5 Steps to Effectively Analyzing Your Triathlon Results

hitman786

Thanks goes to original writter

Have you been searching for your triathlon results? Are you trying to find a way to interpret them and get faster? Then keep reading. I'd recommend five keys to effectively finding and analyzing your triathlon results.

1. Find Your Results. Obviously, you can visit the triathlon results page of the race in which you have competed, but sites like Athlinks.com, Trifind.com and Triresults.com allow you to not only search triathlon results for your splits, your competitors, your races and events, but also to compare races and find accurate data from previous year's races.

2. Examine Your Splits. Your triathlon results are not just about your overall race time. You must individually analyze your swim, your bike and your run splits. How do they compare? Compare profiles of races and analyze strength on hills vs. flats, pool vs. open water, flat water vs. ocean, off-road vs. paved. Look at variables like your "average 100m pace", your "mile or km pace" for the run, and your "miles per hour or km per hour" for the bike and the run. The purpose of this is to focus in areas of fitness on which to focus during later season based on identified inconsistencies or limitations in earlier season races.

3. Examine Your Data. Do you have a power meter or heart rate monitor? Look at your triathlon results for consistency in watts and beats per minute, identify unnecessary spikes in intensity, compare better race results to see what you did with your heart rate and power profiles, take into consideration the effect of environmental variables such as heat, road conditions or topography.

4. Generate Goals. This is the whole idea why you should analyze your triathlon results in the first place. You need to sit down and write (yes, WRITE!) a strategy for improving your weaknesses. Did you have a bad bike split on a hilly course? Then begin incorporating hill repeats. Did your performance suffer in a mass swim start? Start rubbing elbows in Masters and get more open water swim partners. Were you slow in hot races? Begin heat acclimatization and incorporate hydration and electrolyte strategies. How do you think people get fast? It's certainly not by ignoring weaknesses!

The key is to assimilate all the variables listed above to actually generate a plan of attack in training and racing for later in the season and then to identify areas of needed improvement and develop training protocols that build on those areas.

And how about that fifth key? It is "social networking". This can be with your triathlon club, your fellow competitors, or even the onlookers and your family. An important feature is the ability for members to post and share triathlon results and race reports. This is because the fifth key - social networking with other triathletes about your race, and finding out from the crowd how you could have been able to perform better, what you did right, and what you did wrong - is one of the most powerful ways to get faster.

Your take home message: don't just cruise through the upcoming race season, shrug off any bad races, and cruise forward. Instead, be scientific, analyze your results, learn from your mistakes, and get faster!