Alistair Brownlee is the only triathlete to have won two individual Olympic golds, in London in 2012 and Rio in 2016. In a recent episode of That Triathlon Show, host Mikael Eriksson got him to lay out how he actually trained at his peak: the hours, the intensity, and how hard the easy days really were. The episode's title gives away the surprise. The people who trained alongside him were struck by how slowly he went most of the time.
It's well worth the full hour and a quarter. This post pulls out the numbers that matter for Zone 2 riders and asks the obvious question: what should someone with six hours a week, not thirty-five, take from them? All the figures below come from the episode's published show notes.
Summary
- Enormous volume. Around 35 hours a week at his Olympic peak, sometimes 40.
- Very little of it hard. Roughly 6–13% of his riding and about 11–12% of his running was intensity.
- Easy meant easy. Easy rides averaged about 200 W with an FTP of 400 W or more, about half. Easy runs were over 70% slower per kilometre than his 10 km race pace.
- Recovery was training. Eight to nine hours' sleep a night, plus a nap most days.
- For the rest of us: copy how easy his easy days were, not his ratio of easy to hard. With a few hours a week, the hard sessions earn their place first.
1The shape of a champion's week
At his most dominant, Brownlee trained around 35 hours a week, with the biggest weeks near 40. The split, as described on the show:
- Bike: 6–7 days a week, 15–18+ hours, of which only one or two hours was intensity.
- Run: up to 12 sessions and about 12 hours a week, 120–140 km, with only around 15 km of that at intensity.
- Swim: 5 days a week, 7–7.5 hours, with 10–20% at intensity.
Put those together and the hard work is a thin slice: somewhere around a tenth of the riding and running. That isn't a philosophy imposed from outside. It's what a week of 35 hours has to look like if the athlete is going to absorb it and turn up the next day able to train again, the same pattern our review of the Zone 2 research found across elite endurance sport.
2How easy was easy?
This is the part that surprised his training partners. His easy rides averaged about 200 W, from an athlete with an FTP of 400 W or more. That is roughly 50% of FTP, the easy end of Zone 2 on most power-based zone models. His easy runs went at 5:00 per kilometre, from someone who could run 10 km in under 29 minutes, about 2:54 per kilometre. His everyday running pace was more than 70% slower per kilometre than his race pace.
Most amateurs do the opposite. Their easy rides drift up towards 65–75% of FTP because easy feels like a waste, and the hard sessions end up a bit less hard because they never arrive fresh. Brownlee's numbers are the clearest illustration you'll find of keeping the two genuinely apart.
He also gave a simple test for whether an easy session was easy enough: you should "come back feeling better than you started." If an easy ride leaves you flat, it wasn't easy.
3Why a slow week makes a fast athlete
His own framing of intensity is that it's "the icing on the cake", and that a bigger cake takes more icing. The easy volume builds the engine: the aerobic base, the durability to keep producing power late in a race, and the resilience to handle the next session. The hard work sharpens what the volume has built. Without the volume, there's less to sharpen.
Recovery was part of the plan, not an afterthought. At his peak he slept eight hours or more a night, often nine, and napped most days. He also described caring more about recovery, everyday nutrition and mental freshness as his career went on. Easy days only work as easy days if the rest of life lets them.
4What to copy on six hours a week
Here's where a careful reading matters. Brownlee's week is about 90% easy because he was training 35 hours. That ratio is a consequence of the volume, not a target for everyone. Our research review found that below roughly six or seven hours a week, the hard sessions give you the most for each hour and should be protected first; easy riding fills the gaps and helps you recover between them.
So the lesson for most riders isn't "ride slowly all the time". It's more precise than that:
- Keep your easy rides genuinely easy. This is the part of his training anyone can copy, at any volume. If your easy rides sit at 65–75% of FTP, bring them down.
- Keep your hard sessions genuinely hard. Two good sessions a week, on fresh legs, beat four mediocre ones.
- Let the easy share grow with your hours, not the other way round. Add time as Zone 2, not as more intensity.
- Treat sleep as part of the plan. You probably can't nap daily, but the principle scales down.
If you want to see what that looks like for your own week, our training planner lays it out for anything from 3 to 15 hours, built on exactly these rules.
5The hard part is the easy part
The most striking thing in the episode isn't the volume. It's the discipline to ride at half your FTP when your ego wants to ride at three-quarters of it, day after day, with training partners watching. That is precisely the part most of us get wrong.
It's also the reason JustZone2 exists. The app holds your heart rate in Zone 2 by adjusting your trainer's resistance every second, so your easy rides stay easy without you having to police them. And because your heart rate is held steady, the power you produce at that heart rate becomes a measure of your fitness over the weeks and months.
Brownlee had a coach, a brother and a squad to keep him honest. The rest of us have a smart trainer.
Figures are taken from the published show notes of That Triathlon Show, episode 713 (3 September 2026), with short quotations attributed to Alistair Brownlee. Percentages are our own arithmetic from those figures. This post isn't affiliated with or endorsed by the show or by Alistair Brownlee.
