What Comes After Your First Triathlon (Most Get This Wrong)

You trained. You showed up. You crossed the finish line.

Now what?

For a lot of athletes, the end of a race doesn’t feel the way they expected. There’s pride, excitement… and sometimes an unexpected sense of emptiness. The structure is gone. The goal is gone. And the question becomes: what comes next?

In this episode of Triathlon 101, Coach Justin walks through what actually happens after your first triathlon—and how to approach your next steps with clarity instead of emotion.

This isn’t about immediately signing up for another race. It’s about understanding the post-race phase that most athletes skip—and why that mistake leads to burnout, frustration, and stalled progress.

You’ll learn:

•  Why feeling “off” after race day is completely normal 
•  The difference between reacting vs. progressing 
•  How to evaluate your first race the right way 
•  The biggest mistake athletes make when choosing their next race 
•  Why longer and harder isn’t always better 
•  How to build a sustainable path forward in the sport 

Whether your race went exactly as planned—or completely off the rails—this episode will help you take that experience and turn it into your next step forward.

Because the finish line isn’t the end… it’s the starting point.

Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction: What Comes After Your First Triathlon
03:00 The Emotional Aftermath of Race Day
06:30 The Most Important Question: Continue or Stop?
09:30 Reflect Before You React
12:30 Finish Line High vs. Finish Line Low
15:00 The Trap of Doing Too Much Too Soon
21:30 Why Bigger Isn’t Always Better
25:00 The Refinement → Progression Process
28:00 Recovery: Physical and Mental Reset
34:30 Training Must Fit Your Life
39:00 Your 3 Paths Forward as an Athlete
01:00:30 Long-Term Progression Strategy + Final Takeaways

 🎧 Listen now and take control of what comes next in your journey.

For coaching inquiries:

Coach Katie → https://fuel2run.com

Coach Justin → https://tabularasaracing.com

Podcast Email → theenduranceathletejourney@gmail.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome to Triathlon 101, a Beginner's Guide to Triathlon, an Endurance Athlete Journey Podcast Series. I'm your coach for this journey, and if Triathlon has ever felt confusing, intimidating, or out of reach, that's exactly why this series exists. You don't need to be fearless, you don't need to have perfect fitness, and you definitely don't need to have everything figured out yet. What you need is a clear plan, honest guidance, and the confidence that comes from taking the right steps in the right order. In this series, we'll strip away the hype, focus on smart progression, and help you build confidence before distance so that triathlon fits into your life, not the other way around. Whether this is your first race or your first time even considering one, you're in the right place. Let's get to work. So I want to paint a picture of you, you did it, you trained for it, you showed up, you crossed your finish line, and now you're sitting here thinking, what comes next? So, what I hope is the situation where this is really just your starting point. We are going to take this experience and we're going to build on it further, and we're going to expand on it. We're going to work on things that didn't go so well. We're going to capitalize on things that went really well. And so the point that I'm trying to make with this is that this is just the start. I hope that this is not just a one and done kind of thing. You just wanted the experience. I hope that you had a situation where you really saw what you were capable of when you put your mind to it and when you put your foot forward with a structured plan and a goal in mind. And you prove to yourself that you can do something hard. You can do something that it maybe have been a little bit scary, a little uncertain on yourself. And I hope that this experience left you with a feeling of satisfaction, a feeling of pride that you were able to accomplish this. I want to also introduce an idea that maybe this situation, your experience didn't turn out like you had hoped. And I want to go into a little bit more depth on what we can do next so that you're not leaving this sport with a bad taste in your mouth, something that you have learned. And we want to take that experience and apply it going forward. So let's jump right on into this and let's talk about what I would call the emotional aftermath of a race. So I want to normalize what it is that you're feeling. I I remember crossing my first finish line, and man, I was excited, I was proud, I was relieved, and it left me feeling a little empty. Not that the experience didn't meet my expectations, because quite frankly, the experience exceeded my expectations because when I crossed that finish line, I was hooked, I was ready, I was super excited, and I was like, man, I did something hard, I did something that that I didn't know if I could do or not, and I questioned choices and approaches and everything else. But I proved to myself today that I am capable of doing it. But then when you like maybe a day or two passes and you're kind of recovering, you may start to feel a little empty. And I want to describe this as kind of like it's almost like a grieving process. And this is really prominent when you start getting to maybe longer course races where the training period lasts a longer period of time. If we're training for a 70.3 or 140, a full Iron Man 140.6, these training periods can last months. And it's common when you cross that finish line and you're just like, man, it's done. But then you really start to question, okay, what do I have next? And you're kind of grieving the loss of the structure. You had a routine, you had a goal that you were working towards, something that you were striving forward to obtain. And once you obtain it, you're left with a little bit of a hole. As okay, what do I do now? And as a coach, when I work with my athletes, this is something that we do a lot of. We we sit down and we talk about this. What are going to be our next steps? What is it that you want to do? And how can I help you get to that next step and whatever it is that you want to accomplish? And I just want you to know that if this is what you're feeling, this is perfectly normal to miss the structure, miss the routine, and to miss the goal. But I don't want you to jump right into the next thing simply because you're grieving this loss. Because I want us to think about things in terms of the long term, not just instant gratification. Let's let's jump into training so I don't have to deal with these emotions, I don't have to deal with these thoughts, and I'm just going to throw dirt on top of them by diving into the next thing. We want to discuss what these feelings are and what they mean because that makes us healthier going forward. This is expected, and I hope that you find this video helpful in terms of understanding your emotion and maybe giving you some guidance for your next step in your process. So, what I want you to do is here's your first decision point that we have to address. The question is that was this something that I did, or is it something that I want to continue to do? That's by far the most important question that you have to address. And no coach can answer this for you. No, no group of friends can answer it, no, no loved one, no spouse can answer this. This is a you question. And this ties back to why you did this in the first place. What is your why for moving forward? Why did you want to set on this path? Your why may have been you wanted to prove something to yourself that you could do something hard. That's great, that's perfectly fine. It could be something where you wanted to teach your kids or a loved one that that working hard for something and being goal-oriented and what it means to put in the work and do something hard. That's fine too. If that's what your why is. If that gets you up in the morning and gets those shoes on, or you jump on that bike, or you you grab your goggles and you head off to the pool. If that's what it takes, fine. That is your why. And I want you to stick with that. But you have to address it. You you have to really formalize what this is to you, because this will help you understand and how to come up with the response to was this something that I was just that I just wanted to do, or is this something that I want to continue to strive towards? Is this something that I want to develop and move forward with? If that's the case, then there are steps that we can take to transition this and create these structured steps to move forward in the process. Because I don't want you just kind of stumbling along in the dark, bumping into things. I want to turn on the lights for you. I want to show you the path forward. And then that's really what a good coach does. They're not there just to simply give you workouts and give you performance targets to hit. They are there with you for this journey moving forward. They are a partner in this. They share in the victories and they share in the struggles. I can tell you because I experience this with my own athletes. If I have an athlete that doesn't have a very good race, I struggle along right there with them. I feel that. Likewise, if I have an athlete that had a fantastic race, I take a lot of pride and satisfaction in seeing the look on their face as a result of their achievement. I was there simply just to guide them and support them. I didn't do the work they did. But it gives me a level of satisfaction seeing their reaction to the environment to the situation that they've been in and the pride that they take in what they've accomplished. So that's one of the one of the best things about being a coach and why I love this so much. It's just the interactions. It has nothing to do with, oh, my athletes were able to do this, and my athletes were able to do that, and I've got Kona qualifiers, I've got elite athletes, and all this kind of stuff. None of that stuff matters to me, honestly. What I'm more interested in is taking an athlete from nothing, where they're loaded with just insecurity and uncertainty and just apprehension, and showing them what they can achieve and what they can accomplish when they put their mind to it. And I love that. So the reason that that I go through that is because this next step is we want to reflect before we react. I want us to really process and sit down and talk about how this thing went, how this how this experience went for you, not just on race day. Race day was what it was. There's probably a bunch of different factors that you could not control on the quality of your race day. So we're looking back at all of the weeks that we put into the whole process of getting to race day. Those are just as important as the result of what you got on race day. So in order to evaluate what next steps should be, we have to evaluate what the steps that we have taken produced and how you moved through that process. So we're going to answer questions like, what did I enjoy? What did I feel was the hardest? Was I confident or did I feel unprepared? And why did I feel that? Did I enjoy this process or was I just interested in just crossing the finish line and I really wasn't interested in learning anything else? If that's the case, then absolutely so be it. But your next step should come from some level of clarity and not impulse. I don't want us signing up for another race simply because you had a good one and you're looking to get something else, or I don't want us signing up for a race because you had a race that didn't meet your expectations, so you want quote unquote a second shot at it. I don't want that either. Doesn't mean that we don't sign up for future races, and that might be a little bit of an inspiration, but it's not the foundation that we build on to move forward. So the next thing that I want to bring up is what I call the finish line emotions. You have two athlete types in this kind of situation. You can have an athlete, what I would characterize as the finish line high. They cross that finish line and they're just like, man, that was fantastic. I can do anything now. Sign me up. Let's go. But then you also have the athlete where I say it's the finish line low. They cross that finish line and they're like, that was an absolute hot mess. It didn't go the way that I had hoped, or I didn't get to see my true level of fitness, or I was underprepared for what was going to be demanded of me, and I just didn't have the fitness that I needed in order to compete the way that I wanted to. That those two athletes can reside within the same person. I can tell you that I've had races where I crossed the finish line and I was like, that was fantastic. I can't wait for the next one. Everything went great. There were a few things that were to struggle, but overall, it was a positive experience, and I'm ready to take on the next challenge. I've also had races where it says, I don't want to ever do that again. I want to put my bike uh on Facebook Marketplace. I want to throw away my run shoes and I want to sell my wetsuit and throw away my goggles. I've had those races too. And so what I want to emphasize here is these two athletes, even though they can reside within a single person, we want to approach this as a progression and not an escalation. Now, when I say escalation, it's common for me as a coach to hear other athletes that I talk with say, I just finished my sprint, I'm ready for an Iron Man. And I'm ready for I'm ready. I'm committed, I can I'm gonna do this, which is perfectly fine. But it's not what I recommend. A, you are running off of adrenaline and emotion. Those two things are not going to be with you in month sixth of your training plan, and it's getting colder outside, or it's getting dark early, and now you have to find the motivation to get out of your warm bed and go to the pool for a swim workout, or you may have to break out the headlamp in order to get a run after a long day of work, and but you still have a workout to do, or I've got a six-hour bike ride on a Saturday when all my friends are having barbecues, but this is something that that I have to do is I have to get this bike workout in. Those finish line emotions don't sustain and get you through those. Your whys do. Your commitment to the process gets you through those hard times. But relying on the emotion at a finish line to validate next steps is something that I don't find to be incredibly successful in in the long term. I want us to maybe I don't want to say hinder, but I want to I want to hold back that a little bit. I want to taper it a little bit. And as we walk through the emotion and the evaluation of how the process went, then we can use that to determine what next steps are and not basing our next steps off of the finish line emotion. So one of the things that I do with my athletes, and I do this personally myself as well, is when we finish a race, regardless of distance, uh what kind of race it was, whether it was a sprint, Olympic, 70.3, a full Iron Man or whatever, or just a if it's a half iron, half marathon, a full marathon, 10Ks, whatever. I don't I don't entertain the ideas for next races within one to two weeks of crossing that finish line. Now, you may think that it's a little bit harsh, but the reason that I do that is because I don't want our decisions to be biased by the emotion of the situation in which we we just finished this race, either it was good or whether it was bad. I don't want that to really factor into our next steps. I want you to have an opportunity to allow your body to recover, physiologically recover. For a 70.3, it's pretty common to need a couple weeks of recovery, depending on how you raced it. For a full Iron Man, it's perfectly reasonable to almost allow three weeks of recovery. Now, I'll talk a little bit about what I mean by recovery and a little bit later, but I do not encourage my athletes to start looking at race registrations and trying to find what they're going to do next during that recovery process. A, because we need to have our mind a chance to settle and process the emotion on and the thoughts on how the training went, how did race day go? Then once we kind of get past those emotions, then we start to sit down and really analyze how it went, what things worked well, what things didn't work well, what did you like about training, what was particularly hard about training in terms of like how hard it was to execute. Swimming on a Wednesday was really hard because I had other demands of my time for Wednesdays. So that made getting to the pool challenging. So if we could move that to another day, it might be easier. I'm not saying that the workouts were hard. I'm saying the execution of the plan, the schedule was hard. And what made it hard? And is there anything that we can do to fine-tune that to the next for the next journey, for the next step in this process? What can we do? Now, as the body starts to recover and the emotions settle down, we are able to now make decisions from a level of understanding and not a level of excitement. Now, there's something that I do want to clarify. I don't want you to think that we only approach decisions logically and cold and emotionless. That's not what I'm saying at all. But there is a difference between allowing your emotions to influence and guide your decisions rather than having those emotions because of your decision. I hope that makes sense. I don't want the emotions driving the decision. I want the decision to drive the emotion, right? So you sign up for the next step. If you just finished a sprint and you're now going to sign up for an Olympic, I want that to be the source of excitement. The fact that you're stake taking this next step and you're excited about it. I don't want it to be I didn't have the race that I wanted, so now I'm going to sign up for this next one as a shot at redemption. That that's not what I really want. I don't find it particularly helpful. I don't find it particularly sustainable. And from a motivation perspective, that stuff does not last. So let's keep that in mind. That I do want us to feel some level of excitement and some emotion about the decisions that we make, but I don't want the emotions to drive those decisions. So next, uh, I want to say that I want us to avoid this Iron Man tomorrow trap. I can say that let's generic generify that a little bit. I don't even know if that's a word, but we're going to make this a little bit more of a generic statement because an Iron Man is a specific distance. It is a brand of race. It is not the race itself. It's a brand. So what I'm getting at here is the industry and society tends to glorify longer and harder efforts. I know this because I've experienced it myself. And I can tell you for a situation for a scenario in mind is when I've done full Iron Man races before. And so now when I sign up for a half mare a half Iron Man, I find myself discounting the half Iron Man. And when people say, What are you training for? I'm training for just a 70.3. It's still a significant effort, but I'm discounting it because I've done something longer and I've done something harder. And I think that kind of illustrates how social media and society kind of glorifies this progression, this perceived required progression to go longer and harder rather than just sticking with something that works for you. It fits in your life. And it actually can produce more enjoyment and more satisfaction because it complements the life and it doesn't complicate it. So what I have found is that athletes who tend to make these decisions to jump forward to something that they may not be ready for, or to make commitments to a journey that is a little bit beyond where they currently are simply because they are looking for some kind of validation from the outside. What I found is that it typically is to burn out, they get frustrated, they're not seeing the progress that they really want to see, because they've now formed what this experience should look like rather than what it's going to be like. I hope that that distinction is important. And what we'll find is that these athletes will tend to not just burn out, but they'll just lose motivation, and everything just kind of fizzes out. And then when they get closer and closer to race day, they start to panic because they lost their motivation. Maybe their training went by the wayside a little bit, and now that they panic train, then they jump right back in, and they're just like, oh my gosh, I gotta get this done. I've got this race, and what am I gonna do? And then they freak out and they panic train, which then can snowball and lead to injury. Trying to take too big of a step forward will open you up to an increased injury risk profile because you're trying to overlay demands on the body that it's not equipped for. And there is a there's a timeline to that. I you have the amount from the amount of time from today until whatever your race day is, that's fixed, and the days just keep getting shorter and shorter, you're not going to get additional days. And so this increased injury risk profiles, burnout, loss of motivation, loss of enjoyment out of the process, it becomes now a drag. And what it does is it just kills the sport, it doesn't fuel and add to it. And so one of the things that I do want to stress is there is a process that we should go through, and it starts at the finish line. That's where it starts, not finish. It starts at the finish line. And then we sit down and we go through what's called a refinement process. We sit down and we figure out what worked, what didn't work, what are what are some of your perceived weaknesses, what are some of your strengths? Can we improve those? Either one of those. How do we capitalize on strengths? How do we find races that complement those strengths for increased performance, increase in enjoyability, and a higher likelihood of consistent training? We want to still just go through this process of trying to figure out what it is that we can improve on and capitalize on. Once you kind of have that idea and that kind of flushed out, then we can start talking about progression. Whether that means progression in terms of going for a longer race or a progression could mean that we stick with the same distance race, but now we start to overlay some performance expectation. That is a form of progression. Even though you may not be doing longer and harder courses, you are expecting more and more out of your body. So that is a form of progression. What we find is that athletes will skip this refinement process and go straight from the finish line to progression. And they really don't know how to go through the process of refinement in order to get more and more out of their body, which is where that progression comes from. So what happens is they'll train, train, train more and more, and they won't see the progress that they want or that they're looking for in order to meet the performance expectations that they have. Because they didn't go through the refinement process, they didn't sit down and really evaluate how to get to the progression. They just went straight through the straight to the progression. So the next step is after we've all we've sat down and we've talked about, we've gone from the finish line, we've gone through the refinement, we've gone through the progression. When should we race again? So I want to stress what this recovery process is like. And so when I say recovery, I mentioned earlier that you can have races where you can take a week of recovery, whether that you're talking an Olympic or a 70.3, where you may need a week of some decent recovery, uh a full Iron Man where you can take probably three weeks up to a couple months to really recover, depending on the situation. What I recommend is we take at least a couple days, regardless of what the distance is. I want to really unload not just the body but also the mind as well. So for a sprint, you can at least take one or two days off of no activity and really process those emotions. Because what I found that if you don't take those at least those few days and you try and jump right back into training, what it is you're allowing the emotions to drive the train rather than doing stuff that will improve you or get you better, you you're driving off of emotion. And uh, we don't want that. So take the few days, really don't do anything. You can sit down and really evaluate. I like to write things down. I just like to just grab a notebook and just start writing how the race went, how the training went, going into it, how am I feeling after now that the race is done? I allow for a few days for that. And then after that's done, and I'm starting to itch a little bit to try and get back to some level of activity, I'll go into just an unstructured training phase. This could be stuff that you may have had to set aside because you didn't have the time to do it in order to fit in the required volume that you needed for racing. So that could be taking group classes at your local gym. If you liked to do things like body pump or cycling classes or yoga classes or whatever the class may be, and you just did not have the time to commit to those types of activities because of your training, now's the time to do that. Now's the time to kind of jump in and say, okay, I'm gonna get on the elliptical and I'm gonna get on the rowing machine, or I'm gonna do some strength training. I'm gonna really kind of sit down and evaluate where my muscular weaknesses are, and let's just start to get to a little bit of light strength training and really engage some muscles a little bit and start to flush out all of the soreness. Once that's done, then we start to kind of step into some structured training. Many times for let's say a sprint, I'll have the athlete not do anything for at least two, two days, and then I'll spend the rest of the week kind of doing some unstructured stuff, and maybe into the first half of the next week doing some unstructured things, athlete choice. If you want to go for a hike at a local park or whatever, that's completely fine. If you want to grab your gravel bike, because you've been training on your roadbike, and you want to go and just ride some trails, or you want to get on a mountain bike and go do some of that, fine. Let's go. That's perfectly fine. I want you to enjoy this time and kind of unwind because I found that athletes who do who go through this process of recovery, unstructured training, and then into structure training, the structure training has much better quality to it because when you get to that point, you want to be there. You're not there because you feel like you have to be there. That's what I want. We're talking easy movement stuff, some strength training, like I said, some low pressure activity just to get that engagement back again. So that's the first factor is the physical side of it. So once you're ready, one to determine when you should race, we have to at least go through the physical recovery of the race that we just completed. The next factor on when we should race again is going to be from a mental readiness side. Ask yourself, are you excited that the race is over, or are you relieved, or you know, you're you're relieved that the whole training is over, and you're you're just feeling like I'm just not ready to make that step again? Or are you really excited to start that next block of training again? Those are two completely valid scenarios that I see with athletes all the time. Both of those can lead to poor decisions. Being overly excited for the next training block can bring you back into training faster or sooner than what you really should be. Likewise, being relieved or really apprehensive to start the training can really leave you on the sidelines for too long. And you really have to, when you start get back, when you start get back into training, you really struggle because now you're comparing your current self to your previous self, and depending on the amount of time that you spent off, that can be a significant difference. I've done that myself. So I understand what that is. And so what I don't want is I don't want us to be reactionary in our choices. I want our choices to be made with clear and concise decisions that we've made. And we're going to own those decisions. The third factor on when we should race again is we have to bring in the life context. Our training must fit our overall life, whether we have to take into account our work, our family, our stress levels, other demands that we have, kids, other demands that we have on our time, those have to be considered. I've worked with athletes where they get through a long training plan and a big race, and they just need that time with their family because the family goes through the training process just like the athlete does. And if I've talked about this in previous episodes of this series, where you, as the athlete, you don't race alone. You race with your support system. They all sacrifice just like you do. So they need some of that downtime as well. Not just you in terms of your physical and mental recovery, but you start to re-engage in some of those things that you may not have been fully engaged in before. It's common for athletes that have gone through long training plans and really hard races to kind of develop the siloed vision where really they just they're focusing on the training and a lot of other things. They're there, but they're not really they're present, but they're not really there. Now is a great time to work on that and not only be present but be there in that moment as well. I want to re reiterate this concept that your body doesn't separate stress types. Whether you have a stressful job or you have a your kids are really active and you're driving them all over the place, you you have a lot of demands on your time. Your body reacts to that stress. Then you overlay training on top of it, and the body becomes even more stressed. So you could say, let's say that you have a scenario where you've got no stress at all in your life, and you have a hard training day. Compare how you feel at the end of that day as a result of that hard training session. You feel worn down, you feel maybe a little mentally foggy. That that's the effects of the body being under stress. Now, consider a situation where you did no training, but you had a super stressful day at work, and the kids were acting crazy, and you have other decisions that you have to make throughout the day, and so you just got this decision fatigue. You're just trying to unwind from the day. How did you feel at the end of that day? Chances are you felt pretty similar at the end of that day than you did at a day where you had no stress but a lot of training. So that proves that the body doesn't differentiate stress, you're going to feel the same way regardless. So you have to take that into consideration in your next step is does this level of race fit into the life that I have right now, not the life that I'm going to have at some point in time, or the life that I had at some point in time in the past. Will this race fit into where I am right now? That's the question that you really have to ask and consider when it comes to deciding to race again and what to do, what next step to take. Because I believe that the sustainability of the process is way more important than the ambition of taking a next big step. So those are the three factors that I think are really important when trying to decide when to race again, and again, that's the physical recovery, the mental recovery, and the how that all fits into your life. So the next one is the next step in this process is going to how do we progress? And so now we're getting into the real questions. We've evaluated we've spent the time to evaluate how the race went, we've allowed the emotions to to settle, we've processed things that we can process, we've come up with next steps to fill some holes, and now we're trying to figure out what to do next. You have three three potential paths that you can take. The first one is to repeat the distance. So whatever race that you did, if you did a sprint, do another sprint. What that does is it builds confidence, improves the execution of your race strategy. There's a lot that you can gain by still doing the same distance race. It's not a it's not that you're being stale or that you're not progressing and you're not regressing, but I don't want you to feel like you're just kind of sitting still because there's things still that we can work on by repeating the distance again and trying to fine-tune the execution and to allow you to feel more confident in your abilities. Because that first race, chances are you you may have struggled a little bit with confidence. You're really uncertain on how this is going to go. I don't really know what to expect, even though I've been told this is the flow of race day, and these are some of the tips and tricks on how to stay calm here and there, how to make proper decisions. There's still a little bit of uncertainty that's still there. It's completely natural and to be expected. But confidence is gained through experience. And so as we do things more and more, we start to build that confidence and that insecurity and uncertainty starts to fade away. So that's option one. You pick the same distance and we just look to fine-tune some things. The next one is a gradual progression, which could mean that we're going to go to the next level. So we could say we're going to go from a sprint to the Olympic, or if you're going to go from the Olympic to the 70.3, or we're going from 70.3 to 140.6. That that's your progression. We're going to do that next level, we're going to build some durability. That's completely fine. It's reasonable. The next step is the third the third path that we have is to improve performance. So it's a little bit similar to path one, where we repeated the distance to build confidence and improve our execution. But now we're starting to overlay some performance expectation. And now it could be for the swim. I did the swim at this time. Now I want to improve this time by this percent or this number of minutes. I want to improve my transition times from five minutes down to four minutes, or I want to improve my bike power from this FTP number to this FTP number, or being able to maintain this particular cadence during a race. For running, it could be hey, I not only do I want to run the whole thing, but I want to run it at a particular pace range. That's the third path. So not all of those paths that I just talked about had us doing something that was bigger or longer. And that's the key thing that I want you to understand is that progress doesn't necessarily mean that you're progressing in a way that means that you're going harder and longer. Progression could simply mean that, hey, we're going to build confidence, we're going to improve the execution so that I become more experienced and more wise, and I can make better decisions during a race. Or now I'm going to still execute the same race, but I want to get faster and I want to get stronger and I want to get better. Those are all completely reasonable and all represent progress. So not just going longer is a sign of progression. I want us to evolve as an athlete. So structure matters in order to accomplish that. Training now becomes intentional, connected, and strategic. Before, in an earlier episode, I gave you this sample eight week training plan for a sprint. I didn't give you any detailed or any structured workouts. I said, go out there and ride for this number of minutes, or go out there and run for this number of minutes, or swim this number. Number of yards. Now we start to structure things a little bit more. So during that, I could say, now we're not going to just run for 40 minutes. We're going to do a warm-up pace for the first five to ten minutes. And now we're going to do some structured intervals. I want you to run at this particular effort level for two minutes. And I want you to run at easier effort for the next three minutes. And then we start to progress that and change those intervals. This is the intentional structured design of a training plan that is strategic in order to create the adaptation that we're looking for. No longer are we thinking in terms of just completion. We have a stated purpose for the workout. And so, but we have to also make sure that training fits the life and is maintainable. So that's the sustainability factor. It doesn't do me any good, it doesn't do you any good for me to give you a four-hour bike ride if you don't have the ability to execute that long of a ride on a Saturday because you have two kids, they're both in sports, and Saturday is date night with your spouse, and you don't have six hours or four hours in your day to execute that. So the training has to be developed and designed in such a way that it fits your life and complements it and doesn't make it more complicated. Because the more complicated it becomes, the increased likelihood that you're not going to do it. And what that does is it that builds and that snowballs, and that gets to a point where we get closer to race day, and now you start to panic train because the training plan that you had didn't fit into the life that you had. So that's not what I want for you. And we also and the next evolution in your in your journey, in your athlete journey, is we want to now define what success looks like to you right now. So during your first race, chances are your definition of success was just to complete. Now is success structured the same way? Now that you've got that one race under you, now what do you start? Now how do you define it? Now we're not just finishing anymore. We're starting to maybe define success as increased consistency within training. So if you executed 80% of your workouts during that training cycle for that race, maybe let's say success now is executing 85% or 90% of your workouts. And that could be a sign of success. Another sign of success is that you just feel more confident. And again, the confidence comes from experience. So you could also define success as an improvement in skill development, whether that means now in the swim, rather than having to rely on the breaststroke when you got tired, now we start to develop the skills necessary to swim the entire course with the front crawl approach, the freestyle swim. So we're improving muscular endurance and aerobic capacity, and we're developing these skills even more so that you have to rely less on your fallbacks. That could be a sign of success. I know that when I first started Triton, it took me several years to actually swim an entire course freestyle. I could swim it in a pool, but for some reason, when I got into the water, my brain would just shortwire and it refused to work. And then all of a sudden, one race, it just clicked. And I swam the whole thing with the freestyle stroke and didn't have to rely on my fallbacks at all. And there was nothing that I did in particular in order to bring about that. It just happened. That to me, that was a sign of success, and it had no tie to really my training. It was a mental success that something finally clicked in my mind that would allow me to execute the way that I wanted to do it. And that was a definition of success in my book. It had nothing to do with my performance on race day, it had nothing to do with my execution of a training plan. It was just something that I had never been able to do before, and now I was. So those are things that we want to consider when we're talking about the evolution as an athlete. We're starting to now move away from just unstructured activity to where we're just looking to get it done. We're trying to get in just the volume. Now we're becoming more intentional with it. And we're really starting to evaluate how it fits into our life. Next is something that that I've definitely kind of struggled with over the years, and it's this identity shift where you're now shifting from a perception that you're just a participant, and now you are becoming an athlete. I can tell you that a lot of times this does not happen overnight. And this is something that can take years to come about and to materialize. And I think a lot of it has to do with the mental side of the game more than the physical side. So you can do a lot of things and still not really see yourself as an athlete. And I know that was something that that until recently I've now been able to start calling myself an athlete. Before I was just like, oh yeah, I do triathlons, but I never really considered myself myself to be a triathlete or an athlete. But for some reason, just mentally and emotionally, it just didn't it didn't work for me. I I've done a lot of internal work to where now it's starting to click a little bit. And now we're starting to take ownership of our journey. We're starting to make intentional decisions uh on moving forward. We're now starting to develop a skill to quote unquote listen to our body. And that's something that I see a lot of on social media, and people are asking questions, and the response from others is oh, you just you have to listen to your body. And I can tell you that is something that takes time to develop, it is a skill that you must learn, it's not something that you automatically get. You have to learn how to read the signals that your body is telling you and differentiate between what your brain is saying and what your body is saying, because sometimes they may not be the same. And so it takes skill and experience to understand that and differentiate when my brain is saying that I'm tired, but my body isn't necessarily saying I'm as tired as my brain says it is, then I have to say, no, my brain is telling me I'm tired because there has to be some level of insecurity that I'm kind of dealing with, and I'm not taking ownership of something, or if I'm uncertain, but my body is ready. I just have to prove to my mind that I'm ready. Now, I don't want you to say it's like, okay, my mind says that I can do a 70.3, but my body says no, so I'm gonna prove to my body that I can do it. That doesn't necessarily work that way. I don't want you to think that that you have to prove it by taking on something that you may not be particularly ready for because that is a signal that you should pay attention to and do not discount those signals. But there there are times where it's you're sitting in the bed at in the morning and you're just like, man, I really just don't want to get up and I don't want to swim. I'm tired, I want to wait, maybe I'll do it later. And some sometimes that's just something that you just have to say, nope, I have to get this, I want to get this done. I don't want us to start saying that I have to do this. I want us to get to the point where we're saying, I want to do this, because if I want to do it, then it makes it a little bit easier to execute and you're a little bit more, I don't want to say bought into the process, but you don't treat it as something that that has to be done as like a task and something that you have to check the box for. It's something that you want to do, and you want to be intentional about it. Having this time to understand what your body is telling you, making the intentional decisions that you must make in order to accomplish the goals that you have set out to accomplish, and you're taking ownership of your training, this is what feeds into this identity shift from being a participant and just doing a sprint or doing an Olympic to actually becoming an experienced athlete. And this is one of the things that that I love being a coach is when I start to see this shift in my athletes. And I'm very purposeful when I talk to my athletes, that I refer to them as my athletes. These are just not people that I coach. I am very intentional about the words that I use with them because I want to feed into this shift of identity from participant to athlete, and I want to contribute to that. I want to help that grow. I want to foster that development, and I don't want to perpetuate this self-deprecation or this hindrance of thinking of yourself as something more than what you are. Okay, so the next step is I want to talk about where guidance matters. Some of the common issues that I've come across as a coach is I come across a lot of athletes that are confused. They really just don't know what to do. They are bombarded with information from all over the place. They've gotten on social media and gotten tips on training from people that they don't know. Those people don't know them, don't have any insight into their abilities, where they are in their journey. They're just telling them what they did, and it may not be necessarily appropriate for them. They've gone on and they've asked ChatGPT or some AI-based platform on what kind of training plan should I do for this, or what should I consider for this. And these AI platforms aren't taking into account things like injury histories and the demands on their life and how schedules can change and evolve and how the training plan must adapt to those changes in order for it to be executable. So they're confused as to what it is that they should be doing, how often they should be doing it, at what intensity levels they should be doing it, should I be doing track work in order to get faster? If I have an athlete who's 20 years old and they say I want to get faster, I may be inclined to give them track work. But if I'm working with somebody who's in their 50s who has arthritis and all kinds of other factors that they have to take into account at their particular age through no fault of their own, it would be malpractice for me to give that same athlete the workouts that I would give a 20-year-old. It doesn't work that way. You also have scenarios where people have plateaued, and this is where they kind of start to see because I'm not getting any faster. No matter what I've done, uh, I'm not able to either bike at a faster pace or increase my FTP. I'm not able to decrease my 100s in the pool, so I can't get faster in the water. I just don't seem to have the endurance in order to do that, or my running isn't progressing, I'm not getting faster, I'm not getting stronger, and I've plateaued and I don't know what to do. You also have a lot of scenarios where people are just frustrated if they've tried and they've tried different approaches, they've read different books, they've talked to all kinds of different people, but they're just frustrated, they don't know what to trust, and so now the path is no longer obvious for these people, and so it's hard for them to make a decision on what they should achieve next because there is so much uncertainty, and this is where having either somebody you trust, plus like you trust them no matter what, or you have the guidance of a good coach. Now, not all coaches are good coaches, so you really have to evaluate what you're being told, but you want I want you to rely on people that you do trust. A good coach is not going to complicate the scenario. What really they should be doing is simplifying things and not making things more complicated, because the simplicity is what really matters, and that's what starts to diffuse the insecurity and uncertainty. If I give, if I walk up to an athlete who I've been working with, and they're a little bit confused or they're just frustrated, and I start giving them more and more complicated workouts, and I'm really not explaining things in a simple way, and I'm really complicating it. What that does is it's just going to continue to perpetuate the situation. It's not going to diffuse it, and that's not me providing guidance, that's me providing more complication into an already complicated situation. In closing, I want to urge you to not rush into your next step. There's no hurry in things. We have races and there will be races. There's absolutely no need for you to jump into a race out of fear of missing out or fear of losing out on opportunities. Uh, I don't want you to make decisions under those scenarios because most of the time I find that those decisions end up being wrong decisions. I want us to make the decision that is right for us, i.e. you. If I'm your coach, I want to make a decision that's right for us as a team, for where you are right now, that fits into the life that you have right now, something that you can execute going forward, and doesn't leave you feeling overwhelmed and scared. I want you to make small steps and really limit those situations where you're making a big step. So I'll tell you a little bit of a story on how I approached my journey. Is I was in my 30s, and I think I was like around 35 or so, and I said I made the choices, I want to be, I want to do an Iron Man, and I'm gonna give myself five years to get there. I just pulled five years because I was 35 and I wanted to do an Iron Man by the time I turned 40. That was effectively the plan. So the approach that I used was okay, I'm gonna do a sprint this year. My goal for this sprint is to just finish. Next year, I'm going to do a couple more sprints, and my goal is to get faster or stronger, or some kind of improvement. And then at towards the later part of that year, I'm gonna do an Olympic. But my goal for the Olympic is just to finish. So year one, sprint, year two, a couple more sprints with an Olympic at the end. The next the year three, I say, I'm gonna do a couple Olympics, and we'll see if I'm ready for a 70.3, depending on how the Olympics go. I think they actually went pretty well, so I did do my first 70.3 in year three. Year four, I said, okay, now I'm gonna do a couple more 70.3s, and I'm really gonna fine-tune that process during year four. Because I know that I'm not ready for an Iron Man, I'm not ready for to execute the training of an Iron Man and the emotional and mental side of the game, I'm not ready for it. So I stuck with the 70.3s and really just fine-tuned that process, tried to get better, tried to do things that were right. And then when the time was right in year five, I executed the first Iron Man. And so that was how I progressed. I didn't just say, hey, I have to do the next level. I said, I want to stick with the introduction of that particular distance and then fine-tune that execution and then make a small step up to the next step, but not have any expectations at all, just looking to finish. And so that's how I went through it. There was no urgency with it, there was no need to rush. I did have friends that were telling me, hey, you're ready, just go ahead and just go for it. But I knew better. I knew that my mind was not ready for it, and even though I probably could have finished, I can't say that my experience during that process would put me in a situation where I would have done another one. That might have resulted in me just being a one and done kind of athlete, and that's not what I really wanted for myself. So I I relied on asking people that I really did trust, hey, what do you think about this? And they would give me feedback and then I'd take that in and I'd evaluate it and say, okay, based on what these people are telling me, how do I see this now? How do I see this working with me? Because I'm the one that's got to execute it, not them. So I knew that I didn't have anything that I needed to prove to anybody. Really, I was proving all this stuff to myself. I didn't have anything that I needed to prove to others. And so, really, my thought process was I'm going to reflect on what's working, what's not working, where I want to go. I understood myself, I knew understood my body, the way that it worked, what I could adapt from, what I could absorb. Uh, did I make bad decisions? Absolutely. Uh, I did things wrong, some things I did right, but I had intentionality in that process and would take steps along the way. So, what I find is that athletes who succeed long term, they move forward with intention and not through reaction or out of a sense of urgency. I want us to make good decisions, sound decisions with well thought out limitations, next steps. This is what it means to shift from being a participant to being an athlete. There is intentionality that we start to overlay on this process, and that's what I find really contributes to long term success in athletic development. So I want to thank you guys for joining me in this episode. This has been truly a rewarding series to work on. I'm really I'm really glad that I decided to do this series. So it's been the Triathlon 101. At the moment, there's eight episodes that are planned. I'm not saying that I won't come back and maybe produce a few more episodes as things start to develop and things that I learn as a coach and things that I start to see within the industry or the athletes that I work with. I'm not going to say that this is the end of the series, but this is kind of the end of where I have this series planned as of right now. I really do hope that you've enjoyed this series. I hope that it's taught you something. I hope that it's given you the guidance that you have needed in the moments that you've needed it. I really do hope that's the case. Again, if you have any questions, I don't want you to hesitate. You can always reach out to me. You can go to the Tabula Rasa Racing website, send me a message, go to any of the Tabula Rasa Racing Facebook social media channels. You can message me there as well. My email addresses are out there. Please don't hesitate to reach out. I'm happy to help any way that I can. If you are looking for coaching options through Tabula Rasa Racing, something that you have heard within maybe an episode or multiple episodes really resonated with you and stuck with you, I want I would encourage you to go out and listen to some of the other stuff that I have on the website. I've got stuff on my background and my backstory and how I got started, my coaching philosophy. And I think that you've gotten a pretty good understanding on what my philosophy is and how I approach training and guiding athletes. But I do have other stuff that's out there, some blog articles that have been written. Really kind of do your due diligence and reach out to me. I do have options that are available that are not just custom, like one-on-one, one-on-one coaching, if that's not something that you're ready for. I do have other options that are available to you. But feel free to reach out to me and I'm happy to talk with you about any of those and do whatever I can to help you on your journey. So again, thank you guys so much. If you've been listening to this on the Endurance Athlete Journey podcast, thank you. I really value what this brings to my life by doing the podcast and doing these series. I absolutely love this. And I thank you for the support that you continue to show towards the podcast. If you don't know what I'm talking about and you're just watching this on YouTube, check it out. It's called the Endurance Athlete Journey Podcast. I'm one of the co-hosts of that show. And with I coach with Coach Katie Cassane, who is a registered dietitian out of Fort Collins, Colorado, long time runner, and does dietetics for all sports. We do a multiple episodes per week series or shows. I hope that you will check those out. There's at the time that I'm recording this, there's about 85, 86 episodes. So we have an pretty extensive library so far, and there will be more episodes to come. So check us out. We're on any of the major podcast platforms. So you can wherever you get your podcast content from. If you've enjoyed this episode or any of the other episodes of this series, feel free to leave a comment or a review, whether you're listening to it through the audio only or on YouTube. I do monitor all that stuff all the time. I'm happy to answer any questions or comments that you have. Those are greatly appreciated. So again, thank you guys so much for joining me with Triathlon 101, a beginner's guide to triathlon. I've been your host, Coach Justin. I'm head coach and owner of Tabula Rasa Racing. And until next time, my friends, happy training, everyone. That's it for today's episode of Triathlon 101, a beginner's guide to triathlon, an endurance athlete journey podcast series. Remember, you don't need to have everything figured out right now. Progress in triathlon comes from consistency, patience, and taking the right next step. If something you heard today sparked a question or gave you a little more confidence, that means you're moving in the right direction. Stick with this series as we continue breaking down triathlon one step at a time, building confidence before distance, and focusing on a process that actually fits real life. Until next time, trust the process, keep showing up, and remember, you're becoming an endurance athlete long before you ever cross that finish line.