A year to Ironman
Set a baseline with three time trials. Get a periodised plan to race day with paces you can actually hold. Re-test every month and watch the plan rewrite itself around what changed.
A swim, bike and run time trial set your threshold pace, FTP and training zones. Every session you are given afterwards is written in those numbers, not in generic percentages.
Test weeks are already on the calendar. Log the results and you get a verdict — responding, plateaued or overreached — plus a graph of where each discipline is actually going.
Improving? Volume steps up. Flat despite good consistency? The intensity mix changes instead. Gone backwards? The next block eases off. Whichever discipline is lagging gets more of your week.
Add friends to a team and get one shared structure with individual targets inside it: matched intervals, handicap starts that make you finish together, lane send-offs, and chaingang pulls scaled to each rider.
Everyone works for the same six minutes, each at their own threshold pace. You start together and you recover together.
3 miles, staggered starts calculated from each athlete's current fitness. If the model is right it comes down to a sprint.
One group speed. Pull lengths scale with the cube of each rider's speed advantage, because that is how drag works.