This program can be used to spice up your training at any point in the season; winter, spring, summer or fall. This program should be used for ONLY the following athletes: An Athlete who has: 1. Three solid years of training – with at least 400 hours per season. 2. NO injuries over the last training season 3. Come off a season where they have already raced an Olympic Distance triathlon and they are looking to give their training a boost. 4. Consistently run 20 miles or more per week, for at least 3 seasons. This plan should NOT be used for the following athletes: An athlete who has: 1. Less than 400 hours of training per annum. 2. Has NOT completed at least an Olympic Distance event. 3. Has been injured during the last training season. 4. Has NOT done high intensity training before. This plan has 3 workouts per week, per sport and 2 weight training sessions. The weekly hours are from 7-11 hours. This program can be used leading into any of the other D3 programs such as the 12 Week Olympic Distance, Half or Full Iron Distance races. This plan is based on a non-traditional training routine – doing the power and threshold workouts first while you can still carry the fitness forward from the season before. In my training philosophy for experienced athletes, we do speed training 45 weeks (or more) a year. You don’t want to lose speed to any extent, and doing VO2 work early in the training cycle will increase your anaerobic capacity. It takes many weeks of speed work to see improvement, usually 12 weeks or more. Speed work must be done early in the annual cycle and before you add any other volume or longer-intensity workouts. The basic principle is that we are trying to get as fast as possible before we increase the volume. As an athlete gets close to a longer race (HIM or IM) intensity is reduced and volume increased. If the athletes don’t increase their speed to a very high level, they won’t get faster because they’ll lose some speed during the high volume phase. The common question is ‘what about the endurance, if you focus on speed early in the preparation cycle, will endurance suffer?’ For an experienced athlete the answer is that you don’t need more than 6 weeks to get your endurance back to a higher level. If I had my choice of coaching an athlete who has power and strength vs. an athlete who is ‘in-shape’ with a big aerobic base, I would rather coach the athlete with power and strength. And here is my reasoning: It is significantly easier to get a powerful athlete 'in shape', than it is to make an 'in shape' athlete explosive. The first will take weeks the second may take years.