Stengths and Opportunities for Improvement

As the endurance season winds down, now is a great time to evaluate your season and what you consider your opportunities for improvement and what your strengths were the past season.  The off-season is a great time to focus on that weakness while continuing maintenance on your strengths. 

Generally we tend to know our strengths and weaknesses.  From a triathlon perspective, ask a HS swimmer and they'll say the bike and/or run are their weak points or ask a seasoned cyclist and they'll say swim and/or run.  I'm sure you get the idea.  It's pretty easy to be subjective about your weakness, but it's better to look at your race data for the past  year and race courses for which you performed on while keeping in mind your upcoming goals for next  year.

So, let's say an athlete did a Olympic triathlon with a hilly bike course and flat run and had the following results:

12/50 place in age group - swim
45/50 place in age group - bike
9/50 place in age group - run

Based on this data, it's pretty apparent that the weakness here is bike speed, particularly on hills.   The athlete was able to get off the bike and do well on the run so I don't necessarily think it would be an endurance issue.  We'd have to delve into the specifics of the race and the athlete's perspective.  The more data we have, the more specific we can get - i.e. heart rate monitor, powermeter, mile splits, GPS....but that's another topic for another day.  Let's take another example:

same athlete as above but on a half-ironman flat course as above:

10/50 - swim
45/50 - bike
45/50 - swim

Based on the previous race data and the above data, I would say this athlete is lacking endurance and speed on the bike and possible lacking endurance on the run.  Due to the run time being slower compared to the above I would venture to guess the athlete hit a proverbial wall on the bike and it made their run an absolute sufferfest.  In the off-season this athlete would need to build their base on the bike, and work on bike speed and drills.

As always, the data doesn't lie - use it to evaluate your strengths and weaknesses this off-season.  Once you have identified your weakness, spend time working on speed, technique, and base training so you can improve and turn that weakness into a strength.