Play to your strengths

The first bit of advice you get when you start doing triathlon is to train hardest on your weaknesses. It makes sense. Most people come to triathlon with a bit of a background in one of the sports. If you’re a decent runner, you’ll probably enjoy running most and want to spend most time on it, but there are bigger gains to be made from more time swimming and riding.

My background is in swimming and, despite 10 years during which I only ever dived into a pool to make my way to the swim-up bar, when I started swimming regularly again, the technique was already there and the stamina came back quickly.

I’m now swimming strongly and in the vast majority of triathlons I’ll be one of the first people out of the water. If I spent an extra three hours a week swimming, I’m sure I could improve a few seconds here and there, but is that the best use of that time? Running is arguably my weakest of the three, and three hours extra a week of running could yield minutes of improvement – maybe even half an hour on an Ironman marathon.

NO!

So, that’s why you train your weaknesses. But that’s a simplistic view. I currently do two solid swims with the masters squad each week, as well as an easy ‘recovery’ swim on my own in the gym pool after a hard weekend.  That keeps me feeling strong and as though I’m slowly improving. But if I cut that down to one swim a week and used that extra hour to run, chances are there’d not be too much difference in my swim times. But I’d feel different.

HELL NO!

For me, the swimming, as my strongest event, is my metronome. If I’m swimming well going into an event, I feel good. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that, when I was feeling a bit ropey and doubting myself last week, it was during a week when my swim schedule was messy.

I don’t think this is just because the swim comes first in a triathlon either. If you’re a good runner, it must give you confidence during the swim and ride to know that, once you step off the bike, whip the helmet off and pull the trainers on, you’re hitting the run in a rich vein of form.

Yes!

While it’s obviously important to train your weaknesses as they’re where the biggest benefits and time gains can be found, there’s real certainty and clarity in knowing that your strongest discipline is firing on all cylinders; conversely, mentally, if I’m not even swimming well, then what chance do I have in the rest of the race?

On another note, my recovery week is coming to an end. It’s funny to call a week during which you train 10 hours an ‘easy recovery week’ but that’s exactly how it’s felt and I feel really tight and strong because of it. Couple of mid distance rides (105k tomorrow AM and 60k Sat AM) then time to get stuck into the five biggest and most significant weeks of this programme. Looking forward to it.