Winter Wonderland, glass half full

This past Sunday was the final day of the Winter Wonderland Triathlon, now in it's second year.  This is an event that kept me very busy for the last couple months as I was race directing, coaching many participating athletes, and racing myself to see where my fitness and speed are going into the season.  It's really a series of races, as it's impossible to hold a continuous triathlon in Wisconsin in February, but it's gotten pretty popular.  It's a unique way to break up the winter training for many athletes.

Since you can't race bikes outside in February, we used computrainers for the bike portion.

Most of the participants are collegiate athletes from around the midwest who are preparing for Nationals in April, but it is also an age group race.  From a race director standpoint the event went very well.  The athletes seemed to have a good time and things ran smoothly.  From a coaching perspective it went well too.  Lots of my athletes competed between the UW Team and SBR.  Many also raced last year and it was a great chance to see the work they've put in turn out a faster time this year. (One in particular cut an absurd amount of time, and I will talk more about him later in this post.)  As an athlete, how I feel about it really depends on what context I put it in.  If I look at my result compared to my triathlon career and my goals, it was a pretty lousy performance.  However, it was better than I expected given the previous year.  If I look at it compared to my 2014 season it was actually a pretty good race.

The last year just wasn't a good year for me as a triathlete... I don't regret it though, it was a good year otherwise and I did learn a lot through it. And some of my athletes had fantastic years, which was more of a focus in 2014. I just wasn't able to put in any significant time training.  The only thing that went well, athletically, in 2014 was my strength training.  It was a little embarrassing to admit when I was talking with someone about signing up for this race or that race, but there were stretches of weeks on end during last season where my combined weekly swim/bike/run training volume was only about 2 hours.  Pretty pathetic for someone with an elite license.  But that's life.  And the elite license is good for three years, thankfully.  Because I do need to step it up in 2015 if I'm going to retain that status.

Coming out of the weekend, I could easily be discouraged about my performance, but I'm looking at it as a "glass half full" type thing.  The way the past year has gone I easily could've gone over an hour. (The winning time was 53 minutes for collegiate and 55 minutes for age group) but I finished in 58 minutes.  Last August in Chicago, my swimming hit a career low point and I came out of the water almost 6 minutes behind the fastest athletes in a 1500m.  This was half the distance and in a pool, but I cut the time gap per 750m from 3min to about 1.5min against that caliber swimmer.  My bike ride on Sunday may have been 40 watts lower than I've ridden that course in the past but it was 20 watts higher than I could do it the last time I rode it in the fall.  A couple months ago my legs would itch like crazy after a run because it had been so long since I'd done any running, and Sunday I ran a 17:30-45-ish 5k. It's unrealistic to expect to bounce back in no time so I'm happy to focus on the process of getting back into racing shape.

God willing, I should be able to stay on track in 2015 and we'll see where things go.