Training, alone or with company?

Last Thursday I ran with a friend for about 8km during my 17k long run. On my normal runs I would not be able to sustain the pace we ran at for a long time, yet it seemed pretty easy that day. It got me thinking about training alone and with others.

I often find myself training alone, almost all the time when swimming and running, and majority of the time when cycling. Triathlon is an individual sport; just you versus the clock. Thus is there any benefit to training with others?

One major reason I train alone is not because I want to, but because its just so much more convenient. I can decide to go for a run 5 minutes before I head out of the door, whereas if I have an appointment my schedule is kind of fixed already. I can also decide the pace, speed, duration etc depending on how I feel.

Training solo also has a psychological effect. In a group its much easier to ride hard (other than the drafting effect) but in a race how often can you find someone who is exactly your pace? I find that training alone conditions the mind to go hard and stay at that effort. Also in longer races like HIM or IM, you need to get used to being all alone for extended periods of time.

But sometimes I do have the urge to train with others. Other than the obvious benefit of having someone to talk to, there are actually other reasons why group training may be better than individual training.

As contradicting as this may be to the earlier paragraph, group trainings force you to go hard. Of course this is assuming you train with people of your standard or better. In a group ride, either you keep up or get dropped. In a club swim if you don't keep within in interval time you get left behind. And you can't give excuses or reasons to stop and rest.

If people expect you to turn up, its also much harder for you not to. You don't have to debate with yourself whether or not you should wake up at 5am on a Sunday morning; you just do it. It would require quite a lot of mental strength for me to go out for 17k hard on a Thursday evening alone, but this particular Thursday it didn't even cross my mind to not go out for my run.

And there's also the safety aspect. If anything were to happen, someone would know about it and your family/loved ones would know if there's any accident.

That being said, I still value training solo simply because it gives me time alone with no one else. Every day we are interacting with others and sometimes we need a bit of alone time to sort out our thoughts or just to block out everything else.

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