Plain and simple, I like to race. I’m a competitive person and I love the challenge of race day and everything that comes with it. All the long hours of training finally pay off and you get to reap the rewards of all your hard work. It’s why I got into triathlon in the first place, and it is why I continue to train my ass off day in and day out. Heading to a race with that nervous pit in your stomach, not knowing whether you will succeed or fail is for me the best feeling.
Conversely training is essentially the opposite of racing. There are no medals, no aid stations and no spectators. It’s just you and your thoughts, in the pool and on the roads for hours on end. What get’s you through those training sessions are the races that loom in the distance. Don’t train hard enough, with the right intensity, or not enough and your race results will suffer. Knowing that every time you head out for a swim, bike or run that you are doing it for a reason makes the daily grind of training worth it.
However it always has been and always will be about race day. And as you make the transition to half and full ironmans, racing often will end up taking a back seat to training. For the first few years after making the switch to longer distance races this really didn’t suit me. After all, the reason I did this stuff was to get out there and challenge my self against my competitors. As I have grown in the sport however, I’ve come to learn the value of a quality training session over a race. In fact a good day of training for ironman can be just as rewarding as a race.
You see it so often with people whom are starting out in this sport. They fill their summer weekends with race after race, and never truly “peak” for that one big race. Truthfully this isn’t always a bad thing. They end up gaining a lot of valuable race experience and truly learn to love the sport. And as they age in the sport and take their goals to the next level it becomes a very seamless transition to training over racing. That is where I find myself.
The urge to race every weekend will probably always be there for me, that is who I am. But I have also learned to love training, and how valuable it can be to a peak performance on race day. After all isn’t that one perfect race what we are all seeking? Sure I could go out and punch the clock at a ton of different races and have a blast in doing so. But somewhere deep inside I would always wonder, was it the best I could have done? So as the training log fills with hour after hour and the big races seem so far away, I take solace in the fact that racing less, training more and focusing on trying to achieve that one peak performance is all worth it.
