Race-Pace Build Training Method Explained

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Your weekly hours9h

Needs 10h+. Under 10 h the race-pace sessions are too large a share of the week to be surrounded by easy days.

Where the time goes

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Share of weekly time. Race pace is below threshold, so nearly all quality sits between LT1 and LT2 and none above it.

A representative week

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Across all three sports.

Mon

Swim 50 min2,600 m aerobic and technique. No quality — this is a recovery day with a pool in it.

Tue

Bike 115 min20 min build, 3 × 25 min at 200–210 W (this athlete's own 70.3 power) with 5 min at 160 W between them, 10 min easy.

Run 20 min off the bikeStraight off, at goal 70.3 run pace 4:55/km. Written as a brick on purpose.

Wed

Run 55 minGenuinely easy. High modulation is part of the method — this day exists so Tuesday and the weekend can be real.

Swim 45 min2,400 m aerobic. Swim goes first if it shares a day with anything else.

Thu

Swim 60 min3,000 m including 5 × 400 at 1:43–1:45/100 (goal 1,900 m race pace) off 30 s.

Bike 60 minEasy spin, AM/PM split from the swim where possible.

Fri

Rest

Sat

Bike 3 h 302 × 45 min at 200–205 W, the bottom of the race-power band, inside a long steady ride with the rest at 60–65% FTP.

Run 25 min off the bikeAt 5:01/km — 98% of goal pace. Extends to 40 min over the block at the same pace.

Sun

Run 100 min30 min easy, 4 × 10 min at 4:55–5:01/km with 5 min at 5:39/km (85%) between them, 15 min easy. In the weeks containing a big day, this or Saturday is cut and four to five easy days follow.

What Tuesday looks like

Bike 115 min: 20 min build, then 3 × 25 min at 200–210 W with 5 min at 160 W between them, 10 min easy. Straight off the bike, run 20 min at 4:55/km. Both numbers come from this athlete's last 70.3 rather than from a zone chart — 205 W is the power they actually held for a 2 h 40 bike split, and 4:55/km is what they actually ran off it. The percentages are only a readback: 205 W is 82% of a 250 W FTP, and 4:55/km is 35 s/km slower than their run threshold. If they have never raced the distance, say so, widen both bands and start at the bottom of them. The bike blocks lengthen across the block — 3 × 25 min becomes 3 × 35 min, then 2 × 60 min — at the same power.

Signature sessions

EXTENSIVE RACE-POWER BIKE (the core session, and the most valuable transfer). Start the block at 3 × 25 min at goal race power with 5 min easy between, and extend toward 2–3 h of accumulated race-power work in one ride by the end. For a 250 W FTP athlete whose own race file supports it, that is about 200–210 W for a 70.3 bike split under 2 h 45 and 165–185 W for an Ironman. The power does not change across the block; the duration does.

LONG RUN WITH RACE-PACE SEGMENTS. 100 min: 30 min easy, then 4 × 10 min at 98–100% of goal race pace with 5 min at 85% between them, 15 min easy. For a 4:55/km goal that is 4:55–5:01/km with floats at 5:39/km. The float is a run, not a jog. Extend the segments to 4 × 15 min inside the same 120 min, then to 3 × 25 min at 130 min — and no further, because 150 min is the ceiling on any long run.

BRICK RUN AT RACE PACE. 20–30 min off the bike at 98–102% of goal run pace — 4:49–5:01/km for a 4:55/km goal. This is the session that tells you whether the goal pace is real. Do not run bricks at threshold: off-the-bike neuromuscular cost means a threshold brick delivers VO2max-level fatigue for threshold-level benefit.

SWIM RACE-PACE SETS. 5 × 400 at goal 1,900 m pace off 30 s, or 10 × 200 at 103% off 20 s. For a 1:40/100 CSS athlete, goal race pace is around 1:43–1:45/100 and the 103% set is about 1:41/100 — still under CSS.

BIG DAY (the triathlon form of Canova's special block). AM: 3 h 30 ride with 3 × 40 min at goal race power, which is two hours of race-power riding in one ride. PM: 45 min run with 25 min at goal race pace, written as a separate run hours later and not as a brick. Two or three of these in the whole block, 2–4 weeks apart. The big day replaces the week's other specific sessions rather than joining them, and is followed by four or five days with no quality work at all — Canova's own instruction after a large specific session is four to five easy days.

WHAT IS DELIBERATELY ABSENT: VO2max intervals, hill repeats, threshold running, and Canova's own run sessions. His 3 × 7 km at 103% with 1 km floats is 23 km including the floats, all of it specific. No triathlete carrying a bike load runs it.

Who it suits

Athletes in the last two or three months before one target race, training 10 h/week or more, who have raced this distance before and can say what their run split actually was. It suits people who are aerobically strong but fall apart at race intensity late — who ride well for three hours and then cannot hold the target for the fourth. It suits anyone whose training has drifted into a set of zones with no relationship to the day they are training for: this method makes every quality session answerable to one number. It suits long-course athletes with a big bike engine especially well, because the bike is where the race-pace volume goes and where the extension logic works cleanly. It also suits athletes who race the same event annually, since goal pace is then a known quantity rather than a guess.

Not for you if

Anyone without a defensible goal pace. The whole system hangs off a number you must set before you have earned it, and a 3–5% error turns every "98% of race pace" session into a threshold effort — the block collapses in three or four weeks and the athlete concludes they were undertrained. Anyone more than 12 weeks from their race; Form blocks this and redirects to Balanced. Anyone under 10 h/week. Anyone who wants the same week all year, since there is no goal pace to anchor to outside a race build. First-time long-course athletes, who have no prior split to anchor to and typically overestimate by more than the method can absorb. Athletes with recurrent bone-stress or soft-tissue injury — sustained work at 95–105% of race pace is punishing even at the triathlon-reduced run volumes. Athletes who cannot take four or five genuinely easy days after a large session, whether from schedule pressure or temperament. Athletes with several closely spaced races, since there is no single pace to anchor to. And athletes who need the reassurance of covering the full race distance in training: these long sessions are fast, not long.

In a triathlon week

The framework transfers cleanly; the sessions do not. Curation cut the run volumes entirely and kept only the percentage-of-goal-race-pace anchoring, which is the one idea in the picker that changes what target goes on a workout rather than how much of it there is.

BIKE — this is where the method lives. Goal race power is a real, measurable, individual number taken from the athlete's own race file, and "extension of quality" maps onto it exactly: start with 3 × 25 min at race power and extend toward two or three hours of accumulated race-power work in a single ride. Nothing else in the picker gives you a principled way to build long-course bike specificity.

RUN — the hard requirement. Anchor to projected triathlon run pace, never open-running pace. Use the athlete's own prior splits from the same distance; without them, state the uncertainty and widen the band, assuming a 15–30% age-group gap. Keep specific run work to brick runs and moderate race-pace segments, using no more than about two-thirds of the run allowance because of the bike load. Bricks are run at goal race pace or easy, never at threshold.

SWIM — the percentage framework works with goal pace per 100 as the reference, but Canova has no swim method and the fast-recovery construct is already ordinary pool practice under other names. Do not over-engineer it: race-pace sets off short rest, and leave it there.

BIG DAY — the special block becomes the triathlon race-simulation day, which long-course athletes already do. What Canova adds is a principled dose: two or three per block, 2–4 weeks apart, with several easy days afterwards.

What the evidence says

SUPPORTED. Anchoring prescription to the athlete's own goal pace is individually valid by construction and sidesteps the population-average-zone problem entirely. Progressive and variable-pace long runs are well supported for race-specific adaptation. The overall shape — a large aerobic base plus a substantial race-specific block — is what elite marathon practice actually looks like: Haugen and colleagues (2022) report 160–220 km/week in mid-preparation, 11–14 sessions per week, and at least 80% of total running volume at low intensity. Read that low-intensity share with one caveat: Canova's easy running is 85–90% of marathon pace, which is brisk aerobic running rather than jogging. The lactate rationale behind fast-recovery sets is defensible; lactate is an oxidisable substrate that is shuttled and reused, and that is mainstream physiology now.

CONTESTED. Whether "extension of quality" genuinely beats building volume first and adding speed later has never been tested in a controlled comparison. Canova's mechanistic explanations — cell membrane permeability, "aerobic fat power", various enzymatic claims — run well ahead of the evidence and should be read as coaching heuristics. The often-quoted "50% of training at or above race pace" is a misreading twice over: it is his ratio of specific to general work for an athlete with 5–10 years of training behind them (a developing athlete gets 20/80), and his "specific" band is 95–105% of race pace, which includes work slower than race pace.

LORE. Most of the English-language Canova canon is transcribed lecture and forum material. Sessions attributed to named athletes are the trustworthy ones; unattributed "Canova sessions" are folk material. Two attribution notes worth stating plainly: Canova's own athletes were Maria Curatolo and Ornella Ferrara, and later a Kenyan group including Wilson Kipsang — Gelindo Bordin and Stefano Baldini were coached by Luciano Gigliotti, and Canova co-developed and documented their training at federation level rather than coaching them. And the triathlon decoupling percentages that circulate with this method have no traceable source.

How it goes wrong

Setting goal pace from hope rather than history. This is the near-universal failure and it destroys the block quietly, because the first two weeks feel fine.

Setting bike race power from FTP instead of from a race file. A percentage of FTP is a check on the number, not the number itself, and the same nominal race — a 70.3 — is ridden at very different fractions of FTP depending on whether the split takes 2 h 30 or 3 h 20.

Anchoring the run to open-running pace. An age-group triathlon run split is routinely 15–30% off open-race capability — wider than the elite figures that circulate — so open-anchored percentages prescribe a run block that is systematically too fast for exactly the athlete most likely to blow up. The 4–7% and 9–13% decoupling numbers repeated online are unsourced and elite-biased; do not use them.

Running the recoveries wrong in either direction. Jogging them removes the point. But the widely quoted "floats are 98–101% of race pace" is a ceiling case from elite extensive sessions stated as a universal rule, and applied blindly it converts a 32 km progression into a 32 km race-pace run. Canova specifies the joining kilometres of his own 7–6–5–4–3–2 session at 80% of race pace, and the recoveries in his 20 km track session are standing or walking.

Copying his run sessions. They were written for people running 170–200 km/week.

Doing the big day weekly. It is two or three times in the whole block, 2–4 weeks apart, with several days of no quality afterwards.

Computing percentages on speed instead of on pace-seconds. Canova's own worked example: at 3:00/km, "10% is 18 seconds", so 80% is 3:36/km. A speed conversion gives 3:45/km.

Sources: runningwritings.com runningwritings.com runningwritings.com runningwritings.com runnersconnect.net link.springer.com vdoto2.com coachray.nz