Performance Progression

The Motivation

As someone who jumped into triathlon 5 years ago I’ve often struggled myself at trying to define how well I performed, not only against my expectations but against myself in general. Not all courses are the same and you’re not always racing against the same people. Not to mention that there are three sports so just because you had a “bad race” doesn’t mean you had a bad swim, bike, or run on its own. I’ve been plowing forward in my training the past few years without really taking the time to look back and see how far I’ve come. As a scientist, we always look for the best way to present the data we have to communicate what it means. With 5 years of the sport behind me, and almost 20 races, I figured I must have enough data to come away with some kind of conclusion. The first question I had to ask myself though was, “How will I define performance and how can I plot that as data that makes intuitive sense?”

Defining “Performance”

There are lots of ways to define performance. In sports like running or triathlon a lot of focus is put on how fast you finish or what place you finished. While these can certainly be useful metrics I think it’s good to step back and look at other ways you can evaluate how well you are doing not just post-race but post-season(s) as well. With that lens I decided to define my own performance relative to my PRs in each individual sport.¹ I’m using that age old classic metric of measuring your performance against the only person that really matters: yourself. I plotted the average of how far behind a split was from my PR in that same event. The hope being that I would see how well I’ve performed against myself from year to year. I also included one metric of performance that the USA Triathlon organization calculates.² The result is below:

Where did this data come from?

For those of you that want more details on how I calculated the data and where it came from can read this section, otherwise skip it. I collected the split times for the swim, bike, and run for 13 races across 4 seasons.³ I took the difference between my PR in a given sport and the corresponding split time for all the other races. Each season had to have a minimum of 2 races so I would have multiple data points to average. For a given season I took the average of all the data points. In effect, I’m showing the average time behind my PR for all races in a given season.

For those that care even more about the statistics behind the data above I also included the chart below. The averages are the same as the chart above but I have included an error bar with the standard deviation for the races in that season. I did this for myself initially to show a measure of “consistency” since a smaller error would suggest that I was able to maintain that pace across multiple races in the same season. This was one attempt to try and attempt to capture the possible influence of the course itself. The error is greater in my early seasons but I was still clearly slower in many of those races.⁴

The Takeaways

These are my main takeaways from this evaluation of my performance and progression over the past 5 years.

• Emphasis on swim training the first few years has paid off and my swim time is several minutes faster now
• I’ve continued to progress over the years and my PRs are the result of that persistent effort and cumulative training
• I’ve become more consistent in the last couple years with performances between races being less variable
• There is still more room to grow and I hope to continue pushing those PRs forward!
  

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