Building Your Triathlon Performance Team: Part 1 - Family

This is Part 1 of a 6-part series on building and maintaining your support team for optimal training and racing success.

As we look to building and maintaining that performance "TEAM" around us, for triathlon or any other endurance sport especially, the family has to come first above and beyond all. I'd like to expand that word "family" to also include friends and coworkers. Think of your performance family like the "social" part of your performance team. We all need interactions with other humans. For many of us, the sport itself provides that outlet and ability to socialize with other like-minded people.

Keep training in perspective

Furthermore, family helps us step away from sport and remember that there's way more to life than training. Let's face it, the three-year-olds really don't care if you crushed your tempo run or not.

If you don't have a family at home, developing that outlet through non-sport friends is really important. I have a few friends that have zero interest in training, and I value the ability to get out of the 24/7 sports science podcasts constantly playing in my head when I hang out with them. A friend that never finished an Ironman can't really appreciate how hard it is, but they also don't really care. And sometimes having people that don't care too much can be good for us ;-).

My favorite example of this is actually from my sister. She was 8 years old and I had just won my first triathlon overall. And it was on my birthday! I was super stoked and when someone at church asked how I had done, I was excitedly telling them that I won. My sister was totally nonplussed and corrected me: "No Mark, you didn't win. Just your Age Group." I had to let her know that I had in fact ACTUALLY won the race, not just my Age Group. Leave it to family to be totally unimpressed with even an age group victory.

Work with a Triathlon Coach to Prioritize

My household is just me and my wife, so I won't pretend to offer any advice on how to run one with kids. What I do want to do is reassure you that as you work with any of our Paragon Training coaches, know that we want to work alongside you to prioritize the family side of your life, while also helping you get fast! Never hesitate to be honest about what needs to be prioritized as we work with the "athlete" part of your life.

There are a lot of uncontrollables in work/family/relationships. However, if at all possible, I like to try and think ahead in order to work with the ebb and flow of our various commitments.

4 Practical tips for planning your training and racing, with family and other social relationship commitments in mind:

1. Does your work have seasons that are usually extra busy? If so, it's probably best not to schedule a big event at the end of that busy season. It only took me 3 Ironman training blocks and races to realize that June was always a crazy month for me and I realistically shouldn't hope to train 15+ hours a week during June.

2. Can you engage with friends and outside relationships more during certain times of the year, acknowledging that you may have to say "no" more during other times, because bedtime is early that weekend? 

3. Does your family know that you're doing an Ironman and will be doing 6+ hour bike rides every weekend in the last 8 weeks preceding the race? Sometimes, what may seem obvious to coach and athlete isn't as obvious to spouse or kids. Making sure everyone is on board with what will actually be required from ALL contributors during the training cycle is key.

4. Be conscious. of the overall stress "bucket" that may come from relationships (or lack thereof). Emotional stress is real stress and our body reacts very similar to that as it does to a hard tempo run, maybe even more so.

   
   

Whatever your level of family commitment and responsibilities, being conscious of how that contributes and impacts your athletic goals is an important step in building that team around you. 

Part 2 on Building your Performance Team will focus on the coach.