Triathlon and IRONMAN Training App: How Tri Mode Plans Your Season

Tri mode in Movement Rebels plans a triathlon season backwards from race day. You add the race and pick the distance: Sprint, Olympic, 70.3 or Full. The app splits the weeks you have left into Prep, Base, Build, Peak and Taper, gives every week a fixed three-sport skeleton, and lets the coach write the sessions inside it.

It exists because an athlete signed up for a full IRONMAN 49 weeks out and found the edges of the app in a day. A swim set reached the Garmin as a strength workout. A brick split into two unrelated sessions. The weekly plan had no idea it was meant to balance three sports. So we rebuilt it for triathlon.

Phase lengths by weeks left

The season shape comes from one number: weeks to race day. Somebody 49 weeks out gets a long base. Somebody 16 weeks out from a Full or a 70.3 skips Prep and goes straight to work.

Shorter races get shorter tapers: one week for a Sprint, two for an Olympic or a 70.3, three for a Full with enough runway. Every fourth week inside a phase is lighter, and the taper never gets a recovery week of its own.

Too little time? The coach still builds the plan. Under 20 weeks to a Full, 12 to a 70.3, 8 to an Olympic or 6 to a Sprint, it tells you the runway is short and keeps the long sessions conservative.

Sprint to Full: what changes

Same three sports. Different seasons. These are common coaching ranges for an age-grouper with a job, not a law:

The app reads your distance and scales the taper, the long sessions and the phase lengths from it. For most age-groupers with a job, the limit is recovery, not hours: a plan you can absorb week after week, and arriving at the start line healthy, matters more than squeezing in extra volume. The Ironman training guide goes deeper on that.

A week with three sports in it

Before the coach writes a single session, each week gets a skeleton: how many swims, rides and runs, which days carry the long sessions, where the brick goes and how many hours the week holds. The coach fills it in. The skeleton keeps it honest.

• Up to nine sessions in a full week: six training days, up to three of them with two sessions.
• A double is two sessions on one day, for example a morning swim and an evening run.
• One full rest day every full week.
• Never two hard sessions on the same day.

Shift workers can paste a roster into the chat. The coach plans that week around the days you have.

Bricks as one session

A brick is one session on your calendar, with legs: the ride, then the run. When you finish, the app matches each leg to the right activity from your watch. Ask the coach to change the run and the ride stays as it was. For why bricks earn a place in the week at all, see brick workouts for triathletes.

Your pool and your CSS

The Triathlon & IRONMAN card, under Coach, Equipment & Preferences, holds your pool length, your CSS pace, your peak hours per week, how many doubles you can handle, your long day and your strength sessions.

No CSS yet? The Swim CSS test under Tools, Engine Tests is a 400 m and a 200 m time trial. CSS pace per 100 m is the 400 time minus the 200 time, divided by two. Swim 400 m in 7:20 and 200 m in 3:20 and your CSS is 2:00 per 100 m. The swim CSS calculator does the same sum in the browser.

What reaches your Garmin

• Swims arrive as pool swims, each set as a real distance with its rest.
• "6 x 800m" in a run plan arrives as 800 m repeats, and "45m Z2" is never mistaken for 45 metres.
• No FTP yet? Rides use the heart-rate range from your plan, for example 121-135 bpm, instead of a power number you do not have.
• A brick arrives as two workouts on the same day, one per leg.
• Open-water swims stay off the watch. Record them with the watch's Open Water activity.

Two more pieces are built and switched off: a single Garmin multisport workout for a brick, and the pool length sent with each swim. They stay off until we have checked them on a real watch. A week of waiting beats a wrong workout on your wrist.

Getting started

Tri mode is open to every athlete. Add your race in the calendar, pick Triathlon and the distance, then fill in the Triathlon & IRONMAN card. The coach plans from there.