Duathlon To Succeed: The Run-Bike-Run Guide We Kept Being Asked For
Duathlon is the multisport event most likely to be treated as a triathlon with the swim removed. It is not, and athletes who train for it that way tend to find out the hard way somewhere in the first kilometre of the second run.
Duathlon To Succeed runs to 142 pages across 85 chapters, and it is built around the two things that actually separate duathletes: transitions, and the physiology of running on legs that have just spent forty minutes on a bike.
The Transitions Nobody Teaches
T1 and T2 get proper technical treatment — mount and dismount drills, rack organisation, legal bike spacing, and the rules that get age-groupers penalised when nobody has explained them. These are the cheapest seconds in the sport and the most commonly wasted.
The Second Run
The bike-to-run transition has a physiology chapter of its own. Understanding why the legs feel the way they do off the bike — and what can be trained to reduce it — is the difference between a race plan and a hope.
What Else Is In It
The book expanded well beyond the transitions during writing. It now includes:
- An eight-week sprint-distance plan and a sixteen-week standard-distance plan
- Wheels and aerodynamics, cornering and descending, and functional threshold power explained without assuming a coaching background
- Running economy, strength training and injury prevention for the run-bike-run load pattern
- Daily and race-week nutrition, treated separately because they are separate problems
- A chapter on the female duathlete including RED-S
- Youth, masters and para-duathlon
- Multisport crossover — aquabike, winter duathlon and cross duathlon
- The Triathlon Ireland and British Triathlon age-group pathway
There are also twenty race-scenario chapters working through the decisions that get made badly under pressure: going out too hard on the first run, mistiming a nutrition plan, riding into a headwind that was not in the forecast. These are clearly labelled as composite and illustrative — they are teaching scenarios built from common patterns, not accounts of real named athletes or real races. We would rather say that plainly than let a useful teaching device be mistaken for reporting.
The back of the book carries a quick-reference toolkit of checklists and lookup tables, an expanded glossary and an FAQ, on the assumption that a race-morning reader is not going to work through 85 chapters to find one number.