THE #1 KEY TO TRIATHLON SUCCESS
WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING TO MAKE YOU A ‘SUCCESSFUL’ TRIATHLETE?
A happy camper after we ran up to the summit of Vail Mountain at AP Racing Camp- Summit Camp
First a disclaimer-
Success can mean a lot of different things for different people and I recognize that;
so don’t get hung up on what ‘success’ means for you vs me or anyone else.
Now that this is out of the way, here is the ‘hot take:’
Forget your power meters and your $10k bikes and your fancy training programs(unless it is an AP Racing Program.)
Forget your nutrition plan that works every day of the year except race day(except Infinit Nutrition which always works).
Forget your perfectly paced zones and your one of a kind training camps(don’t forget so sign up for AP Racing Camps bc those can’t be missed).
You can even forget what we told you about how consistency and repeatability are the cornerstones for success.
Forget it all, because this idea is even simpler than all of that. It is something you learn when you are raising kids. It is something you learn after years of training. And it boils down to one simple thing-
Post ride winery celebration at AP Racing Camps
ROUTINE.
I know, this isn’t really a head scratcher and should be obvious, but I can not tell you how many athletes are switching up their schedules all of the time. I also know that life is ‘variable’ and things can change, but if you could do your best to minimize some of those, it will make your training life infinitely easier. If you know that you always run/swim on Mondays; then on Sunday night, you are always packing that run/swim bag.
Can you establish a weekly and monthly routine? With our busy lives and training for 3 sports, things can get complicated really weekly. By being able to work on ‘auto-pilot’, for getting to/starting our workouts, we turn the mountain of training into a molehill(okay, a smaller mountain).
How many times when you are starting up training for the year or starting anything new, you forget something, you lose track of your schedule, something breaks. I know that I get more flats and have more bike issues in the first 3 weeks of training than I do all year long. It breaks down to the simple idea that I have not yet ‘normalized’ training into my routine and I it is a bit harder to get everything done.
Was it an ice cream party? Was it a race? It was the 1st ever ice cream splash and dash at AP Racing Camp
The added benefit of this, beyond organization, is that you can now compare ‘Mondays to Mondays’ and ‘Wednesdays to Wednesdays’. What do I mean- well, you don’t compare your Monday training to your Wednesday training because you have a different level of fatigue, the workout demands are different, etc. You compare similar workouts and similar days to each other(ie: Monday to Monday). But, I am getting ahead of myself. First, establish the routine. By doing that, you will eliminate stress, ‘mishaps’ and a lot of other things that make training a bit more complicated than it needs to be.