Women fitting triathlon training around ordinary life and work

Kaitlin Carew: when the working week takes its space

Kaitlin Carew is the closer match if a full-time job is central to what you want to see. In a September 2024 account, she describes working full-time as a physical therapist while training for a full-distance triathlon, with a goal of qualifying for the 2025 age-group race in Kona. Her article links to her Instagram, @kaitlin_carew_tri.

References: Kaitlin Carew / ZONE3

Carew describes preferring morning sessions because she can be tired after work. She also writes about setting boundaries around training time, feeling overwhelmed by a week’s plan and days when she runs out of time. That makes her account useful for the tension between an ambitious race goal and a working day that still has to happen.

References: Kaitlin Carew / ZONE3

A week that needs rearranging

In one difficult week, Carew has a swim planned for Tuesday morning and a run for that evening. The morning gets away from her, and by evening she has room for the run but not both sessions. She leaves the swim off that day instead of treating the blank space as a puzzle that must be filled before bed.

Later, she looks at the remaining days alongside the commitments already in her calendar. A planned bike ride moves to a free morning; another session stays missed when the available time disappears. The useful part of the week is the revision: the original plan is visible, as is the point at which it stops matching the time she actually has.

For someone looking for an ordinary working-life perspective, that distinction matters more than a perfectly completed schedule. Carew’s race goal gives the training a direction, while the interrupted week shows the choices that happen between the goal and the calendar.

Pulenaz: making room for three unfamiliar activities

Pulenaz approaches the same scheduling problem from a beginner’s side. She puts a swim, a bike ride and a run into a week that also has errands and plans with friends, then discovers that getting ready and travelling to each activity take space too. She lays out her swim things the night before, but a delayed errand still leaves less time than she expected.

Instead of pretending the three activities fit neatly, she talks through what she can move and what she will leave for another day. The appeal is in those small uncertainties: remembering what to bring, switching from one activity to another and learning how much of the day each outing occupies. Her account is useful if the logistical puzzle of starting triathlon feels more immediate than an experienced athlete’s race target.

Which perspective should you start with?

Choose Carew for the specific experience of training alongside full-time employment, including the days when the plan does not fit. Her account places that friction beside a full-distance goal. Choose Pulenaz for the everyday beginner’s questions that come before the routine feels familiar. Following both gives you two different scales of the same problem: making a plan for three activities and adapting it when the rest of life changes.

Sources and attribution

1. Kaitlin Carew / ZONE3

   Training for a triathlon while working a full time jobPublished Sep 25, 2024 · Recorded Oct 29, 2026