Top Triathletes Alex Yee and Hayden Wilde both ridiculously fast runners!

Triathlon. Heaps of expensive stuff. Need for expensive facilities. No Africans.

Cyclists train 30+ hrs/ week, triathlon 30+ hrs/week, runners train 15hr/week at most. I'm not gonna question what the best in the world do, but I have to wonder if running 13hr/week and adding 10hr/week cycling (actual intensive, tempo/threshold stuff) would benefit.

It would certainly raise your overall threshold ceiling, the question is if it would raise your running specific threshold.

Let's see you run a 13:29 5k Mister Fast Enough For Just Running

On the other hand you have thriathletes who turned pro in cycling. I am thinking of Okamika and specially Javier Romo, thisguy was competitive at world your level after having started riding his bike full time one year before

They’re not the only ones - Richard Murray has a 28:04 10km on YouTube, ran solo. The Brownlees and Gomez have done sub-30mins 10ks off the bike in races (triathlon courses are known for dodgy measurements, but these were World Cup races so I guess they’re close). Without a great run the big prizes of the sport are probably out of reach.

The best endurance triathlete in the world, Kristian Blummenfelt, started out in running - competing at u20 euro xc - and recently broke 7 hrs for ironman distance with a 2:30:50 marathon after biking 112 miles and swimming 2.4 miles.

He and his training partner and the other best guy in triathlon, Gustav Iden, both post a lot of their workouts on strava and do a ton of threshold stuff.

I think Yee could of qualified for the 5/10k track race. However, he is a better triathlete. Probably mostly because there is more testing and less drugs in triathlon

Remember seeing Yee win the English Schools' Cross Country by miles a few years back, he's always been a top runner.

Yeah it's what we call sarcasm. But watching the final leg of the Olympic triathlon, Alex Yee and Hayden Wilde clearly looked more like "real runners" than Blummenfelt which is what made his last mile obliteration fun to watch.

Super impressive to see these guys running so fast after the swim & bike. Just gets more & more impressive as the distances move up. You need to be running sub-70:00 to get the win in a 70.3 & sub-2:40 in a lot of IMs (when you get decent enough weather).

For short course probably 5-6 days/week of running. Something like 30-50 miles depending on where they're at in training. They're not running 6-9 times/week. Very few doubles in the same discipline. But they are going to be doing 15-20 sessions a week, totaling 20+ hours. Feel like more pure runners should be into triathlon instead of trying to find creative ways to say that these athletes aren't as fast as the best professional runners. That's obvious but they're still plenty fast and can hold their output the same way good marathoners can. A lot of them come really close to their open PBs after swimming/biking. The top-end of the sport is incredible.

Oh how quickly this sub has forgotten about Gwen Jorgensen, lol

Much respect to him, a world class athlete at top of his sport. I admit to being amazed by his physique, I would have not thought it possible.

B level Olympic standard runners go into other sports - triathlon, ultra running, etc.

💉💉💉💉

I do wonder if all this “cross training”, in fact, makes them faster runners than if they only did running training. Maybe fewer injuries while swimming and biking, while certainly making them cardiovascularly strong…

ITU and ironman pros get tested more than any other sport

Don't forget that US Olympic Triathlete Morgan Pearson is also a very good runner. He was always good (13:3x in college) but seemed to improve when he moved to triathlon. Something to be said for all the x-training those guys do.

Stockiest runner in history to run fast. If that's not a sign he's doped to the gills, not sure what is.