The Lonely Triathlete

They are everywhere - bacteria and viruses. When they evade your immune system they can put a halt to your training. So, what is a triathlete to do when they get sick? Adjust your mindset.

Come cough and sneeze over at www.patreon.com/thelonelytriathlete

TRANSCRIPT

Hi, and welcome to The Lonely Triathlete. My name is Todd. I am the Lonely Triathlete, coming to you from British Columbia, Canada, on this Sunday, October 25th, 2026.

And you'll notice I'm coming to you from British Columbia because, for the past couple of weeks, I haven't been in Victoria. I've been somewhere a little warmer. Well, at least theoretically warmer. I was in Mexico with my wife, and things didn't quite go according to plan.

And that brings me to today's topic. It's one I've talked about before, and I'm going to revisit it because it seems to be a recurring theme in my life. But this time, there's a bit of a twist.

I'm talking about injury, illness as a form of injury, and what happens to us as triathletes when something interrupts our training.

Not just what we should do physically, in terms of recovering and getting back into training, but what happens mentally. How do we deal with these interruptions? How do we maintain our sanity? And how do we come out the other side without losing our joy in the sport?

Because I think I've had a bit of a realization recently that's helped me look at these setbacks differently. And I want to share that with you.

Let me give you some context.

I started my off-season training in September, which is the earliest I've ever started. And for those first six weeks, things were going exceptionally well.

My FTP was climbing. I think I gained somewhere in the neighbourhood of five, six, maybe seven percent over those six weeks. My workouts were getting longer, they were getting more challenging, and I was feeling really good about the progress I was making.

I was proud of the work I was putting in.

And then it was time to go on vacation.

We were leaving on October 8th, and when I looked at my TrainerRoad plan, it projected that if I took ten days off, I could expect to lose about three percent of my FTP.

Now, three percent might not sound like a lot. But I'd just spent six weeks working hard to build that fitness, and here I was looking at the possibility of giving a fair chunk of it back in a little over a week.

I wasn't particularly interested in that.

So I did some digging, and I discovered that if I added three harder workouts before leaving, I could probably maintain most of that fitness through the ten days away.

And that's what I did.

I added those three sessions, got the work done, and went into vacation feeling pretty good about where I was.

I had a plan. I'd done the work. Things were progressing beautifully.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, let me tell you.

My wife has severe asthma and Long COVID. So getting sick is not something we take lightly. We have to be particularly careful, not only about protecting her from illness, but also about protecting me so I don't bring something home to her.

We did everything we reasonably could to protect ourselves on this trip.

We wore masks through the airports and on the airplane. We sanitized our hands constantly. We wore masks in common areas at the resort, and we tried to keep our distance from people who were obviously sick.

And let me tell you, there were a lot of obviously sick people.

On the airplane, there were people coughing and sneezing everywhere. I'm talking about wet coughs. People who sounded absolutely dreadful. I would estimate that perhaps fifteen to twenty percent of the people on that flight were visibly sick.

And then we got to the resort, and it was much the same story.

People coughing around the pool, people blowing their noses at tables, people sneezing openly without covering their mouths.

At one point, we were sitting outside eating when a couple sat down right beside us. We were uncomfortable because we didn't know their health status, so we moved our table farther away.

The man asked us, essentially, whether we thought he smelled.

We explained that we were being careful because we had health concerns and didn't know who might be sick.

They didn't seem particularly bothered by that explanation.

And within a couple of minutes, his partner was blowing her nose and coughing.

So we got up and moved again.

Look, I understand that people get sick. I'm not suggesting that everyone with a sniffle should be locked away somewhere. But when you're travelling with someone who has significant respiratory health issues, you become very aware of how much exposure you might be getting.

We even re-sanitized our hotel room when we arrived, aired it out, and took precautions inside.

We really did try.

And the first four days were wonderful.

We found our favourite spot by the pool and the ocean. We figured out where to get our drinks. I was working on my tan. Can you believe it? SPF 50, applied multiple times a day, and I still managed to get a bit of a sunburn on day two.

By day four, I was feeling pretty good about my tan, my vacation, and life in general.

Then, that evening, my wife said she had a tickle in the back of her throat.

The next morning, she was sick.

She spent the day sleeping in the room while I stayed away as much as possible. That night, I actually wore my N95 mask while sleeping, trying to reduce the risk of catching whatever she had.

I did the same thing the following night.

But by that evening, I was feeling unusually run down.

And the next morning, I woke up sick too.

So there we were. Two people in Mexico at an all-inclusive resort, spending our days lying in a hotel room.

We had paid a lot of money for this vacation. We'd made all the arrangements, we'd travelled all that way, and now we were both sick.

We even had to cancel a major excursion we'd planned, involving snorkeling and exploring an island off the coast of Cancun.

And after a few days of feeling lousy, we tested for COVID.

Both of us were positive.

Now, for me, COVID has presented itself twice as something resembling a really nasty cold. I seem to recover fairly quickly, without lingering issues so far.

But for my wife, this was much more serious.

Given her severe asthma and Long COVID, another COVID infection was a significant concern. Her lung specialist had previously advised her to get Paxlovid promptly if she became infected again.

So we needed to get her that medication as quickly as possible.

And that's when we decided we had to come home.

We changed our flights at considerable expense and arranged to fly back the next day.

Getting the prescription was difficult enough. Finding the medication was another ordeal. We called fourteen pharmacies before we finally managed to get it.

Even after she started treatment, her breathing became concerning enough that we seriously considered whether she needed to go to the hospital.

It's been a difficult experience, and I'm very grateful that she's getting through it.

But here's the thing.

We had taken precautions. We had tried to minimize our exposure. We'd done what we reasonably could to protect ourselves.

And we still got COVID.

Sometimes, despite your best efforts, things happen.

And that brings me to the point of this episode.

So, what does all of this mean for me as a triathlete?

Well, first of all, you have to stop training when you're sick.

And I know that's easier said than done.

For me, the hardest part of an illness or injury is often the waiting. You want to get back out there. You want to resume your routine. You want to keep making progress.

But your body needs time to recover.

In my case, I waited until my fever, body aches, and other acute symptoms had resolved and my energy had returned before cautiously testing the waters.

Around day eight, I tried fifteen minutes of easy cycling. That felt fine.

The following day, I did thirty minutes of easy endurance cycling. Again, I felt fine.

My energy was good, my heart rate seemed consistent with the effort, and I wasn't experiencing the body aches or fever I'd had earlier.

I still had some residual congestion, though, and that was a reminder not to get ahead of myself.

Every part of me wanted to jump straight into a hard VO2 max session. I mean, I've just come off a period of excellent progress, and I'm eager to get back to it.

But that would be a terrible way to approach recovery.

COVID can have complications that aren't always obvious during the activity itself. Some people experience cardiovascular problems, and others experience post-exertional symptom exacerbation, where symptoms worsen hours or even days after activity.

Feeling good during a short ride doesn't automatically mean you're ready for a hard workout.

So I'm being conservative. I'll increase activity gradually, pay attention to how I feel during the session and afterward, and seek medical guidance if symptoms persist or anything concerning develops.

Because the last thing I want is to rush back, trigger a setback, and end up losing even more training time.

And here's something worth remembering: I have about a year until the World Triathlon Age Group Championships in Hamburg.

I don't need to rush.

I have time.

And even if I lose a little fitness in the short term, that doesn't mean I've lost the ability to build it back.

Which brings me to the mental side of this whole experience.

Over the past few years, I've had various injuries. Some have been related to overtraining, and those have prompted me to take a closer look at how I train and recover.

I've gone to physiotherapists and chiropractors. I've worked on prehab exercises, stretching, and taking better care of my body. I've made changes because I want to reduce the likelihood of getting injured.

And I think that's entirely reasonable.

If you notice that a particular behaviour consistently contributes to an injury, it makes sense to change that behaviour.

But illness is a different beast.

You can take precautions, as my wife and I did, and still get sick.

And it occurred to me recently that we should probably approach a year of training with the expectation that something is going to happen.

Think about it.

You're training for twelve months. Are you really going to get through that entire year without catching a cold, developing a sore foot, tweaking your back, having a family issue, or encountering something at work that disrupts your routine?

Maybe you'll get lucky.

But I wouldn't count on it.

And yet, I think many of us start a training block with this unspoken assumption that we're going to have twelve uninterrupted months of progress.

We develop a plan. We follow the plan. We watch our fitness improve.

And when something interrupts that process, we react as though something has gone wrong.

But has something really gone wrong?

Or has something happened that is simply part of being human?

I think there's a meaningful difference between those two ways of looking at things.

When I started training in September, I was making fantastic progress. Everything seemed to be moving in the right direction. My FTP was increasing, my workouts were getting harder, and I was feeling stronger.

It would have been easy to imagine that this trajectory would continue indefinitely.

But that's not how training works.

It's not how life works.

Progress is rarely a straight line.

And I think recognizing that in advance makes setbacks much easier to deal with when they inevitably arrive.

Here's another thing that's helped me.

I've been tracking my training and performance for years, and when I look back at my athletic life, I can see that the overall trend has been upward.

But it hasn't been linear.

There have been periods of improvement, periods of stagnation, and periods when I've lost fitness or had to stop training altogether.

And yet, over time, I've continued to improve.

It's a bit like the stock market. There are dips and corrections along the way, but the longer-term trend can still be upward.

Now, I think tracking your progress is important here.

If you're relying entirely on how you feel today, or how you think you've been performing over the past few weeks, you can easily lose perspective.

You might feel as though you've had a terrible season when, in fact, you've set several personal bests and made substantial progress over the past couple of years.

Your memory isn't always a reliable record of your performance.

So track your training. Record your times, your power, your fitness metrics, or whatever measures are meaningful to you.

Find a way to look at your progress over a longer period.

Because when you do that, you can remind yourself that the temporary setbacks are only part of the picture.

You can look at the evidence and say, "You know what? I've been here before. I've lost fitness before. I've had interruptions before. And I've recovered. I've improved. I've continued to make progress."

That perspective gives you confidence.

It helps you avoid treating every interruption as a catastrophe.

And it allows you to focus on the longer journey rather than becoming obsessed with what happened this week.

Now, I want to be clear about something.

I'm not suggesting that we should stop trying to prevent illness and injury.

Quite the opposite.

I think we should do everything reasonable to reduce the likelihood of these things happening.

If you're overtraining, change your training. If you're not recovering properly, address that. If there are sensible precautions you can take to reduce your exposure to illness, take them.

I certainly will continue to do those things.

But there's a distinction between taking responsibility for what you can control and believing that you can control everything.

As athletes, we're often very focused on the relationship between our actions and our performance.

We train harder, we get fitter. We recover better, we perform better. We improve our nutrition, and hopefully we get better results.

That relationship encourages us to take responsibility for our training.

And that's a good thing.

But sometimes, I think we extend that sense of responsibility too far.

We start believing that if something happens to us, there must have been something we could have done to prevent it.

And sometimes that's true.

But sometimes it isn't.

If I injure myself because I repeatedly ignore a warning sign, that's something I want to examine. I want to understand what I did and how I can avoid repeating that mistake.

But if I bend over to pick something up and my back suddenly goes out, with no warning, there's only so much I can learn from that experience.

And if I get COVID despite taking reasonable precautions, I don't think it's particularly useful to beat myself up about it.

I can learn what I can. I can continue taking sensible precautions. But I can't go back and change what happened.

At some point, I have to accept the situation and move forward.

And I think that's a healthier way to approach both injury and illness.

You can take responsibility without blaming yourself for everything.

You can pursue improvement without demanding perfection.

And you can accept a setback without giving up on your goals.

There's another part of this that I think is important.

I've often said on this podcast that one of the reasons I train is because I enjoy it.

I enjoy swimming, cycling, and running. I enjoy becoming fitter and stronger. I enjoy the discipline and the health benefits. I enjoy seeing what I'm capable of doing.

That's why I do it.

And I think sometimes we lose sight of that.

We become so focused on the goal, the race, the next FTP increase, or the next personal best that we start treating the training itself as something that must always progress.

And when it doesn't, we become miserable.

But I can still enjoy today even if I'm not training.

Why?

Because triathlon isn't my life.

It's a part of my life. An important part of my life, absolutely. But it isn't my life.

And I've always felt that way.

When I started triathlon, I was a back-of-the-packer. I wasn't entering the sport with expectations that I'd be near the top. I was starting something completely new, and my goal was simply to see where I was and try to improve.

Perhaps if I'd been a college athletic star, with people expecting me to win, I'd have a different relationship with performance.

But that wasn't my experience.

I've been fortunate to discover how much I enjoy this sport without feeling that I have to prove something to someone else.

And I think that has helped me maintain perspective.

I want to improve. I want to perform well. I'm excited about Hamburg next year.

But I don't need every week to be perfect in order to enjoy being a triathlete.

And I don't need to sacrifice my mental health in pursuit of a faster time.

In fact, I think the opposite is true.

If I can accept that setbacks are part of the process, I can get through them with less frustration. I can give myself the time I need to recover. And I can return to training without feeling that I've somehow failed.

That makes the entire experience more enjoyable.

And isn't that the point?

I think there's a message here for anyone listening who's currently dealing with an injury or illness.

You're human.

You might be a triathlete. You might be fitter than most people around you. You might be pushing your body to do things you couldn't have imagined doing a few years ago.

You might even feel superhuman sometimes.

But you're not.

There are books about athletic performance with titles along the lines of Becoming Superhuman. And I understand the appeal of that idea. We want to push beyond our perceived limits. We want to discover what we're capable of doing.

But the reality is that we're still human.

Humans get sick. Humans get injured. Humans have family problems, work problems, and all sorts of other things happen that disrupt their plans.

And the more we push ourselves toward our physical limits, the more important it becomes to respect our need for recovery and recognize the risks we're taking.

We can work to reduce the likelihood of setbacks, but we can never eliminate that possibility.

So if you're injured or sick right now, don't automatically assume you've done something wrong.

Look at what happened. Learn whatever you can. Make changes if they're warranted.

But don't turn an unfortunate event into a personal failure.

Give yourself some grace.

And when it comes time to return to training, resist the temptation to make up for lost time by doing too much too soon.

You haven't failed because you've had to take a break.

And you don't need to prove anything by rushing back.

Your goal is to be healthy enough to continue training over the long term, not to win back every lost workout in the next seven days.

So, where does that leave me?

Well, I'm sitting here on Sunday, October 25th, cautiously returning to training after COVID.

Part of me wants to get right back into the hard sessions. I want to get back to my routine, continue building fitness, and pick up where I left off.

But I'm going to use logic rather than emotion.

I'm going to reintroduce training gradually, pay attention to how my body responds, and give myself the time I need to recover properly.

I have about a year until Hamburg. There's no need to panic.

And when I look at my training history, I can see that I've experienced setbacks before. I've recovered from them before. And I've continued to improve.

There's no reason to assume that this time has to be any different.

So that's the lesson I'm taking from this experience.

Do what you reasonably can to prevent illness and injury. Track your progress so you can see the bigger picture. Take your recovery seriously. And recognize that setbacks are not an exception to the process of becoming a better athlete.

They're part of it.

We may feel superhuman sometimes, but we're not. And the sooner we accept that, the easier it becomes to navigate the inevitable disruptions that come with being an athlete.

We can become more resilient. We can maintain our joy in the sport. And we can protect our mental health along the way.

Because I don't just want to be a fitter triathlete.

I want to be a healthy, happy, resilient triathlete who enjoys the journey.

And I suspect that's what most of us want, too.

They are everywhere - bacteria and viruses. When they evade your immune system they can put a halt to your training. So, what is a triathlete to do when they get sick? Adjust your mindset.

TRANSCRIPT

Hi, and welcome to The Lonely Triathlete. My name is Todd. I am the Lonely Triathlete, coming to you from British Columbia, Canada, on this Sunday, October 25th, 2026.

And you'll notice I'm coming to you from British Columbia because, for the past couple of weeks, I haven't been in Victoria. I've been somewhere a little warmer. Well, at least theoretically warmer. I was in Mexico with my wife, and things didn't quite go according to plan.

And that brings me to today's topic. It's one I've talked about before, and I'm going to revisit it because it seems to be a recurring theme in my life. But this time, there's a bit of a twist.

I'm talking about injury, illness as a form of injury, and what happens to us as triathletes when something interrupts our training.

Not just what we should do physically, in terms of recovering and getting back into training, but what happens mentally. How do we deal with these interruptions? How do we maintain our sanity? And how do we come out the other side without losing our joy in the sport?

Because I think I've had a bit of a realization recently that's helped me look at these setbacks differently. And I want to share that with you.

Let me give you some context.

I started my off-season training in September, which is the earliest I've ever started. And for those first six weeks, things were going exceptionally well.

My FTP was climbing. I think I gained somewhere in the neighbourhood of five, six, maybe seven percent over those six weeks. My workouts were getting longer, they were getting more challenging, and I was feeling really good about the progress I was making.

I was proud of the work I was putting in.

And then it was time to go on vacation.

We were leaving on October 8th, and when I looked at my TrainerRoad plan, it projected that if I took ten days off, I could expect to lose about three percent of my FTP.

Now, three percent might not sound like a lot. But I'd just spent six weeks working hard to build that fitness, and here I was looking at the possibility of giving a fair chunk of it back in a little over a week.

I wasn't particularly interested in that.

So I did some digging, and I discovered that if I added three harder workouts before leaving, I could probably maintain most of that fitness through the ten days away.

And that's what I did.

I added those three sessions, got the work done, and went into vacation feeling pretty good about where I was.

I had a plan. I'd done the work. Things were progressing beautifully.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, let me tell you.

My wife has severe asthma and Long COVID. So getting sick is not something we take lightly. We have to be particularly careful, not only about protecting her from illness, but also about protecting me so I don't bring something home to her.

We did everything we reasonably could to protect ourselves on this trip.

We wore masks through the airports and on the airplane. We sanitized our hands constantly. We wore masks in common areas at the resort, and we tried to keep our distance from people who were obviously sick.

And let me tell you, there were a lot of obviously sick people.

On the airplane, there were people coughing and sneezing everywhere. I'm talking about wet coughs. People who sounded absolutely dreadful. I would estimate that perhaps fifteen to twenty percent of the people on that flight were visibly sick.

And then we got to the resort, and it was much the same story.

People coughing around the pool, people blowing their noses at tables, people sneezing openly without covering their mouths.

At one point, we were sitting outside eating when a couple sat down right beside us. We were uncomfortable because we didn't know their health status, so we moved our table farther away.

The man asked us, essentially, whether we thought he smelled.

We explained that we were being careful because we had health concerns and didn't know who might be sick.

They didn't seem particularly bothered by that explanation.

And within a couple of minutes, his partner was blowing her nose and coughing.

So we got up and moved again.

Look, I understand that people get sick. I'm not suggesting that everyone with a sniffle should be locked away somewhere. But when you're travelling with someone who has significant respiratory health issues, you become very aware of how much exposure you might be getting.

We even re-sanitized our hotel room when we arrived, aired it out, and took precautions inside.

We really did try.

And the first four days were wonderful.

We found our favourite spot by the pool and the ocean. We figured out where to get our drinks. I was working on my tan. Can you believe it? SPF 50, applied multiple times a day, and I still managed to get a bit of a sunburn on day two.

By day four, I was feeling pretty good about my tan, my vacation, and life in general.

Then, that evening, my wife said she had a tickle in the back of her throat.

The next morning, she was sick.

She spent the day sleeping in the room while I stayed away as much as possible. That night, I actually wore my N95 mask while sleeping, trying to reduce the risk of catching whatever she had.

I did the same thing the following night.

But by that evening, I was feeling unusually run down.

And the next morning, I woke up sick too.

So there we were. Two people in Mexico at an all-inclusive resort, spending our days lying in a hotel room.

We had paid a lot of money for this vacation. We'd made all the arrangements, we'd travelled all that way, and now we were both sick.

We even had to cancel a major excursion we'd planned, involving snorkeling and exploring an island off the coast of Cancun.

And after a few days of feeling lousy, we tested for COVID.

Both of us were positive.

Now, for me, COVID has presented itself twice as something resembling a really nasty cold. I seem to recover fairly quickly, without lingering issues so far.

But for my wife, this was much more serious.

Given her severe asthma and Long COVID, another COVID infection was a significant concern. Her lung specialist had previously advised her to get Paxlovid promptly if she became infected again.

So we needed to get her that medication as quickly as possible.

And that's when we decided we had to come home.

We changed our flights at considerable expense and arranged to fly back the next day.

Getting the prescription was difficult enough. Finding the medication was another ordeal. We called fourteen pharmacies before we finally managed to get it.

Even after she started treatment, her breathing became concerning enough that we seriously considered whether she needed to go to the hospital.

It's been a difficult experience, and I'm very grateful that she's getting through it.

But here's the thing.

We had taken precautions. We had tried to minimize our exposure. We'd done what we reasonably could to protect ourselves.

And we still got COVID.

Sometimes, despite your best efforts, things happen.

And that brings me to the point of this episode.

So, what does all of this mean for me as a triathlete?

Well, first of all, you have to stop training when you're sick.

And I know that's easier said than done.

For me, the hardest part of an illness or injury is often the waiting. You want to get back out there. You want to resume your routine. You want to keep making progress.

But your body needs time to recover.

In my case, I waited until my fever, body aches, and other acute symptoms had resolved and my energy had returned before cautiously testing the waters.

Around day eight, I tried fifteen minutes of easy cycling. That felt fine.

The following day, I did thirty minutes of easy endurance cycling. Again, I felt fine.

My energy was good, my heart rate seemed consistent with the effort, and I wasn't experiencing the body aches or fever I'd had earlier.

I still had some residual congestion, though, and that was a reminder not to get ahead of myself.

Every part of me wanted to jump straight into a hard VO2 max session. I mean, I've just come off a period of excellent progress, and I'm eager to get back to it.

But that would be a terrible way to approach recovery.

COVID can have complications that aren't always obvious during the activity itself. Some people experience cardiovascular problems, and others experience post-exertional symptom exacerbation, where symptoms worsen hours or even days after activity.

Feeling good during a short ride doesn't automatically mean you're ready for a hard workout.

So I'm being conservative. I'll increase activity gradually, pay attention to how I feel during the session and afterward, and seek medical guidance if symptoms persist or anything concerning develops.

Because the last thing I want is to rush back, trigger a setback, and end up losing even more training time.

And here's something worth remembering: I have about a year until the World Triathlon Age Group Championships in Hamburg.

I don't need to rush.

I have time.

And even if I lose a little fitness in the short term, that doesn't mean I've lost the ability to build it back.

Which brings me to the mental side of this whole experience.

Over the past few years, I've had various injuries. Some have been related to overtraining, and those have prompted me to take a closer look at how I train and recover.

I've gone to physiotherapists and chiropractors. I've worked on prehab exercises, stretching, and taking better care of my body. I've made changes because I want to reduce the likelihood of getting injured.

And I think that's entirely reasonable.

If you notice that a particular behaviour consistently contributes to an injury, it makes sense to change that behaviour.

But illness is a different beast.

You can take precautions, as my wife and I did, and still get sick.

And it occurred to me recently that we should probably approach a year of training with the expectation that something is going to happen.

Think about it.

You're training for twelve months. Are you really going to get through that entire year without catching a cold, developing a sore foot, tweaking your back, having a family issue, or encountering something at work that disrupts your routine?

Maybe you'll get lucky.

But I wouldn't count on it.

And yet, I think many of us start a training block with this unspoken assumption that we're going to have twelve uninterrupted months of progress.

We develop a plan. We follow the plan. We watch our fitness improve.

And when something interrupts that process, we react as though something has gone wrong.

But has something really gone wrong?

Or has something happened that is simply part of being human?

I think there's a meaningful difference between those two ways of looking at things.

When I started training in September, I was making fantastic progress. Everything seemed to be moving in the right direction. My FTP was increasing, my workouts were getting harder, and I was feeling stronger.

It would have been easy to imagine that this trajectory would continue indefinitely.

But that's not how training works.

It's not how life works.

Progress is rarely a straight line.

And I think recognizing that in advance makes setbacks much easier to deal with when they inevitably arrive.

Here's another thing that's helped me.

I've been tracking my training and performance for years, and when I look back at my athletic life, I can see that the overall trend has been upward.

But it hasn't been linear.

There have been periods of improvement, periods of stagnation, and periods when I've lost fitness or had to stop training altogether.

And yet, over time, I've continued to improve.

It's a bit like the stock market. There are dips and corrections along the way, but the longer-term trend can still be upward.

Now, I think tracking your progress is important here.

If you're relying entirely on how you feel today, or how you think you've been performing over the past few weeks, you can easily lose perspective.

You might feel as though you've had a terrible season when, in fact, you've set several personal bests and made substantial progress over the past couple of years.

Your memory isn't always a reliable record of your performance.

So track your training. Record your times, your power, your fitness metrics, or whatever measures are meaningful to you.

Find a way to look at your progress over a longer period.

Because when you do that, you can remind yourself that the temporary setbacks are only part of the picture.

You can look at the evidence and say, "You know what? I've been here before. I've lost fitness before. I've had interruptions before. And I've recovered. I've improved. I've continued to make progress."

That perspective gives you confidence.

It helps you avoid treating every interruption as a catastrophe.

And it allows you to focus on the longer journey rather than becoming obsessed with what happened this week.

Now, I want to be clear about something.

I'm not suggesting that we should stop trying to prevent illness and injury.

Quite the opposite.

I think we should do everything reasonable to reduce the likelihood of these things happening.

If you're overtraining, change your training. If you're not recovering properly, address that. If there are sensible precautions you can take to reduce your exposure to illness, take them.

I certainly will continue to do those things.

But there's a distinction between taking responsibility for what you can control and believing that you can control everything.

As athletes, we're often very focused on the relationship between our actions and our performance.

We train harder, we get fitter. We recover better, we perform better. We improve our nutrition, and hopefully we get better results.

That relationship encourages us to take responsibility for our training.

And that's a good thing.

But sometimes, I think we extend that sense of responsibility too far.

We start believing that if something happens to us, there must have been something we could have done to prevent it.

And sometimes that's true.

But sometimes it isn't.

If I injure myself because I repeatedly ignore a warning sign, that's something I want to examine. I want to understand what I did and how I can avoid repeating that mistake.

But if I bend over to pick something up and my back suddenly goes out, with no warning, there's only so much I can learn from that experience.

And if I get COVID despite taking reasonable precautions, I don't think it's particularly useful to beat myself up about it.

I can learn what I can. I can continue taking sensible precautions. But I can't go back and change what happened.

At some point, I have to accept the situation and move forward.

And I think that's a healthier way to approach both injury and illness.

You can take responsibility without blaming yourself for everything.

You can pursue improvement without demanding perfection.

And you can accept a setback without giving up on your goals.

There's another part of this that I think is important.

I've often said on this podcast that one of the reasons I train is because I enjoy it.

I enjoy swimming, cycling, and running. I enjoy becoming fitter and stronger. I enjoy the discipline and the health benefits. I enjoy seeing what I'm capable of doing.

That's why I do it.

And I think sometimes we lose sight of that.

We become so focused on the goal, the race, the next FTP increase, or the next personal best that we start treating the training itself as something that must always progress.

And when it doesn't, we become miserable.

But I can still enjoy today even if I'm not training.

Why?

Because triathlon isn't my life.

It's a part of my life. An important part of my life, absolutely. But it isn't my life.

And I've always felt that way.

When I started triathlon, I was a back-of-the-packer. I wasn't entering the sport with expectations that I'd be near the top. I was starting something completely new, and my goal was simply to see where I was and try to improve.

Perhaps if I'd been a college athletic star, with people expecting me to win, I'd have a different relationship with performance.

But that wasn't my experience.

I've been fortunate to discover how much I enjoy this sport without feeling that I have to prove something to someone else.

And I think that has helped me maintain perspective.

I want to improve. I want to perform well. I'm excited about Hamburg next year.

But I don't need every week to be perfect in order to enjoy being a triathlete.

And I don't need to sacrifice my mental health in pursuit of a faster time.

In fact, I think the opposite is true.

If I can accept that setbacks are part of the process, I can get through them with less frustration. I can give myself the time I need to recover. And I can return to training without feeling that I've somehow failed.

That makes the entire experience more enjoyable.

And isn't that the point?

I think there's a message here for anyone listening who's currently dealing with an injury or illness.

You're human.

You might be a triathlete. You might be fitter than most people around you. You might be pushing your body to do things you couldn't have imagined doing a few years ago.

You might even feel superhuman sometimes.

But you're not.

There are books about athletic performance with titles along the lines of Becoming Superhuman. And I understand the appeal of that idea. We want to push beyond our perceived limits. We want to discover what we're capable of doing.

But the reality is that we're still human.

Humans get sick. Humans get injured. Humans have family problems, work problems, and all sorts of other things happen that disrupt their plans.

And the more we push ourselves toward our physical limits, the more important it becomes to respect our need for recovery and recognize the risks we're taking.

We can work to reduce the likelihood of setbacks, but we can never eliminate that possibility.

So if you're injured or sick right now, don't automatically assume you've done something wrong.

Look at what happened. Learn whatever you can. Make changes if they're warranted.

But don't turn an unfortunate event into a personal failure.

Give yourself some grace.

And when it comes time to return to training, resist the temptation to make up for lost time by doing too much too soon.

You haven't failed because you've had to take a break.

And you don't need to prove anything by rushing back.

Your goal is to be healthy enough to continue training over the long term, not to win back every lost workout in the next seven days.

So, where does that leave me?

Well, I'm sitting here on Sunday, October 25th, cautiously returning to training after COVID.

Part of me wants to get right back into the hard sessions. I want to get back to my routine, continue building fitness, and pick up where I left off.

But I'm going to use logic rather than emotion.

I'm going to reintroduce training gradually, pay attention to how my body responds, and give myself the time I need to recover properly.

I have about a year until Hamburg. There's no need to panic.

And when I look at my training history, I can see that I've experienced setbacks before. I've recovered from them before. And I've continued to improve.

There's no reason to assume that this time has to be any different.

So that's the lesson I'm taking from this experience.

Do what you reasonably can to prevent illness and injury. Track your progress so you can see the bigger picture. Take your recovery seriously. And recognize that setbacks are not an exception to the process of becoming a better athlete.

They're part of it.

We may feel superhuman sometimes, but we're not. And the sooner we accept that, the easier it becomes to navigate the inevitable disruptions that come with being an athlete.

We can become more resilient. We can maintain our joy in the sport. And we can protect our mental health along the way.

Because I don't just want to be a fitter triathlete.

I want to be a healthy, happy, resilient triathlete who enjoys the journey.

And I suspect that's what most of us want, too.

Would you call it cheating if I installed a tiny electric motor in my bike that produced 5W of free power? Of course you would. But would you call it cheating if I raced with a $12,000 super TT bike that saved me 10W of power? Hmmm.

Memberships can be had at www.patreon.com/thelonelytriathlete

TRANSCRIPT

So, there's been a story in the triathlon world recently that I find really fascinating.

And it's not fascinating because I think it's funny, or because I enjoy watching somebody get caught cheating.

Actually, quite the opposite.

It's fascinating because it raises a much bigger question about what we're actually trying to accomplish when we race triathlon.

The story involves an age-group triathlete who had some remarkably fast bike splits, which eventually resulted in anonymous whistleblower complaints and allegations of motor doping.

And I want to be careful here, because this whole thing apparently became a bit of a nightmare, and I don't think it's my place to declare somebody guilty based on what I've read.

But the story got me thinking about motor doping.

And then it got me thinking about technology.

And then it got me thinking about what the heck we're actually doing in this sport.

Because here's the thing.

We all understand why motor doping is cheating.

If I put a little electric motor on my bike and use that motor to propel me down the road, I'm no longer relying entirely on my own physical ability.

That's pretty obvious.

But here's where I start to get philosophical about it.

What exactly is the objective of triathlon?

Is it to go the distance as quickly as possible?

Or is it to go the distance as quickly as you are capable of going using the power of your own body?

Those sound like almost the same thing.

But I don't think they are.

Because if the objective is simply to cover 40 kilometres on a bicycle as fast as possible, then why would we have any rules about equipment?

Let's just remove all the restrictions.

Put a motor on the bike.

Put a giant fairing around the rider.

Give everybody an aerodynamic shell.

Give them whatever technology is available.

And let's see who can get from point A to point B the fastest.

That would be a competition.

But it wouldn't really be the sport of triathlon anymore.

Because triathlon isn't supposed to be a competition between machines.

It's supposed to be a competition between people.

And that got me thinking about something that we don't question very often.

Why do we allow technology to improve our performance at all?

Now, I love technology.

I'm a triathlete.

I have a power meter.

I have an aero bike.

I have aero wheels.

I have a wetsuit.

I have very expensive goggles.

I use training software.

I have GPS.

I have all kinds of technology that didn't exist when I first started doing triathlons.

And obviously, I don't think all of that is cheating.

But where is the line?

And why is that line where it is?

Take the bicycle itself.

A modern triathlon bike is vastly more technologically advanced than the bicycles we were riding 30 years ago.

It's more aerodynamic.

It's lighter.

It's stiffer.

The wheels are more aerodynamic.

The helmet is more aerodynamic.

The clothing is more aerodynamic.

The position we're riding in is more aerodynamic.

All of those things make us faster.

And we accept that.

In fact, we celebrate it.

We spend thousands of dollars trying to save a few watts.

And I'm one of those people.

I love this stuff.

But here's the uncomfortable question:

At what point does technology stop helping the athlete and start becoming the athlete?

Because there is a continuum here.

At one end, you've got something like a better pair of running shoes.

Nobody would argue that wearing a good pair of running shoes means you're not actually running.

At the other end, you've got an electric motor.

Nobody would argue that the motor is your athletic ability.

But somewhere between those two extremes is a whole lot of grey area.

Super shoes.

Aero helmets.

Deep-section wheels.

Electronic shifting.

Aero frames.

Power meters.

Carbon-plated shoes.

Wetsuits.

Training software.

Altitude tents.

Cooling systems.

Nutrition technology.

Recovery technology.

And on and on.

And I'm not saying any of those things are bad.

I'm just asking the question:

Why do we allow them?

And I think part of the answer is that technology has always been part of sport.

Human beings have always tried to make better equipment.

We made better running shoes.

We made better bicycles.

We made better swimsuits.

We made better skis.

We made better boats.

And there's something really interesting about technological innovation.

It makes the sport faster.

It makes it more exciting.

It makes people want to buy things.

And, let's be honest, there's an entire industry built around convincing triathletes that the next piece of equipment is going to make them faster.

And sometimes it does.

But there's another consequence.

Money.

Because the more expensive technology we introduce into the sport, the more the playing field can become separated by who can afford the best equipment.

Now, I know we're not talking about professional sports here.

We're talking about age-group triathlon.

But age-group triathlon can be incredibly competitive.

And especially when you're racing for a podium, or trying to qualify for a world championship, the difference between first and fifth place can be very small.

So if one athlete has a $12,000 superbike with $3,000 wheels and another athlete has a five-year-old road bike with clip-on aerobars, are they really competing on an equal playing field?

Well...

No.

They're not.

But we've decided that's okay.

We've decided that the athlete with more money is allowed to buy some performance advantage.

And that's where this gets uncomfortable.

Because we draw the line at a motor.

But why?

Because the motor provides too much assistance?

Because it's hidden?

Because it replaces human effort?

Probably all three.

But if that's the principle, then maybe the question we should be asking isn't:

“Is this piece of technology legal?”

Maybe the question should be:

“How much of the performance is actually coming from the athlete?”

Now, obviously, that's impossible to quantify.

And I'm not suggesting we try to ban every technological improvement.

That would be ridiculous.

I like technology.

I don't want to go back to racing in a cotton T-shirt and riding a 25-pound steel bicycle.

But I think it's worth recognizing what we're doing.

We're gradually moving the sport toward a place where athletic performance and technological performance are intertwined.

And that isn't necessarily bad.

But it does change the nature of the competition.

And then you get to motor doping.

And suddenly, we're looking at something that's different.

Because the motor isn't making you more aerodynamic.

It isn't reducing rolling resistance.

It isn't helping you train.

It's actually producing power.

You can be sitting there pedalling away, and some of the work is being done by a machine.

And that's where I think we all intuitively say:

No.

That's not you.

That's the motor.

And maybe that's the simplest definition of cheating in sport.

You're getting performance from something that isn't you.

But then again...

Isn't that happening in tiny amounts all the time?

My aero helmet isn't me.

My wheels aren't me.

My wetsuit isn't me.

My bike isn't me.

My running shoes aren't me.

So maybe the distinction is not whether technology contributes to performance.

Of course it does.

Maybe the distinction is whether the technology is passive or active.

Does it allow my body to use its own energy more efficiently?

Or does it actually add energy?

That's probably where the line needs to be.

And I think that's a pretty reasonable line.

But there's another issue with all of this.

And that's trust.

Because age-group triathlon is supposed to be recreational.

We're amateurs.

We're not making a living from this.

We're not getting paid millions of dollars to win races.

And yet we take this stuff incredibly seriously.

We train for months.

We spend enormous amounts of money.

We travel around the world.

We qualify for world championships.

We stand on podiums.

And when we're racing, we want to know that the person beside us is playing by the same rules.

That's part of what makes competition meaningful.

If I beat somebody, I want to know that I beat them.

Not their bank account.

Not their equipment manufacturer.

Not their hidden motor.

And not their ability to find some loophole in the rules.

And that's why I think the motor-doping story is worth talking about.

Not because I want to pile on one athlete.

Not because I think age-group triathlon is filled with cheaters.

And certainly not because I think we should start policing every person who rides a little bit too fast.

It's because it forces us to ask a much bigger question.

What are we actually competing at?

Are we competing to see who can cover the course fastest by any means available?

Or are we competing to see what human beings are capable of doing?

Because I think most of us, if we're honest, chose triathlon for the second reason.

That's what makes it satisfying.

You swim the distance because your body can swim that far.

You ride the distance because your body can produce the power.

You run the distance because your body can keep going.

And when you cross the finish line, there's something incredibly satisfying about knowing:

That was me.

Not the bike.

Not the shoes.

Not the technology.

Not the training software.

Me.

And maybe that's why motor doping bothers us so much.

Because it doesn't just violate a rule.

It violates the underlying agreement we're all making when we line up at the start.

We're agreeing that we're going to find out what we're capable of.

And I think that's what makes sport different from simply transportation.

If the goal were merely to get from here to there as quickly as possible, I'd take a motorcycle.

I'd get there a hell of a lot faster.

But that's not why we're doing this.

We're doing this to find out what we're capable of.

And perhaps that's the line we should keep coming back to as technology continues to evolve.

Not:

“Can we make this legal?”

Not even:

“Can this make us faster?”

But:

“Does this still allow the athlete to be the thing producing the performance?”

Because once the answer becomes no...

I'm not sure we're really talking about triathlon anymore.

Do you train on vacation? Should you train on vacation? I have some thoughts.

Share your thoughts at www.patreon.com/thelonelytriathlete

TRANSCRIPT

So, it's vacation time.

And that got me thinking about something that I've actually changed my mind about over the years: training while you're on vacation.

For most of my triathlon life, I didn't.

And my reasoning was pretty simple.

I'm on vacation.

I'm not training.

I'm taking a break from the structure, the schedule, the alarm clocks, the workouts, the recovery protocols, all of it.

And I actually think there's a lot of value in that.

Because when we talk about recovery, we tend to think about physical recovery. You take some time off, your muscles recover, your body gets a break.

But there's also mental recovery.

And I think that's just as important.

If you're training six days a week, and every workout has a purpose, and you're constantly thinking about what you're supposed to be doing tomorrow, and whether you hit today's numbers, and whether you got enough sleep, and whether you ate enough protein...

Sometimes it's really nice to just stop.

You're on vacation.

You don't have to do anything.

And that's the way I used to approach it.

But lately I've been finding that a little harder to justify.

And the reason is five watts.

Five watts.

I've spent the last six weeks working to increase my FTP by about five watts.

And now I'm about to go away for ten days.

And if I do absolutely nothing for those ten days, my training software predicts that I'm going to lose roughly five watts of FTP.

About one and a half percent.

And I'm thinking...

Wait a minute.

It took me six weeks to gain those five watts.

And I'm going to give them back in ten days?

That doesn't seem fair.

Now, intellectually, I know that fitness doesn't work quite that simply.

And I also did a little bit of reading about what happens when you take a short break from training.

And it turns out that if you've put in some good, hard training before the vacation, you can actually maintain a surprising amount of fitness over a relatively short period of time.

In fact, with some appropriately hard workouts leading into the vacation, I may be able to preserve most, or maybe even all, of that FTP.

Which is good news.

But then I started thinking...

What if I did a little bit of exercise while I was away?

Not training.

Exercise.

And that distinction has become really important to me.

Because I don't want to take my training plan on vacation.

I don't want to wake up in Mexico and think, "Okay, what's my workout today?"

I don't want to be looking at power numbers or heart-rate zones or trying to hit intervals.

I don't want to turn my vacation into a training camp.

But I also don't think there's anything wrong with getting up in the morning and moving my body for 30 or 40 minutes.

And that's essentially what I've decided to do.

I'm not taking my bike.

I'm not going to use an indoor gym.

For one thing, I don't really want to spend my vacation inside a gym. And it's cold and flu season, and I'm just not particularly interested in putting myself into an indoor environment where a whole bunch of people are breathing heavily around me.

But I can run.

And I can swim.

So my thought is, maybe one morning I'll get up early, before it gets too hot, and I'll go for a 30- or 45-minute run.

And the next day, I'll go swimming for 30 or 40 minutes.

Then maybe run.

Then swim.

Run.

Swim.

And that's it.

There's no particular workout.

There's no prescribed intensity.

There's no TrainingPeaks workout waiting for me.

There's no TrainerRoad workout.

There's no "I have to get this done."

I'm just going to exercise.

And I really like that idea.

Because the swimming in particular doesn't even really feel like I'm giving something up.

I'm going to be in Mexico.

I'm going to be in the ocean.

I'm probably going to spend hours in the water.

So why not spend 30 minutes of those hours actually swimming?

I'm not taking 30 minutes away from my vacation to go to the pool and do 2,000 metres because my training plan says I have to.

I'm already in the water.

I'm just moving through it.

And running is a little different because I probably wouldn't otherwise get up and go for a run on vacation.

But even there, I think there's something enjoyable about getting outside early in the morning, before the heat, and seeing where you are on foot.

And here's where I think I've found the middle ground.

I'm not really trying to improve my fitness while I'm on vacation.

I don't expect these workouts to make me fitter.

They're not going to meaningfully increase my FTP.

They're not going to suddenly make me a faster runner.

They're not going to transform my swimming.

But combined with the hard training I've done before the vacation, I think they can help me maintain some of what I've built.

And that's a nice side benefit.

But I don't think that should be the primary reason for doing them.

The primary reason is simply that exercise is good for us.

And I think that's something we sometimes forget when we're talking about training.

We tend to divide our lives into these categories.

I'm training.

I'm not training.

I'm on vacation.

I'm at work.

I'm at home.

I'm travelling.

But our bodies don't really care about those categories.

If you can find 30 or 40 minutes to move your body, that's probably a good thing whether you're at home, you're travelling for work, or you're sitting on a beach somewhere.

And maybe the trick is not to think of it as training.

Think of it as exercise.

Because there are some real downsides to training on vacation.

The first is time.

If you're travelling with your spouse or your family, that 45-minute run isn't necessarily just 45 minutes.

There's getting ready.

There's showering.

There's changing.

And suddenly you've taken an hour or more away from the people you're actually on vacation with.

And that's not necessarily a good trade.

There's also the danger of becoming obsessed with it.

You tell yourself, "I'm just going to exercise a little bit while I'm away."

And pretty soon you're thinking about your workouts every day.

You're setting alarms.

You're getting frustrated if you miss a workout.

You're changing your plans because you need to get your run in.

And now you've recreated the exact structure you were trying to get away from.

There's another downside, too.

Spontaneity.

One of the great things about vacation is that you don't necessarily know what the day is going to look like.

Maybe you stay out late.

Maybe you have a couple of drinks.

Maybe you sleep until nine.

Maybe somebody suggests doing something you've never thought of doing.

And suddenly that 7 a.m. workout doesn't fit.

And that's okay.

You're on vacation.

You don't want your exercise to become another obligation.

And finally, there's recovery.

Sometimes your body actually needs the break.

Maybe you've just come off a hard training block.

Maybe you're carrying a little fatigue.

Maybe you've been travelling all day.

Maybe you didn't sleep well.

Maybe you're jet-lagged.

Maybe you're just tired.

In those circumstances, going for a hard run because you feel like you "should" isn't necessarily healthy.

And I think that's where the distinction between exercise and training becomes really useful.

If I'm exercising on vacation and one morning I don't feel like running, I don't run.

That's the test.

If I wake up and think, "You know what? I would rather sleep for another hour and then go have breakfast with my wife," then that's what I should do.

Because I'm on vacation.

And if missing that run creates anxiety or guilt...

Well, then maybe I've crossed the line from exercise back into training.

So I think that's the balance I'm going to try to find.

I'm not going to take my training plan with me.

I'm not going to try to replicate what I would be doing at home.

I'm not going to worry about maintaining every watt of FTP.

I'm not going to worry about losing a little bit of fitness.

I'm just going to move.

Run a little.

Swim a little.

Enjoy the water.

Enjoy being outside.

And then come home and get back to training.

And maybe that's the bigger lesson here.

I used to think the choice was binary.

Either you're training, or you're on vacation.

And I've come to realize that maybe there's something in between.

You can take a genuine break from training without taking a complete break from movement.

You can exercise without following a training plan.

You can move your body without measuring everything.

And you can protect your vacation without completely abandoning the things that make you feel good.

So, if you're heading away on vacation this season, maybe ask yourself a simple question:

Do I actually want to train while I'm away?

And if the answer is no, don't.

Take the break.

Enjoy the vacation.

Sleep in.

Eat the good food.

Have the drink.

Don't set the alarm.

Give yourself that mental break.

But if the answer is yes...

Maybe don't make it training.

Go for a swim.

Go for a run.

Take a hike.

Rent a bike.

Go for a walk.

Do something you enjoy.

And then go back to enjoying your vacation.

Because maybe the goal isn't to come home from vacation having gained fitness.

Maybe the goal isn't even to come home having perfectly maintained your fitness.

Maybe the goal is simply to come home feeling refreshed...

and still feeling like yourself.

Lately I've observed a tremendous number of people entering a 70.3 as their first triathlon. Back in the day, people hardly ever started at that distance. It usually went something like sprint --> standard --> half --> ironman. So, what changed? I've got some ideas.

Check the podcast out at www.patreon.com/thelonelytriathlete

TRANSCRIPT

There’s something I’ve been noticing lately.

I spend a fair amount of time looking at the triathlon subreddit, r/triathlon, and over the past few years I’ve noticed something that I find kind of fascinating.

There are so many people doing a 70.3.

And not just doing a 70.3.

Doing a 70.3 as their first triathlon.

And every time I see one of these posts, I find myself thinking…

Why?

I mean, seriously.

A 70.3 is a long-distance endurance event.

For a reasonably good age-group triathlete, maybe you’re looking at five hours.

For a lot of people, six hours.

Six and a half hours.

Seven hours.

Maybe more.

And I started thinking about that in relation to running.

Because six or seven hours is a really long time to be doing anything athletic.

For most recreational athletes, that's considerably longer than they would take to run a marathon.

And yet somebody who has never done a triathlon will sometimes say:

“I've signed up for a 70.3.”

And everybody says, “Congratulations!”

And then they start talking about wetsuits and nutrition and training plans.

And I think…

How did this become normal?

Because I don't remember it being this way.

I got into triathlon in the 1990s.

And back then, at least as I remember it, the progression was pretty straightforward.

There was sprint distance.

There was what we called standard distance, which became Olympic distance.

And then there was the Ironman.

And somewhere in between there was the Half Ironman.

And I did one of those myself when I was working my way toward doing a full Ironman.

But it wasn't really a thing in the way 70.3 is a thing today.

And this is where I had to go back and check my memory, because I wasn't completely sure.

And it turns out my memory is basically right.

There absolutely were half-Ironman-distance races in the 1990s.

There were some very well-known ones.

Wildflower had a Half Ironman.

Vineman had one.

There were others.

And I even remembered something called the Tin Man.

And this is where I thought, “Wait a minute. Did they actually try to call the half distance the Tin Man?”

Well…

Sort of.

There were races called Tin Man, and some of them were at roughly the half-Ironman distance.

But Tin Man wasn't actually the universal name for the distance.

It was just a name used by particular races.

So, yes, I remembered something real.

But no, there wasn't this giant global thing called the Tin Man series.

And that's the important distinction.

Because the half-Ironman distance existed.

What didn't really exist was the product that we now know as the 70.3.

And that changed in 2005.

That's when Ironman launched the Ironman 70.3 brand.

And I think that was a pretty important moment in the history of triathlon.

Because they didn't invent the distance.

They branded it.

They standardized it.

They created a global series around it.

And then, in 2006, there was a 70.3 World Championship.

And suddenly the half-Ironman wasn't just…

“Well, this is a good race to do on the way to a full Ironman.”

It became a destination.

You could be a 70.3 athlete.

You could qualify for a 70.3 World Championship.

There were 70.3 races all over the world.

And Ironman got very, very good at marketing them.

And I think that's where this gets really interesting.

Because I wonder if the success of 70.3 has actually changed what people think triathlon is.

If you came into the sport in the 1990s, like I did, you might have thought about triathlon as something like:

Sprint.

Then Olympic.

Maybe a Half Ironman.

Maybe eventually an Ironman.

There was a progression.

Today, I think a lot of people enter the sport with the Ironman brand already in their heads.

They see Ironman.

They see 70.3.

They see the World Championship.

They see people racing in these spectacular locations.

They see the professional athletes.

They see the finish-line videos.

They see the “You Are an Ironman” stuff.

And if you're a new athlete, you can very quickly come to the conclusion that this is what triathlon is.

You don't necessarily think:

“I'll start with a sprint.”

You think:

“I'm going to do a 70.3.”

And I think social media has probably accelerated that enormously.

Because what's more impressive on Instagram?

“I completed my first sprint triathlon.”

Or:

“I COMPLETED MY FIRST 70.3!”

You know exactly which one gets the reaction.

And I don't mean that critically.

I understand it.

There's something incredibly appealing about setting a huge goal.

And I'm certainly not going to criticize somebody for doing it.

But I do think it's interesting that we've arrived at a point where doing a six- or seven-hour endurance event can be somebody's introduction to triathlon.

And there's another thing I've been thinking about.

Television.

Because I wonder how much the growth of 70.3 has been helped by the fact that it's actually a really good television product.

A full Ironman is fascinating if you're a triathlete.

But as a television event, it's difficult.

It's a very long day.

The professional athletes are out there for hours and hours.

And then you've got thousands of age-group athletes spread over an even longer period.

A 70.3 gives you a much more compact race.

You've got the swim.

You've got the bike.

You've got the run.

You've got the lead changes.

You've got athletes racing very, very hard.

And you've got an entire race that unfolds in a much more manageable television window.

And I think that's probably important.

Because the more we see something, the more normal it becomes.

And if what we're constantly seeing is professional athletes doing 70.3s…

And amateur athletes doing 70.3s…

And people qualifying for 70.3 Worlds…

Then 70.3 starts to look like the normal thing to aspire to.

And maybe this is where I'm going with all of this.

I think Ironman did something extremely clever.

They took an existing distance and turned it into a brand.

And once you turn something into a brand, you can sell an identity around it.

You're not just doing a 1.9-kilometre swim, a 90-kilometre bike and a half marathon.

You're doing a 70.3.

That number means something.

And it means something because we've been told that it means something.

Now, there's nothing wrong with that.

I'm not anti-70.3.

I've done one.

I've trained for one.

I've spent plenty of time thinking about doing another one.

But I do wonder whether we've lost something along the way.

Because I actually think the Olympic distance is a fantastic race.

It's long enough that you have to train.

It's short enough that you can race it.

You can go hard.

You can recover.

You can have a life outside of triathlon.

And you can get really, really good at it.

And that's actually where I've found myself heading.

For a long time, I assumed the natural progression was toward longer distance.

That's what you did.

You went from sprint to Olympic.

Then you did a 70.3.

Then maybe you did an Ironman.

Longer was somehow better.

More impressive.

More difficult.

But I'm starting to question that.

Maybe the next step isn't always longer.

Maybe it's better.

Maybe instead of asking:

“How far can I go?”

we should sometimes ask:

“How fast can I go?”

Or:

“How good can I get at this distance?”

And that's particularly relevant to me now.

I'm 58.

I've already done the longer stuff.

I've done a 70.3.

I've done Ironman-distance racing.

And now I'm heading toward the 2027 World Triathlon Age Group Championships in Hamburg at the standard distance.

And what I'm finding really interesting about that is that I'm actually excited about getting better at a distance that isn't the longest thing I could possibly do.

I want to get faster.

I want to improve my swim.

I want to improve my bike.

I want to run well off the bike.

And I want to see how good I can get at an Olympic-distance triathlon.

Not how long I can survive.

How well I can race.

And maybe that's the part of this whole 70.3 phenomenon that interests me most.

We've become very good at convincing people that the ultimate achievement in triathlon is going longer.

But maybe there's another way of looking at it.

Maybe completing a seven-hour race isn't necessarily more impressive than doing a two-and-a-half-hour race really, really well.

Maybe the challenge isn't always endurance.

Maybe it's performance.

Maybe it's precision.

Maybe it's figuring out how to squeeze another minute out of a swim, another couple of kilometres per hour out of the bike, another few minutes out of the run.

And maybe…

Just maybe…

The next step in triathlon doesn't always have to be longer.

Sometimes it can just be better.

Lately I've observed a tremendous number of people entering a 70.3 as their first triathlon. Back in the day, people hardly ever started at that distance. It usually went something like sprint --> standard --> half --> ironman. So, what changed? I've got some ideas.

TRANSCRIPT

There’s something I’ve been noticing lately.

I spend a fair amount of time looking at the triathlon subreddit, r/triathlon, and over the past few years I’ve noticed something that I find kind of fascinating.

There are so many people doing a 70.3.

And not just doing a 70.3.

Doing a 70.3 as their first triathlon.

And every time I see one of these posts, I find myself thinking…

Why?

I mean, seriously.

A 70.3 is a long-distance endurance event.

For a reasonably good age-group triathlete, maybe you’re looking at five hours.

For a lot of people, six hours.

Six and a half hours.

Seven hours.

Maybe more.

And I started thinking about that in relation to running.

Because six or seven hours is a really long time to be doing anything athletic.

For most recreational athletes, that's considerably longer than they would take to run a marathon.

And yet somebody who has never done a triathlon will sometimes say:

“I've signed up for a 70.3.”

And everybody says, “Congratulations!”

And then they start talking about wetsuits and nutrition and training plans.

And I think…

How did this become normal?

Because I don't remember it being this way.

I got into triathlon in the 1990s.

And back then, at least as I remember it, the progression was pretty straightforward.

There was sprint distance.

There was what we called standard distance, which became Olympic distance.

And then there was the Ironman.

And somewhere in between there was the Half Ironman.

And I did one of those myself when I was working my way toward doing a full Ironman.

But it wasn't really a thing in the way 70.3 is a thing today.

And this is where I had to go back and check my memory, because I wasn't completely sure.

And it turns out my memory is basically right.

There absolutely were half-Ironman-distance races in the 1990s.

There were some very well-known ones.

Wildflower had a Half Ironman.

Vineman had one.

There were others.

And I even remembered something called the Tin Man.

And this is where I thought, “Wait a minute. Did they actually try to call the half distance the Tin Man?”

Well…

Sort of.

There were races called Tin Man, and some of them were at roughly the half-Ironman distance.

But Tin Man wasn't actually the universal name for the distance.

It was just a name used by particular races.

So, yes, I remembered something real.

But no, there wasn't this giant global thing called the Tin Man series.

And that's the important distinction.

Because the half-Ironman distance existed.

What didn't really exist was the product that we now know as the 70.3.

And that changed in 2005.

That's when Ironman launched the Ironman 70.3 brand.

And I think that was a pretty important moment in the history of triathlon.

Because they didn't invent the distance.

They branded it.

They standardized it.

They created a global series around it.

And then, in 2006, there was a 70.3 World Championship.

And suddenly the half-Ironman wasn't just…

“Well, this is a good race to do on the way to a full Ironman.”

It became a destination.

You could be a 70.3 athlete.

You could qualify for a 70.3 World Championship.

There were 70.3 races all over the world.

And Ironman got very, very good at marketing them.

And I think that's where this gets really interesting.

Because I wonder if the success of 70.3 has actually changed what people think triathlon is.

If you came into the sport in the 1990s, like I did, you might have thought about triathlon as something like:

Sprint.

Then Olympic.

Maybe a Half Ironman.

Maybe eventually an Ironman.

There was a progression.

Today, I think a lot of people enter the sport with the Ironman brand already in their heads.

They see Ironman.

They see 70.3.

They see the World Championship.

They see people racing in these spectacular locations.

They see the professional athletes.

They see the finish-line videos.

They see the “You Are an Ironman” stuff.

And if you're a new athlete, you can very quickly come to the conclusion that this is what triathlon is.

You don't necessarily think:

“I'll start with a sprint.”

You think:

“I'm going to do a 70.3.”

And I think social media has probably accelerated that enormously.

Because what's more impressive on Instagram?

“I completed my first sprint triathlon.”

Or:

“I COMPLETED MY FIRST 70.3!”

You know exactly which one gets the reaction.

And I don't mean that critically.

I understand it.

There's something incredibly appealing about setting a huge goal.

And I'm certainly not going to criticize somebody for doing it.

But I do think it's interesting that we've arrived at a point where doing a six- or seven-hour endurance event can be somebody's introduction to triathlon.

And there's another thing I've been thinking about.

Television.

Because I wonder how much the growth of 70.3 has been helped by the fact that it's actually a really good television product.

A full Ironman is fascinating if you're a triathlete.

But as a television event, it's difficult.

It's a very long day.

The professional athletes are out there for hours and hours.

And then you've got thousands of age-group athletes spread over an even longer period.

A 70.3 gives you a much more compact race.

You've got the swim.

You've got the bike.

You've got the run.

You've got the lead changes.

You've got athletes racing very, very hard.

And you've got an entire race that unfolds in a much more manageable television window.

And I think that's probably important.

Because the more we see something, the more normal it becomes.

And if what we're constantly seeing is professional athletes doing 70.3s…

And amateur athletes doing 70.3s…

And people qualifying for 70.3 Worlds…

Then 70.3 starts to look like the normal thing to aspire to.

And maybe this is where I'm going with all of this.

I think Ironman did something extremely clever.

They took an existing distance and turned it into a brand.

And once you turn something into a brand, you can sell an identity around it.

You're not just doing a 1.9-kilometre swim, a 90-kilometre bike and a half marathon.

You're doing a 70.3.

That number means something.

And it means something because we've been told that it means something.

Now, there's nothing wrong with that.

I'm not anti-70.3.

I've done one.

I've trained for one.

I've spent plenty of time thinking about doing another one.

But I do wonder whether we've lost something along the way.

Because I actually think the Olympic distance is a fantastic race.

It's long enough that you have to train.

It's short enough that you can race it.

You can go hard.

You can recover.

You can have a life outside of triathlon.

And you can get really, really good at it.

And that's actually where I've found myself heading.

For a long time, I assumed the natural progression was toward longer distance.

That's what you did.

You went from sprint to Olympic.

Then you did a 70.3.

Then maybe you did an Ironman.

Longer was somehow better.

More impressive.

More difficult.

But I'm starting to question that.

Maybe the next step isn't always longer.

Maybe it's better.

Maybe instead of asking:

“How far can I go?”

we should sometimes ask:

“How fast can I go?”

Or:

“How good can I get at this distance?”

And that's particularly relevant to me now.

I'm 58.

I've already done the longer stuff.

I've done a 70.3.

I've done Ironman-distance racing.

And now I'm heading toward the 2027 World Triathlon Age Group Championships in Hamburg at the standard distance.

And what I'm finding really interesting about that is that I'm actually excited about getting better at a distance that isn't the longest thing I could possibly do.

I want to get faster.

I want to improve my swim.

I want to improve my bike.

I want to run well off the bike.

And I want to see how good I can get at an Olympic-distance triathlon.

Not how long I can survive.

How well I can race.

And maybe that's the part of this whole 70.3 phenomenon that interests me most.

We've become very good at convincing people that the ultimate achievement in triathlon is going longer.

But maybe there's another way of looking at it.

Maybe completing a seven-hour race isn't necessarily more impressive than doing a two-and-a-half-hour race really, really well.

Maybe the challenge isn't always endurance.

Maybe it's performance.

Maybe it's precision.

Maybe it's figuring out how to squeeze another minute out of a swim, another couple of kilometres per hour out of the bike, another few minutes out of the run.

And maybe…

Just maybe…

The next step in triathlon doesn't always have to be longer.

Sometimes it can just be better.

Too much fiber, noisy weekends, high cholesterol and more on this week's episode!

Come chat with us at www.patreon.com/thelonelytriathlete

Too much fiber, noisy weekends, high cholesterol and more on this week's episode!

Triathlon works best, long-term, as a lifestyle. Easier said than done?

Join up at www.patreon.com/thelonelytriathlon

TRANSCRIPT

I've been thinking a lot this week about the idea of triathlon as a lifestyle.

And specifically, I'm thinking about the training side of triathlon.

Because when somebody is new to the sport, I think one of the things that can be really interesting—and really beneficial—is that, over time, triathlon can become more than just something you do.

It can actually become part of your lifestyle.

And I started thinking about what that really means.

Because we use the word "lifestyle" all the time, but what actually makes something a lifestyle?

Well, I think one of the big things is that it's habitual.

It's something you do repeatedly. It's something that eventually becomes almost automatic.

I mean, think about eating breakfast. Or eating lunch. You don't wake up every morning and have a big internal debate about whether you're going to eat today.

It's just part of your life.

And I think there's something really interesting about what happens when training starts to move in that direction.

When you're new to triathlon, you probably have to think about everything.

When am I going to swim?

When am I going to ride?

When am I going to run?

What workout am I going to do?

What do I need to eat?

What do I need to bring?

Do I have clean cycling clothes?

Is my bike ready?

There's all this friction around the activity.

But if you stick with it long enough, some of that starts to disappear.

You know what Tuesday is.

You know that Thursday is a run day.

You know that Sunday morning is probably going to involve a bike.

You start preparing your gear without really thinking about it.

You start arranging your life around the things that are important to you.

And eventually, you're not really asking yourself, "Am I going to train today?"

You're asking yourself, "How am I going to make today's training work?"

And I think that's a pretty significant shift.

I think the first thing is consistency.

And I don't mean perfection.

That's an important distinction.

Consistency doesn't mean you never miss a workout.

It doesn't mean you execute every training week exactly as prescribed.

It doesn't mean you never get sick, or injured, or have a busy week at work, or have something happen in your family.

Consistency means that you keep coming back.

You train.

You miss a workout.

You get back to training.

You have a great week.

You have a terrible week.

You keep going.

And eventually, those repeated actions start to become a pattern.

And that pattern starts to become a habit.

And the habit starts to become part of your life.

I think patience is another big piece of this.

Because triathlon is really good at teaching you that you don't get everything you want immediately.

You can have a great training week and not see any improvement.

You can work really hard for three months and discover that your FTP went up by 10 watts.

And you might think, "That's it?"

But then you look back two years later and realize that those 10-watt improvements, those little improvements in your running, those little improvements in your swimming, all accumulated into something pretty significant.

That's the nature of endurance sport.

You're accumulating.

And I think that's one of the beautiful things about it.

Because if you're going to make triathlon part of your life, you're going to have setbacks.

You are going to miss workouts.

You're going to have bad races.

You're going to get sick.

You're probably going to get injured at some point.

You're going to have periods where life gets in the way.

And one of the skills you develop is simply learning how to pick yourself up and start again.

And that's a pretty useful skill outside of triathlon, too.

Because life doesn't really care what your training plan says.

Sometimes life happens.

And the question becomes, "Okay. What do I do now?"

Not, "How do I make up every workout I missed?"

Not, "How do I punish myself for falling behind?"

Just, "Okay. What's the next thing I can reasonably do?"

And I think that's another characteristic of something that's sustainable.

It's flexible.

It can bend without breaking.

Because I think it's very easy to confuse enthusiasm with sustainability.

You discover triathlon and you think, "This is amazing."

And suddenly you're looking at training plans and YouTube videos and gear and nutrition and power meters and heart-rate zones and all of these things.

And before you know it, you're trying to do everything.

And you're training five or six days a week.

And you've bought a bunch of equipment.

And you're trying to optimize every workout.

And you're exhausted.

And you've been doing it for six weeks.

And then you wonder why you can't maintain it.

So I think one of the most important questions for a new triathlete isn't:

"How much can I do?"

It's:

"What can I do consistently?"

And maybe even more importantly:

"What can I imagine myself doing five years from now?"

Because if the answer is, "Well, there's no way I can keep doing this," then maybe you've built something that's too big.

I think you start with your life.

Not with the training plan.

Look at your week.

Look at your work.

Look at your family.

Look at your sleep.

Look at the other things that matter to you.

And then ask yourself: where does training realistically fit?

Maybe you start with a very simple week.

One swim.

One bike.

One run.

And maybe that's not your ultimate training program.

It's just your starting point.

It's your minimum viable version of being a triathlete.

And once that feels normal—once it feels like, "Yeah, this is just what I do"—then maybe you add something.

And you see how that feels.

Maybe you experiment with when you train.

Maybe mornings work better.

Maybe evenings work better.

Maybe you discover that getting everything ready the night before removes a tremendous amount of friction.

And that's another thing I think people underestimate:

You're not just building a training plan. You're building a system around the training.

The bike gets cleaned.

The bottles get filled.

The clothes get laid out.

The shoes are ready.

The workout is on the calendar.

And suddenly, tomorrow morning doesn't require a whole bunch of decisions.

That's what I mean by reducing friction.

The fewer decisions you have to make, the easier it becomes to repeat the behaviour.

Because things will go wrong.

Maybe you miss Tuesday's workout.

What's your rule?

Do you try to squeeze it in Wednesday?

Do you move on?

Do you change the rest of the week?

Maybe you have a terrible night's sleep.

What's your rule?

Maybe you're feeling beat up.

What's your rule?

I think having some of those decisions made in advance can be incredibly helpful.

Because you don't want to make your best decisions about training when you're exhausted, frustrated, or feeling guilty.

Sometimes the best training decision is simply to let the workout go.

And then come back tomorrow.

And that's allowing triathlon to consume your life.

Because there's a difference between making triathlon part of your lifestyle and making triathlon your entire lifestyle.

And I think that's an important distinction.

For me, anyway, triathlon is important.

It's a significant part of my life.

But it's not the whole thing.

There are relationships.

There is family.

There is work.

There are other interests.

There is downtime.

There is just being a human being who isn't training.

And I think the sport is actually healthier when it has a place in your life rather than when it takes over your life.

And that probably goes back to sustainability again.

Because if the thing you're doing is constantly competing with everything else you value, eventually something is going to give.

That's another one that's really easy to fall into.

Especially today.

You can go online and see somebody's power numbers.

You can see somebody's race results.

You can see somebody's training volume.

You can see somebody who is swimming six days a week and running 50 kilometres and riding 300 kilometres.

And you're sitting there thinking, "Well, I guess I'm not doing enough."

But you don't know their circumstances.

And you certainly don't know their starting point.

You're comparing your beginning to somebody else's middle.

And that's a pretty easy way to take something that was supposed to add to your life and turn it into a source of stress.

So I think the better question is:

Is what I'm doing sustainable for me?

Not for somebody else.

For me.

Obviously, you get fitter.

You get stronger.

Your cardiovascular fitness improves.

You become more capable.

You may race faster.

You may achieve things that you never thought you were capable of.

But I think there are some benefits that go well beyond the physical.

There's confidence.

Not the kind of confidence where you think you're better than somebody else.

It's the confidence that comes from knowing you've done difficult things before.

You know what it feels like to be uncomfortable.

You know what it feels like to have a bad day and keep going.

You know what it feels like to work toward something for months and finally see the payoff.

And there's a sense of structure.

Training gives your week a rhythm.

There are things you do on certain days.

There are goals you're working toward.

And for a lot of people, I think that can be really valuable.

There's also community.

You meet people through triathlon.

You become part of something.

And maybe one of the most interesting benefits is the relationship you develop with aging.

Because when you make endurance training part of your life, you're not just thinking about what you can do this year.

You're thinking about what you want to be capable of five years from now.

Ten years from now.

And maybe that's one of the really powerful things about making triathlon a lifestyle.

You're not simply training for your next race.

You're building a life in which being active, being challenged, learning, adapting and taking care of yourself are normal things that you do.

And I think that's a pretty good lifestyle.

Not because triathlon is somehow the answer to everything.

It isn't.

But because the habits that you develop through the sport—consistency, patience, resilience, flexibility, preparation—can become useful long after the workout is finished.

And maybe that's the real benefit.

The race is temporary.

The fitness comes and goes.

The finish line is one day.

But if you can turn the process of training into something that fits naturally into your life, then you've created something that can stay with you for decades.

And that's a pretty compelling reason to become a triathlete.

Triathlon works best, long-term, as a lifestyle. Easier said than done?

TRANSCRIPT

I've been thinking a lot this week about the idea of triathlon as a lifestyle.

And specifically, I'm thinking about the training side of triathlon.

Because when somebody is new to the sport, I think one of the things that can be really interesting—and really beneficial—is that, over time, triathlon can become more than just something you do.

It can actually become part of your lifestyle.

And I started thinking about what that really means.

Because we use the word "lifestyle" all the time, but what actually makes something a lifestyle?

Well, I think one of the big things is that it's habitual.

It's something you do repeatedly. It's something that eventually becomes almost automatic.

I mean, think about eating breakfast. Or eating lunch. You don't wake up every morning and have a big internal debate about whether you're going to eat today.

It's just part of your life.

And I think there's something really interesting about what happens when training starts to move in that direction.

When you're new to triathlon, you probably have to think about everything.

When am I going to swim?

When am I going to ride?

When am I going to run?

What workout am I going to do?

What do I need to eat?

What do I need to bring?

Do I have clean cycling clothes?

Is my bike ready?

There's all this friction around the activity.

But if you stick with it long enough, some of that starts to disappear.

You know what Tuesday is.

You know that Thursday is a run day.

You know that Sunday morning is probably going to involve a bike.

You start preparing your gear without really thinking about it.

You start arranging your life around the things that are important to you.

And eventually, you're not really asking yourself, "Am I going to train today?"

You're asking yourself, "How am I going to make today's training work?"

And I think that's a pretty significant shift.

I think the first thing is consistency.

And I don't mean perfection.

That's an important distinction.

Consistency doesn't mean you never miss a workout.

It doesn't mean you execute every training week exactly as prescribed.

It doesn't mean you never get sick, or injured, or have a busy week at work, or have something happen in your family.

Consistency means that you keep coming back.

You train.

You miss a workout.

You get back to training.

You have a great week.

You have a terrible week.

You keep going.

And eventually, those repeated actions start to become a pattern.

And that pattern starts to become a habit.

And the habit starts to become part of your life.

I think patience is another big piece of this.

Because triathlon is really good at teaching you that you don't get everything you want immediately.

You can have a great training week and not see any improvement.

You can work really hard for three months and discover that your FTP went up by 10 watts.

And you might think, "That's it?"

But then you look back two years later and realize that those 10-watt improvements, those little improvements in your running, those little improvements in your swimming, all accumulated into something pretty significant.

That's the nature of endurance sport.

You're accumulating.

And I think that's one of the beautiful things about it.

Because if you're going to make triathlon part of your life, you're going to have setbacks.

You are going to miss workouts.

You're going to have bad races.

You're going to get sick.

You're probably going to get injured at some point.

You're going to have periods where life gets in the way.

And one of the skills you develop is simply learning how to pick yourself up and start again.

And that's a pretty useful skill outside of triathlon, too.

Because life doesn't really care what your training plan says.

Sometimes life happens.

And the question becomes, "Okay. What do I do now?"

Not, "How do I make up every workout I missed?"

Not, "How do I punish myself for falling behind?"

Just, "Okay. What's the next thing I can reasonably do?"

And I think that's another characteristic of something that's sustainable.

It's flexible.

It can bend without breaking.

Because I think it's very easy to confuse enthusiasm with sustainability.

You discover triathlon and you think, "This is amazing."

And suddenly you're looking at training plans and YouTube videos and gear and nutrition and power meters and heart-rate zones and all of these things.

And before you know it, you're trying to do everything.

And you're training five or six days a week.

And you've bought a bunch of equipment.

And you're trying to optimize every workout.

And you're exhausted.

And you've been doing it for six weeks.

And then you wonder why you can't maintain it.

So I think one of the most important questions for a new triathlete isn't:

"How much can I do?"

It's:

"What can I do consistently?"

And maybe even more importantly:

"What can I imagine myself doing five years from now?"

Because if the answer is, "Well, there's no way I can keep doing this," then maybe you've built something that's too big.

I think you start with your life.

Not with the training plan.

Look at your week.

Look at your work.

Look at your family.

Look at your sleep.

Look at the other things that matter to you.

And then ask yourself: where does training realistically fit?

Maybe you start with a very simple week.

One swim.

One bike.

One run.

And maybe that's not your ultimate training program.

It's just your starting point.

It's your minimum viable version of being a triathlete.

And once that feels normal—once it feels like, "Yeah, this is just what I do"—then maybe you add something.

And you see how that feels.

Maybe you experiment with when you train.

Maybe mornings work better.

Maybe evenings work better.

Maybe you discover that getting everything ready the night before removes a tremendous amount of friction.

And that's another thing I think people underestimate:

You're not just building a training plan. You're building a system around the training.

The bike gets cleaned.

The bottles get filled.

The clothes get laid out.

The shoes are ready.

The workout is on the calendar.

And suddenly, tomorrow morning doesn't require a whole bunch of decisions.

That's what I mean by reducing friction.

The fewer decisions you have to make, the easier it becomes to repeat the behaviour.

Because things will go wrong.

Maybe you miss Tuesday's workout.

What's your rule?

Do you try to squeeze it in Wednesday?

Do you move on?

Do you change the rest of the week?

Maybe you have a terrible night's sleep.

What's your rule?

Maybe you're feeling beat up.

What's your rule?

I think having some of those decisions made in advance can be incredibly helpful.

Because you don't want to make your best decisions about training when you're exhausted, frustrated, or feeling guilty.

Sometimes the best training decision is simply to let the workout go.

And then come back tomorrow.

And that's allowing triathlon to consume your life.

Because there's a difference between making triathlon part of your lifestyle and making triathlon your entire lifestyle.

And I think that's an important distinction.

For me, anyway, triathlon is important.

It's a significant part of my life.

But it's not the whole thing.

There are relationships.

There is family.

There is work.

There are other interests.

There is downtime.

There is just being a human being who isn't training.

And I think the sport is actually healthier when it has a place in your life rather than when it takes over your life.

And that probably goes back to sustainability again.

Because if the thing you're doing is constantly competing with everything else you value, eventually something is going to give.

That's another one that's really easy to fall into.

Especially today.

You can go online and see somebody's power numbers.

You can see somebody's race results.

You can see somebody's training volume.

You can see somebody who is swimming six days a week and running 50 kilometres and riding 300 kilometres.

And you're sitting there thinking, "Well, I guess I'm not doing enough."

But you don't know their circumstances.

And you certainly don't know their starting point.

You're comparing your beginning to somebody else's middle.

And that's a pretty easy way to take something that was supposed to add to your life and turn it into a source of stress.

So I think the better question is:

Is what I'm doing sustainable for me?

Not for somebody else.

For me.

Obviously, you get fitter.

You get stronger.

Your cardiovascular fitness improves.

You become more capable.

You may race faster.

You may achieve things that you never thought you were capable of.

But I think there are some benefits that go well beyond the physical.

There's confidence.

Not the kind of confidence where you think you're better than somebody else.

It's the confidence that comes from knowing you've done difficult things before.

You know what it feels like to be uncomfortable.

You know what it feels like to have a bad day and keep going.

You know what it feels like to work toward something for months and finally see the payoff.

And there's a sense of structure.

Training gives your week a rhythm.

There are things you do on certain days.

There are goals you're working toward.

And for a lot of people, I think that can be really valuable.

There's also community.

You meet people through triathlon.

You become part of something.

And maybe one of the most interesting benefits is the relationship you develop with aging.

Because when you make endurance training part of your life, you're not just thinking about what you can do this year.

You're thinking about what you want to be capable of five years from now.

Ten years from now.

And maybe that's one of the really powerful things about making triathlon a lifestyle.

You're not simply training for your next race.

You're building a life in which being active, being challenged, learning, adapting and taking care of yourself are normal things that you do.

And I think that's a pretty good lifestyle.

Not because triathlon is somehow the answer to everything.

It isn't.

But because the habits that you develop through the sport—consistency, patience, resilience, flexibility, preparation—can become useful long after the workout is finished.

And maybe that's the real benefit.

The race is temporary.

The fitness comes and goes.

The finish line is one day.

But if you can turn the process of training into something that fits naturally into your life, then you've created something that can stay with you for decades.

And that's a pretty compelling reason to become a triathlete.