Triathlon training: focus on faults
August 4th, 2008 by Nikola Tosic
Conrad Stoltz
I started and I manage a club here, in my home away from South Africa :), and recently we had a surge of new members. As I talk to them I realized how much focus there is on their qualities. I speak to them and coaches how one is strong, another one is a good swimmer, someone else is tall and lean. They are all very excited because they hear good things and this is not planned, it just happens.
Than I tried to remember by beginnings almost five years ago, how I also was very excited about what is good about me for triathlon. But now I am extremely focused on what I do badly, almost to the point of depression. I think, in some weird way, that this is natural and great.
It is necessary to be positive in the first season, to get the whole training thing into a daily routine, but to make a breakthrough in your result one must be focused on faults and dwell on even them daily. I am a bad swimmer and that is not much of a problem, I am still at top 8-10% of the field when I get on the bike (I swim 57-58 min easy which is not top level but just enough for me).
However my cycling is far from great. Even though I can cycle easy 34/35kmh average I still lack a lot of skills and natural aggression and strength to overcome some race specific situations and so my result still suffers (my recent 5:23 on one of the fastes bike courses in Ironman series is depressing).
My running has been working well for two seasons as I place in top few % with my marathon result and I almost do not even think about the run anymore, I just maintain it. My coach is focusing everything on my bike as it is my main fault. Not on my endurance but that little something that I do not have for the bike. Opposed to guys and girls who are mostly much stronger than me, my body which is designed for long running, is not great for power cycling. As I am very efficient on a flat course with constant wind, any curves, rain, and hills distract me and I am not able to overcome that. I need that essential strength.
Anyway, to return to the main point, thanks to working with a coach from day one, my focus was always on what I do badly. My training is very critical yet constructive. It is also about long term goals. If I do one thing well I am sure I will not work on this much, I will focus on exactly those things I do badly and I will hate it but it will pay off.
Also all my training is never for the next race but for some race in few years from now. This is a concept that I like. I have done zero gym work this year and our goal was to get a result going with no strength work. Gym should help me a lot with the bike but I am happy I was able to do the result that I have done with a horribly slow bike and no gym work whatsoever.
My advice, if I am in any position to give advice, is to work on what you do worst. For this you need to be as objective as possible and this is why coaches are important. However it is dangerous to also neglect everything else - I know coaches who started working with national level swimmers and eventually, even if these swimmers became top triathletes, their swimming went down season after season and this is a problem of too much focus on what was not working well: running.
The most common problem is with triathletes that bike well and than focus mostly on the bike and hate the swim and the run. Especially the run which requires a more scientific aproach than cycling.
I hope this inspires some triathletes a bit to be more depressed yet successful. Joke! 
