Elevate Your Performance with Our Post-Race Assessment Framework
There is no lack of information to help athletes prepare for triathlon and endurance races and events. Training methodologies, nutrition plans, race tactics, mindset, etc. All are explored in great detail. What is often missing, however, is a constructive framework for evaluating race performance. Post-race assessment strategies help inform you not only for how you fared in each race, but also how to apply to your future training and racing to ensure growth. Let’s fix that and dive in.
Let’s Get Cracking:
Let’s go through our framework and toolkit to ensure you come out with something that every athlete can benefit from -- clarity on race performance.
How to Position Racing within Your Performance Journey:
Framing races: Before we reveal some of the approaches we utilize for triathlon race assessment, it is important to appreciate how racing fits into your overall performance journey. We also want to be clear on we are aiming to accomplish with our race assessments. Getting this part right will help with a smart and pragmatic approach to your race review.
Races are a part of the performance journey: We discuss this in pre-race mindset education, but let’s return to the theme here. A single race is never a definition of your self-worth as an athlete or person. You can never claim to have it all figured out off the back of a single great performance, and you are equally no failure because of a tough race. The greatest champions have found their way to the top by navigating plenty of setbacks and poor race performances. The key is they learned from the experiences and applied the lessons to future training and racing. A race is only ever a stepping stone in the journey of your performance evolution, so let’s reduce the angst and tension around a single performance. You are then suited to learn and implement the lessons.
Don’t take the performance challenges personally: Whether a bad race or just a poor part of a race, many athletes immediately jump to associating a poor performance as a personal failure. By falling into making an assessment personal, it only clouds the opportunity to learn and grow. It is normal to get frustrated with a poor performance, and it is okay to be upset if things don’t go well. But, it is important to move past the grieving and learn soon after the event. There are always lessons.
Seek growth, not blame: Lessons always bubble up, but if you (and your coach/team) commit to assessment through the lens of growth, then the process will retain high value. If you fall trap to applyng blame or, even worse, seeking excuses for your performance, then little value can come from it.
Learn from the good as much as the tough: When a triathlon or endurance race performance goes wrong, it is typical for an athlete to put the race performance onto the slab and perform a thorough autopsy across every element to source the reason for the performance. Excel, and it is off to the bar to celebrate. So many coaches and athletes bypass a massive opportunity to understand.
A Pragmatic Approach to Review and Assessment:
Assessment: OK, get out the tools, it is time to begin the assessment. Let’s ensure we do this right. A few key points to ensure that your triathlon race assessment is as effective as possible:
Give yourself 48 hours before really digging in. Any post-race emotions will cloud honesty, whether euphoria or distress. A little breathing room is always valuable. The same goes when you respond to an email that annoys you. Always give yourself 24 hours before the response.
Approach it with brutal honesty. By not taking it personally, you cement the quest that you are seeking lessons and growth. You will only get to these with absolute honesty with yourself. This takes a little bravery but feels much better than those who seek excuses for themselves, either with their preparation or their race.
Cast a wide net. Your assessment should cover more than the time you are racing. You will want to come up to a level and think back across life and training for the whole lead-up. We seek insights into what contributed to the promotion of good performance, or what impacted the chance to shine. The answers arrive out of more than simply the race day.
Here are some of the key things we look at -- including some specific examples -- to help with your assessment. We should realize that a healthy assessment can be a real mix of quantifiable and qualitative review. Both are helpful, so we added a note following each to show how these combine for a broad picture of your race performance. As always, we like to keep things as simple as possible, as over-complication to make things sexy is a fool's errand.
Race lead up: Athletes frequently become subconsciously selective when assessing triathlon and endurance race performance, building a case for their emotional reaction, instead of seeking honest clarity. Many also fall into the trap of short-term memory. Races can go great, or wrong, on the back of a lead-up into the race day, so this is worth reviewing. Remember, honesty is best, as we are not seeking blame on anyone. We are seeking lessons.
Global review: Take out a pen and paper and review your training and life in the weeks building up to an event. How did things go? If you arrived at the event weekend with a desperation to have this race over with, you were likely carrying accumulated fatigue. Was the lead-up peppered with life stress or poor sleep? How was your health profile? Reflect and paint an honest reflection.
Consistency: How was your consistency? Did you create a sense of performance predictability, or were you training with wild fluctuations of inconsistency? Look for patterns that might bring insights.
Life factors (sleep, nutrition, consistency): Don’t stop your review at ‘I never missed a session.’ We must look for supporting habits that might have been bypassed or poorly executed, and not to source blame, but instead to find ways to grow.
Race planning and mindset: Did you have a clear understanding of how you planned to tackle the event? Were you bridled with the anxiety or fear of outcomes? If so, then you can appreciate an area to develop into the following events.
My quantifiable results: Following a review of your lead-up, you are equipped to dive into your actual results. Here lie some really important areas to review, but let’s first appreciate what isn’t overly helpful. You don’t gain much from simply looking at your end splits or time to provide real insight into performance. Race courses vary in terrain, distance (really), and environmental factors. It is why we always encourage athletes to avoid looking at the swim time when emerging from the water, as it just doesn’t provide helpful insight mid-race. Instead:
Get into the habit of looking at your outcomes by discipline relative to the top 3-5 athletes in your category. Ignore the pros, as they have a different race experience, but the top of the pile provides perspective. Don’t get down if your splits are a long way off, you are not seeking judgment. Rather, you are seeking insights into the top standard.
Evaluate your deviation from the mean. You can crunch the data in your age group to equalize your performance relative to course and environment, which can give you another angle on how you did. Relate this to historical races, and the picture becomes more clear.
Crunch the data. The obvious next step is to review the data from your various gadgets and meters. GPS, power meter, heart rate. You can glean plenty from the data captured across the disciplines. We can’t go into deep specifics in this piece, as the topic is a book chapter in itself, but do realize that average power for a bike course, or average pace for a run course, seldom provides deep and full insight into how well you performed in the race.
My self-Assessment on execution: Of equal importance to the quantifiable assessment is your honest qualitative review. The art of racing is a craft that requires nurturing and development. How did you do? Really. Did you bring all the assets that you could? Let’s dig in:
Did you control all you could control? During the race, did you succeed in staying on mission? No matter what happened, did you stay focused on trying to go as fast as you could in each piece?
Did you solve problems and adversity well? Was there anything you would change?
How did the pacing go? Could you retain form when fatigue crept up?
What insights can you draw from your fueling and hydration? Energy levels throughout the day? GI distress or anything else?
What I did well: As drawn out as it seems, the above personal review can leave you a laundry list of things that didn’t work out as planned. Some of these were in your control, others were likely not. With a lens of looking forward, I would finish your review with a list of the lead-up and race aspects that you felt you did really well. Even in tougher performances, there was likely a bunch of stuff done really well. List them. Be kind to yourself. Keep this simple and honest, but you should end with a good list of positives.
Where I can improve: Now comes your next list, similar to a pros and cons outline. This is where it gets fun, as you will have a list of areas to improve. That’s the journey right there. Don’t think about the areas or situations in which things didn’t go well as failures. Don’t take the poorly executed pieces as personal failures. Instead, seek growth. Map a list of aspects that you can improve in future training or race execution.
Integrating Lessons for Future Improvements:
Implementing for the future: By the time you have finished your assessment, drawing from some of the suggestions we outlined above, you might begin to feel overwhelmed. Even without the complete review of training prep and race execution, we are positive you will have a pretty long laundry list of successes and struggles. Just the list alone won’t help much. We have never seen an athlete implement change across fifteen things at once, and those who have try will likely get overwhelmed.
Your best path to implementing change is to filter your areas to double down on (the success), and those which should be prioritized for change (the improvements). This is how you link a single race experience into training for the following race, and how you link one race performance to another, to build athlete progression. It is worth remembering that one of my biggest points of pride at the pro and elite level is the success we had with the long-term development of athletes over many seasons. This applies to you too. Just like Meredith Kessler, Tim Reed, Jesse Thomas, Sarah Piampiano, Rachel Joyce, and all the Purple Patch pros, we don’t seek a single race or season performance. We want the work for any season to flow into the next. Link it up, and it becomes the ‘journey.’ You can draw massive insight and performance progression by viewing your development through this lens. From any race, simply look to:
Retain and double down on the more important positive aspects of the race.
Evolve the approach to no more than three aspects that would benefit from growth.
To get to these accessible areas of focus, simply review your list. Be honest, and seek the areas that provide your greatest performance evolution potential. For one athlete, it might be a deep dive into performance nutrition. For another, it might be calmer (or more aggressive) pacing on the bike. This is where a coach can really help. To filter focus and help you define your best yield to change.
By not changing too much, but simply looking for aspects to evolve that will provide the best short and long-term yield, you can expect incremental improvement in preparation, craft, and execution.
It sounds like quite a process doesn’t it? It can be, but shouldn’t be. At Purple Patch, we don’t believe a race review should take more than 60 minutes, with follow-up discussions likely similar. The paralysis of analysis is very real, so don’t fall into obsession. Draw the lessons and scribble the results. And, do it with a commitment to the journey of performance. It makes it fun.
An objective lens (coaches) to help assess performance:
Coaches can help frame an athlete’s perspective on performance and training. Take some time to help yourself by speaking with one of our coaches to frame what you can do to improve your performance.