By the time you're reading a course guide, your fitness is already decided. You're not building anything in the final two weeks — you're protecting what you've built. The goal of race week training is to arrive at the start line sharp, not depleted from trying to squeeze in one more hard session.

That said, this course should have shaped your preparation well before taper. Chattanooga rewards three specific training adaptations: the ability to sustain consistent power across rolling terrain without surging, comfort running off a fatigued bike in warm conditions, and the neuromuscular pattern of a two-lap run where the second lap asks more of you than the first.

The run adds 627 feet of gain across 13.1 miles. The Veterans Bridge crossings each lap include short punchy climbs that athletes don't anticipate. If your run training was done exclusively on flat surfaces, this will find you. It's not enough to derail a well-prepared athlete — but it's enough to make an already-tired one suffer more than necessary.

Race week restoration starts earlier than most athletes think. The 10–14 days before the race are where you either deposit or withdraw from the account you're going to spend on Sunday. Sleep, stress management, and consistent daily nutrition determine how much of your fitness you actually get to access on race day.

Chattanooga in mid-May adds a specific variable: heat and humidity. If you're traveling from a cooler climate — and many athletes often are — your body needs 48–72 hours to begin adapting. Arrive Thursday or Friday. Don't fly in Saturday morning and expect to be comfortable racing in conditions your physiology hasn't seen yet.

On the nutrition side: race week is not the time for a dramatic carbohydrate loading strategy. Add a serving or two of carbohydrate per day across the week, keep fat and fiber moderate, and eat familiar food. Glycogen stores fill gradually. The athlete who overeats pasta on Friday night to "top off" typically ends up with a GI problem they didn't need on Sunday morning.

If your fueling plan was built in February in a cool training environment, pressure-test it before you get to Chattanooga. Heat and humidity change every variable in the QT2 Fueling Window — carbohydrate oxidation rate shifts, gastric emptying slows under heat stress, sweat sodium losses compound across a four-to-six-hour effort, and your absolute fluid requirement goes up. A plan that worked perfectly in a 55-degree long ride may quietly fail you in 80-degree race conditions.

On-course at Chattanooga 2026, you'll have access to Maurten (Gel 100, Gel 100 CAF, Solid 225) and Precision Fuel & Hydration PH1000 at aid stations on both the bike and run. The PH1000 delivers 1,000mg of sodium per liter — roughly what the average athlete loses per liter of sweat. Bike aid stations are approximately every 12–15 miles. Run aid stations are every mile, which means you have no excuse for getting behind on fluids or electrolytes on the run.

The most common fueling mistake at Chattanooga isn't wrong products — it's wrong timing. Athletes wait until they feel like they need calories to start fueling. By that point, you're already behind. Start fueling within the first 15 minutes on the bike, before you feel hungry, and maintain a consistent intake cadence throughout. Fueling is not reactive — it is proactive.

General targets for a 70.3 in warm conditions:

• Carbohydrate: 80–100g per hour on the bike; 40–60g per hour on the run — heat compresses what your gut can process at race intensity
• Sodium: 700–1,000mg per hour depending on individual sweat rate — use the PH1000 on-course or supplement with your tested products
• Fluid: 16–28 oz per hour on the bike; use thirst and urine color as feedback, not a rigid schedule — don't over-hydrate
• Caffeine: Maurten Gel 100 CAF is 100mg per serving — best deployed around miles 30–35 on the bike and mile 5–6 on the run
• Start early: First calories within 15 minutes on the bike, before you feel you need them

Pacing is where most Chattanooga races are won or lost. The course sets three specific pacing traps — one per discipline — and most athletes fall into at least one of them. Let's go through each.

The Swim.

The Tennessee River runs downstream from your start to Ross's Landing. Athletes routinely exit the water 10–15% faster than their open-water baseline, which is great for your split and potentially dangerous for your race plan. A fast swim exit in a great atmosphere, with crowds on the Veterans and Market Street Bridges, creates a very natural impulse to carry that energy onto the bike. Don't.

On the upstream section at the start: use a high turnover rate. Hit the water rather than letting the current hit you. Short, quick strokes work better here than long powerful ones. Once you make the turn, the river does some of the work — let it.

On seeding: the rolling start uses timing mat activation, so your clock starts when you cross the mat. Position yourself a little ahead of what you think is appropriate. Not aggressively — but you should assume a meaningful number of athletes around you will be...optimistic...about what they're going to swim. Seed yourself to avoid spending the first 400 meters navigating traffic.

The Bike.

The bike course is fair. It's not fast, and it's not slow. It's just fair — you have to earn your split. 56 miles, 2,218 feet of climbing, one loop heading south from downtown Chattanooga into north Georgia, paralleling Lookout Mountain, through Chickamauga, and back north. The road surfaces are good. The character is relentlessly rolling with one more sustained effort on the return into Chickamauga.

The pacing error that ends runs in Chattanooga happens between miles 1 and 25. Athletes feel good, the roads are wide, there are other athletes around them, and they ride slightly above target power — not dramatically, just slightly. Ten to fifteen watts over target, sustained across 25 miles, is a significant energy deficit that doesn't announce itself until well into the run. Your power file will tell you the truth your legs won't.

On climbs, cap at 110% of target power. On descents, keep the pedals turning — don't sprint, don't coast. The athlete who rides the most even effort across 56 miles is usually the athlete who runs the best 13.1. It's not complicated, but it requires discipline when everything in you wants to respond to what's happening around you.

The Run.

The run covers two laps (2.25 total) through downtown Chattanooga — Riverwalk, Veterans Bridge, North Shore, Walnut Street Bridge, Riverfront Parkway — finishing at Ross's Landing. It's a genuinely scenic course. It also has 627 feet of elevation gain across 13.1 miles, and the Chattanooga humidity, if it's present, will make it feel like more.

The single most important pacing decision you will make on the run is the first mile. Start 5% slower off the bike than your target pace. That's not a suggestion — it's the number that research on off-the-bike run pacing consistently lands on as the threshold between a strong second half and a deteriorating one. It will feel too slow. That feeling is correct. You're building into the run, not racing it immediately. Miles 3–4, you settle in. Miles 10–13, you race.

Mental fitness in a 70.3 is not about motivation. It's about decision-making under fatigue, and specifically about conserving the resource that determines whether you make good decisions or bad ones late in the race: willpower.

Willpower functions like a muscle. The more you call on it, the more it fatigues. An athlete who races reactively — responding to other athletes, overriding their pacing plan, fighting surges and controlling effort by sheer force of will — arrives at mile 9 of the run with a depleted willpower reserve precisely when the course demands the most from them. An athlete who races a clean plan, holds back early, and makes easy disciplined decisions throughout the day still has something left to draw on when it gets hard. And at Chattanooga, it will get hard.

A 70.3 run is always going to be tough. A well-executed one is tough in a manageable way. A poorly executed one is unnecessarily tough — and there's a meaningful difference between the two.

There are three specific mental challenge points in this race. The first is the swim exit. You come out of the water faster than expected, the crowd is loud on the bridges, and your adrenaline is high. Your job here is to slow down your decision-making, not speed up your execution. Do your transition deliberately. Don't let the environment set your pace.

The second is miles 30–45 on the bike, where athletes around you begin to crack from earlier pacing mistakes. Some will slow dramatically. Others will pass you because they went out too hard and are still burning through a lead. Neither of these things is information about your race. Your power target is your target regardless of what's happening around you. Race your number.

The third is the start of lap two on the run — mile 6.8, back at Ross's Landing. The finish is visible. The crowd is gathered. You have been racing for three to five hours and everything in you wants to respond to the proximity of the finish line. This is precisely where patience is most valuable and hardest to execute. You are still 6+ miles from finishing. Athletes who go hard here at mile 7 rarely finish strong at mile 13.

One last thought: you are primarily racing against yourself. You can have a terrible race and win your age group. You can execute a masterful race and not land on the podium. Both of those outcomes have more to do with other athletes on that particular day than they have to do with you. The only thing you can control is your own execution. Focus there.