Triathlon Training Tips – Goal Setting
It’s that time of year when your inbox is flooded with tips on New Year’s resolutions, diet suggestions, and ideas on how to make a fresh start. I know that keeping your resolutions can be difficult, so instead, why not choose an exciting goal for 2014 that you can stick to? The best goals are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time sensitive).
Why not set yourself a SMART triathlon goal for 2014?
Suggestions on setting your SMART goal:
Check out our training tips for spring.
It’s not too soon to start planning for your 2012 season. Most races are open and filling fast, so it’s time to get to work, decide your goals, and get started on focused training!
Read about the importance of goal setting, how to choose a race and what base training is all about. Check the Training section of our website here.
What are your goals for 2012? Let us know your feedback or email us your triathlon training questions…
Hello Trigirls!
Hope this finds you in good health? If the health is not so good – I hope that this finds you in good spirits! Every cloud has a silver lining and all that…
At the moment, while I’m not in perfect health (I’m having a few back problems that have prevented me from long distance triathlon racing so far this season), I still feel that there is plenty to work on, and there is plenty of hope on the horizon. I’ve just had to re-evaluate my short-term goals and while I’m confident that my long-term goal of racing at the World Championships Ironman in Hawaii (in 2012) is still achievable, it is going be via a different route to the one planned at the beginning of this year.
So what are your triathlon or training goals? Are they achievable? Are they too easy even? Do they need re-evaluating? I try and have goals for every session; it can take less than 30seconds to clarify what the
Roughly every 4th week of my training plan is a test and recovery week. The training volume drops, but I have a series of benchmark session to do so the coach and me can see whether things are moving in the right direction.
So there I was one Wednesday evening in my basement on my trusted turbo trainer churning out my monthly 80k time trial. By now I have a fairly high boredom threshold when it comes to turbo sessions. When I first started I would barely last 20 minutes! But for sessions like that I load up my mp3 player with podcasts, and tune out the world with those beautiful Sennheiser headphones that drown out most outside noise. That particular evening it was IMTalk I was listening to, and they were talking about the mental tricks you can engage to get through those tough sessions. That in turn made me think of what I do (which admittedly is fairly similar).
So here are my top 5 in no particular order:
Counting and numbers, and by that I mean anything. Just keep your mind busy. During hard interval run sessions I find myself counting my foot strikes, forcing myself to get to 100 before I will look at my watch again. During swim sessions I often work out the percentages of the total I’ve already swum. I count pedal revelutions too. It all helps.
Breaking things up: 2000 m swim test sounds tough? You lose count easily. How about thinking of it as 5×400