Monday night we welcomed the class of 2024 to this year’s TRi50 program. Held at Sportitude, the group was introduced to the program, triathlon, training and all of the equipment required to successfully get to the finish line of your first race.
It never ceases to amaze me just how varied the group is each year– backgrounds, ages etc. but in the end they all share one thing in common and that is the desire to successfully complete a triathlon. The reason why they want to do it will be different for everyone, but they are still all connected. Usually, in the group there are quite a few who have done some races before, but this year’s bunch is extremely raw, so this will be a going into the unknown for pretty much everyone.
Over the next 7 or so weeks you can expect to see some new faces around training, starting with Monday night at the Lake. But there are quite a few who were keen to join some of the other Laker’s sessions, so if you see someone looking a little lost by all means given them some advice and encouragement.
As I said on the night, everyone in triathlon is always keen to offer advice. We can all remember what it is like to be a beginner, to be faced with so many unknowns, questions, and things to learn! But we also know what it is like to be a part of a community where everyone is so helpful. Where people readily give up their time and energy to help someone out. Most are happy to pay it forward because someone did it to them when they started.
Yes, they may be rookies this year, but next year armed with all the information they have learnt from their program, our Tri50 crew will be the ones keen to pass on the knowledge to next year’s recruits. When you consider the average lifespan of a competing triathlete is only 3-5 years, maybe 5-7 for the Lakers, it means most people are still very new to it all and can vividly remember their first forays into the sport.
And when you do race, don’t stress about making mistakes, we all do them. For me while you are always aiming for the perfect race sometimes you just have to settle for a good story. At Silver Sands we had a few good wetsuit stories- one where someone got out of the swim and had put their bike shoes and helmet on ready to run out to the mount line only to realise they still had their wetsuit on, while a first timer actually made it to the mount line and got on their bike still in their suit and another was part way through the swim in their new wetsuit only to feel as it if it was strangling them, so they proceeded to take it off mid swim and give it to the life guard!
Over the years I have seen people trying to put T-shirts on after they put their helmet on, riding with their helmet on backwards and riding without one at all, heading out onto a run without their shoes, doing extra laps, mostly it is beginners who do these things but not always! Racing does funny things to people and the way they think so it is important to train to race.
So yes, it is important that you have some fitness, but as I said to the group, it is far more important to make sure you are ready for the race and whatever the day throws at you. This means we need to learn some basic skills like swimming and bike handling in a safe environment and then we progressively move them into more and more challenging situations to see if their skills hold up. Finally, we create a race-like environment to test everything out and to work on the process. If they can navigate their way through all of these stages, then you are confident they will be ready to rumble.
But sometimes the day throws up something we are just not ready for. In a recent race, one of our more experienced Lakers had a panic attack in the swim. However, when you look at the circumstances you can see why- no warmup, dark morning, diving in off a pontoon, an expectation that they had to go hard to be able to get the result they wanted meaning their opening 100m was red-lining- so it is understandable that they had a panic attack. You simply can’t practice all these things in training. However, that is why we race, to grow our experience bank that we can call upon in future races. The positive thing for them is that they found a way to work through it, and they learnt that it didn’t cost them as much time as they thought, and they still had a great race.
So, while there will be some challenges along the way for our Tri50 crew, if you approach it with a can do attitude and make sure you smile and have fun with it, then they will be ready to make the most of every opportunity.
Happy training and please feel free to contact me if you have any triathlon training, coaching and racing related thoughts or questions.