Disclaimer: I'm no coach and no expert. But if those were my 2 main races of the season, I would probably do roughly the same thing you proposed. I would not expect to go as fast as my potential in the Oly by training with an HIM plan, but relatively few people do their first Oly as a speed event anyway so no big deal.

The one thing that I might have some concern about is that doing an HIM training plan for your first tri might be a little much. Only you know if you can handle that. If you followed a training plan for your first marathon, you know what that's about.

If the daily workload starts to seem crushing in the tri training portion, perhaps cut back on the distances, but not frequency, of your bike rides. Rationale: the swim is more or less the same in an Oly and HIM, and you want the longer run to set you up for marathon training. So the bike is the logical place to cut back if you are feeling too cooked from training.

I might also throw in a sprint tri earlier in the summer. They're fun and you can work some of the kinks out of transition, etc. so you won't be quite as nervous for the Oly.

Enjoy Pleasant Prairie. It's a nice race on a very fast course.

Anyone else want to chime in?

Good advice. My thought is that you could morph the swim, bike portions of an OLY plan with the key elements of a marathon plan. Start the mary plan 18 weeks out and follow the long runs, medium long runs, and speedwork/tempo runs. You would still be running either 3 or 4 times a week and bricks/transition runs could be substituted as well as long bike rides (60-80 milers). Just a thought. Good luck with what you choose to do.

Thanks for all of the advice. It helps to have some reassurance that i am doing the right thing. I am from Chicago so the Lake Front path is going to be my friend this summer.