My 2025 Triathlon Training Year in Numbers (and the Bike Volume I'm Not Proud Of)

The 2025 hours, side by side with 2024

I keep an annual roll-up rather than a monthly one, which is half of the problem I am trying to fix in 2026. Here is the year as it actually landed, hours from my Strava annual export with the prior-year distance figures where I have them.

Source: my Strava annual export (figures in kilometres). I treat any number I cannot point back to a device or platform record as unfit to publish.

What the bike number tells me — and why "WTF" is in my notes

158 hours and 2,693 km on the bike. The hours look fine on paper; the distance does not. My 2024 ride distance was 3,142 km. That is roughly a 450 km drop, or about 14% less riding, in the year I should have been building toward longer racing, not the other way around.

When I pulled the numbers, the literal note I left for myself was "WTF." That is the honest reaction and I am leaving it in. There is no clever story underneath it — I simply did not get on the bike often enough on the days where the run volume was high. The bike is the discipline I treat as second-class, and the data finally caught me out.

One nuance: hours stayed closer to flat than distance, which suggests slower average rides — more turbo, fewer long road sessions. That is consistent with a year where I defaulted to the indoor trainer when time was tight rather than committing to the 4–5 hour outdoor block that actually moves an Ironman bike split.

What the run number tells me

185 hours running is my biggest run year on record. It also lines up with what my lactate testing has shown me: I have been able to put more aerobic volume in under LT1 this year than I could when I was guessing my zones from pace or feel.

Most of that 185 hours sits well below my LT1 heart rate — that is the whole point of the Norwegian-style approach I am running, where the easy work has to actually be easy so the 1–2 quality sessions per week can land properly. Five quality sessions per fortnight, the rest of it slow enough that I could hold a conversation. The hour count is a lagging indicator that the model is sustainable for me.

What 50 hours of swimming says

Down from 61 hours in 2024. The drop is real and I do not want to dress it up. Pool access is the obvious culprit — I lost a regular slot in the back half of the year and never fully replaced it. 50 hours in a pool is roughly an hour a week, which is maintenance for an Ironman-distance swimmer, not progress.

My honest read: I have been lucky that my swim is durable. Open-water sessions in the summer cover a multitude of sins in a 50h pool year. But if my next race is wetsuit optional in choppier water, the gap shows up fast.

Why I am moving to monthly recording in 2026

The single biggest lesson from this exercise is that an annual roll-up tells me the answer too late to act on it. If I had seen the bike distance lagging in March, I would have moved Tuesday and Thursday evenings to the bike rather than the run. I did not see it until I sat down to write this post.

From the start of 2026 I am recording monthly, not annually. Three concrete changes:

• A monthly hours-by-discipline check on the 1st of every month, logged in the same place I track lactate-test results. Same source-of-truth file.
• A 2026 bike-volume floor of 200 hours — about an extra 45 minutes per week vs 2025, weighted toward outdoor long rides rather than turbo replacements.
• A non-negotiable second weekly pool swim, even if it is 30 minutes at lunch.

I am deliberately not setting a 2026 run-volume target above 185 hours. The run year I had in 2025 only worked because the easy work stayed easy, and adding hours to chase a number is exactly how athletes wreck a lactate-guided plan.

FAQ

How many hours did you train in total in 2025?

463 hours across all disciplines, plus 10 hours of walking I bothered to record.

Why is your 2025 cycling distance lower than 2024 even though hours are similar?

I rode more indoors and slower outdoors than I did in 2024. The hours barely moved; the distance fell 450 km. That is the honest read and it is the number I am fixing in 2026.

Is 185 hours of running a lot for an age-grouper?

It is on the high side of normal for a long-distance triathlete. It only works because the vast majority of it is below LT1 — under the threshold heart rate I established through lactate testing.

Do you train by hours or by distance?

By hours. Distance varies with terrain, weather and route; hours under specific heart-rate zones is the metric I trust week to week.

Where do these numbers come from?

My Strava annual export for 2025, cross-checked against my training log. I did not adjust any figure for this post.