Finding ways to build these five elements into your self-coaching will help you succeed. Here are some ideas for doing so.

1. Accountability

Choose an accountability partner, such as a training buddy with whom you have an agreement to keep each other on track. You don’t necessarily have to train with this person all the time – daily check-ins by phone, text, or email will suffice.

2. Encouragement

Create an online athlete support group. Platforms like Strava, Garmin Connect, and MapMyFitness are great places for small groups of affiliated athletes to find community. You’re probably using these platforms already. Why not get more out of them by inviting a few friends to form a private group where you lift each other up through daily mutual encouragement?

3. Expertise

Get educated – or perhaps even certified – as a triathlon coach. There’s no better way to gain the expertise of a career coach than to learn from the same resources they learn from. For about the cost of a new pair of bike pedals, you can become a USA Triathlon Level 1 coach with a total time investment of less than 20 hours. Even if the only athlete you ever coach is yourself, that’s a worthy investment.

4. Perspective

As athletes, we have a hard time looking at our training objectively. This biased perspective can create blind spots that, in turn, lead to bad decisions.

To give yourself perspective, keep a detailed training journal. We all love data, but the best insights into completed training often come from written comments about how athletes experience their workouts. If you don’t yet keep a written journal to complement the data, consider starting. When you review your comments, you’ll naturally bring a slightly different perspective to them in hindsight. For example, a workout that you rated a disaster might, in retrospect, look like a decent workout you overreacted to. Sometimes the best “outside” perspective is your own perspective after time has passed.

5. Support

Prior to the advent of artificial intelligence, it was difficult for athletes to get the kind of planning support that coaches provide without a coach. But AI-powered training platforms like TriDot and Athletica take the burden of planning off the shoulders of self-coached athletes.

How to build a training plan

You can self-coach your way to triathlon success using a trustworthy training plan. Triathlete provides several plans specifically designed for athletes looking to accomplish a distance or time goal.

• 8-Week Sprint Triathlon Training Plan For Beginners
• Rock Your First Olympic Triathlon with This 16-Week Training Plan
• A 20-Week Training Plan for Your First 70.3 Triathlon
• Super Simple Ironman 70.3 Triathlon Training Plan
• Low-Volume Ironman Triathlon Training Plan
• Super Simple 20-Week Ironman Triathlon Training Plan
• Take Your Ironman to the Next Level With this 24-Week Training Plan
• A Triathlon Training Plan For Your First Ironman

However, you might find it empowering and helpful to understand how to manage your training programming to make adjustments to the plan or build your own plan based on your unique needs.

Step 1: Define your macrocycle

The training plans you create for yourself should end on the date of your next “A” race or the last race of your next competitive season and start when you are ready to begin a focused build toward that event. These dates define your training macrocycle, which should last between 12 and 24 weeks depending on the length of your race(s) and your initial fitness level. For more on training cycles, check out this article: How to Use Periodization in Your Triathlon Training Plan.

Step 2: Divide the macrocycle into mesocycles

Successful triathlon training requires that you balance work and recovery on various timescales. One way to do this is by breaking the training cycle into smaller mesocycles—three- to four-week blocks where the first two to three weeks are challenging and the final week is lighter. The table below offers an example of a three-week mesocycle.

Step 3: Divide the mesocycle into microcycles

As a practical matter, most triathletes operate on seven-day microcycles that align with calendar weeks. Creating a default weekly workout cycle, where you’re doing the same types of workouts in the same sequence each week, makes the training process more predictable.

The watchword for microcycle design is “balance.” You should do roughly equal numbers of swims, rides, and runs, which should be distributed as evenly as possible across the week. Your hardest training days should be separated by lighter days, and about 80 percent of your total training time in each discipline should be done at low intensity, the rest at moderate to high intensity.

Below are examples of microcycles for triathletes who train six times per week and nine times per week.

Step 4: Plan your peak mesocycle

Your peak mesocycle is the two- to three-week period during which you carry the heaviest training load and perform your most challenging workouts. The purpose of the peak training week is to put the final touches on your race preparation, which should occur just before you begin your final taper.

In planning your peak training block, choose workouts that simulate the endurance and speed challenges of your upcoming race. These workouts would be too hard for you to handle today, but manageable after you’ve completed the training leading up to them. Here are examples of race-specific workouts you might include in a peak mesocycle for an Olympic-distance triathlon:

Step 5: Plan your first training week

The first week of a new training cycle has a very specific job to do, which is to initiate the process of building your fitness toward full race readiness. To fulfill this function, your first week of training must be slightly more challenging than the training you’ve done or expect to do immediately before it.

Step 6: Connect the dots

The final step in the process of creating your own training plan is to fill in the space between your first week of training and your peak mesocycle. The idea here is to make each week a little more challenging than the one before, except for recovery weeks.

There are two ways to increase your weekly training workload: training more and training at higher intensity. It is best not to do both simultaneously. Instead, focus on increasing either the volume or the intensity of your training based on where you are in the training process and the distance of your “A” race.