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Reviewing your season
Most athletes have now come to the end of their season. This is a great time to take a break, recharge the batteries, have some unstructured fun swim, bike and running. This is also the time to review your season and work out where you need to make changes and develop so that next season is even better.
This is not something to rush – give yourself plenty of time. The better your review, the better your decisions and the outcome will be.
Step 1: Take a good look your results
Get all your results together and firstly, make a note of any pbs through the year and keep a list of these all together.
Then compare your results in each discipline of a particular race, with the age group winner (if this was not you!).
Finish Swim T1 Bike T2 Run Athlete 01:12:04 07:23 01:20 0:39:36 05:11 22:47 Winner 01:08:04 07:29 01:04 0:38:14 06:04 20:23 Difference 00:04:00 00:06:00 00:16:00 00:01:22 00:53:00 02:24:00 % Difference
+6% +1% +4% +12% The biggest difference indicates your weaker discipline compared to your peers. In the example above, the athlete was clearly weakest, compared to the winning athlete, on the run.
Do this for each race. Is this pattern repeated? Importantly, as you compare your races in this way look also to see whether improvement was made through the season. Were you focussing on your bike training only to see no improvement in performance from an early season race through to your priority race. If this is the case you need to review your training practices and question why you did not see improvement.
Step 2: What to improve
From your race results analysis you will have an idea of specific areas where you need to improve compared to your peers and this will help you decide how you should be spending your winter months. The next step is to drill down further in each discipline (not only the weakest) and consider what particular aspect of performance is letting you down:
Here are the most common examples: technique, flexibility and core conditioning, endurance, muscular endurance, strength (leading to power), carrying too much weight!, confidence. Choose one area of development right now and focus on it for the next 12 weeks. This is where thetrilife.com Transformer Series comes in handy!
Step 3. The overall picture
It is also important to review your training environment at this stage. You may want to be asking yourself the following questions:
- what were the performances you were most pleased with and why?
- did you reach your goals? Were your goals realistic?
- what did you enjoy the most in your training?
- were there training sessions or races that didn’t work well for you?
- was your training load not enough, too much or just right?
- did you follow a training plan – did it stretch you?
- training/life balance – anything need adjusting here?
- have you considered joining a club, or working with a coach?
Are you crazy?
All of us will have areas that we need to develop – work out what that may be for you and set about changing it.
We all know what Einstein said:
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Be a different triathlete next season!
