On a Saturday in late April, Andy swam, then rode for three hours, then ran. One calendar day, three sports. It was not a one-off. Over the spring it became the rhythm: thirteen days with two sessions, three days with all three.
What made me want to write this one is the logistics. Triathlon is a scheduling problem before it is a fitness problem, and most amateurs solve it by quietly letting one of the three sports slide. Andy did the opposite. He kept the swim, the bike and the run all moving through a full spring of racing, two IRONMAN 70.3s inside five weeks, and let the plan referee the load instead of his ego.
There is a backstory to the aerobic patience. Andy grew up an ice hockey player, a sport that lives in the anaerobic, all-out-then-stop register. Since 2020 he has been training consistently to build the opposite quality, a deep aerobic engine, slowly pushing his lactate curve further out. A triathlon block built on a broad base is that project made concrete.
The ride that mattered
The structural session of the block was a rehearsal, not a race. On 26 April he rode a "Race Sim Ride": 3h05, 209 TSS, an intensity factor of 0.82. That is the bike leg of a 70.3 ridden at race effort, on purpose, weeks out, so nothing about the distance or the pacing would be a surprise on the day. A week later he did it again, 175 minutes and 201 TSS. The long run got the same treatment: on 23 May he ran 20.9 km at an intensity factor of 0.89, the kind of sustained effort that teaches the legs what the closing miles of a half-iron run feel like.
The shape of the build
His plan runs on a Pyramidal model: a deep aerobic base across all three sports with a layer of intensity on top. It ramped in two steps to a 729-TSS week, the heaviest of the block, then stepped back on purpose. CTL climbed from the mid-forties into the mid-sixties across the spring. Underneath all of it sat the swim spine, a masters swim that showed up most weeks and almost never moved, and a thread of indoor heat-training rides through May and June so that race-day temperature would be something he had already met.
Then, in late May, a head cold. The kind of thing that ends an amateur build. The plan cut the week back, he let it, and he picked the thread up again once he was through it. No heroics, just no panic.
That restraint is the quiet theme. Across the block the plan offered to swap a hard day for recovery seven times, every time the numbers said he was carrying too much. He took the easier session each time, and looking back, every one of those calls was the right one. The discipline was not in grinding through. It was in backing off on the right days.
What the score noticed
His Fitness Base climbed from 62 into the mid-seventies and held there. The Overload column tells the sharper story:
| Week | Total | Overload |
|---|---|---|
| 19 Apr | 65 | 63 |
| 17 May | 73 | 100 |
| 14 Jun | 69 | 60 |
| 21 Jun | 73 | 100 |
Overload hits the ceiling in exactly the two weeks he raced a 70.3, Chattanooga in May and Mont-Tremblant in June, where he crossed the line in 4:48, and settles back down in between. The score is not prescribing those spikes. It is reporting two race weekends after the fact.
The moment ahead
The next start line is Jones Beach, his A-race 70.3 at the end of September, about thirteen weeks out. Behind it sits the bigger ambition: a slot at the 70.3 World Championship, this year or next. The spring already proved the engine works across all three sports and survives a curveball. The summer is the harder test: carrying that fitness into one more race in the heat he has been training for, without letting the bike eat the swim or the run. We will see how it lands in the post-race numbers.
You can follow @andy-mcburney on Strava, or see his training at intervalcoach.app/p/andy-mcburney. If you want to see your own training this way, your Analytics page carries the same Training Score and history. And if you would like to be featured here, set your profile public in settings and pick a handle.