11 Ways To Build Triathlon Success In 2018

Ready for the triathlon season of your life? Not yet? Read on to learn about your first step toward career readiness.

Taking a calculated risk to go faster for swimming, biking, and running instead of hunkering down in your status quo running routine.

Don’t wait to step up your effort and improve your racing tactics when you see others accomplishing more. Commit to starting a challenging and successful triathlon journey today. Here are 11 ways you’ll be a more competitive triathlete to achieve success in your specific race goals.

1. Train with a specific set of custom triathlon workouts for the best ROI of time to performance results. Continuing to do the same activities will produce the same results. Make your changes starting now.

2. Dedicate 80% of your effort to eliminating the time wasters that impede progress towards your goals. These can include writing workouts, waiting for others to show up for training, analyzing meaningless metrics, removing non-value-adding concerns and extraneous confidence, and other time-wasting actions.

3. Pre-exempt disorders, eliminate potential problem areas early: lack of stamina, untested nutrition options, incomplete checklists, delayed race registrations, indecisiveness in housing arrangements, etc.

4. Take advantage of downtime from work, sports, and social activities. Your body and mind come back stronger after dedicated rest, recovery and rejuvenation. Take a deep breath, exhale and relax a bit as well.

5. focus on doing new to progress towards your goals. You are not fixing problems. The fixing is for pets. New workouts. New racing tactics. Barrow extensively of successful triathletes more advanced in their travels than you.

6. Eliminate regression. Embrace polarity management in your training plan.

7. Training should be a process mindset, not a project. Let sport become part of your lifestyle.

8. Get people to follow you to your sweet spot. Don’t passively find yourself in a competitor’s sweet spot. Explore solutions to extend your sweet spots to other disciplines.

9. Overcome the challenges. Gain with limited pain. Take advantage of opportunities to raise your pain threshold with challenging workouts that are physically and mentally demanding.

10. Make sure you and your coach are in sync with your training and race plans. Make sure you and your follow are in sync with social tri and family plans! Communicate plans. Honor the limits. Fulfill commitments.

11. Achieve and celebrate small victories throughout your training milestones, local races and all-inclusive family outings. Continue progress toward larger goals as well. Enjoy greater achievements and celebrations as you achieve greater successes.

Here’s an example of how I changed training plans from year to year. Fitness training for a second Ironman triathlon followed a similar seasonal path to the previous year. Unlike Ironman Utah, when I approached the race as a project manager, the training commitment for Ironman Coeur d’Alene (CDA) didn’t consume my life, just training time. After all the mental effort of thinking about Ironman Utah from registration to race day, Ironman CDA flowed through my mind like just another triathlon.

Becoming an Ironman required following a process rather than managing a project. Training, part of the process. Motivation to complete training and compete in the race, parts of the process. Swimming training with a group of Masters, competing against others and supporting the family; all parts of the process. Physically and mentally challenging my body, were more components of the process.

I followed the training template from the previous year, although I added an extra day of swimming when possible and a mid-week, early morning bike ride 50-60 miles from the Arizona State University campus to Fountain. Hills and back for more bike climbing. Specific weight-lifting exercises for arms, back, stomach, and legs have also been added. During the training timeline, mileage increased, leveled off, and decreased. I did five races while ramping up training before Ironman CDA to gain some speed, build stamina, engage in some real pre-race mental preparation, and gain experience to deal with race day anxieties. I walked the talk about working out the 13-week training plan for Ironman.

Take inventory of your toolkit now. Purge outdated tools and replace them with new concepts. Compare specifically what you do now and what you could be doing differently based on the 11 items outlined above. Acquire the behaviors necessary to reach your full potential. Check your basic physical condition. Challenge all your mental abilities. Start preparing for your season today.

What other changes are you making to your 2018 career plans?