February 2024 Triathlon Progress Tracker
Continuous monitoring of your fitness routine is key for staying on track with your goals.
I intend on making this post reflective. I want to share with you the process of identifying obstacles and limitations that might be getting in the way of achieving my fitness goals.
My hope is that this will inspire you to start thinking about your fitness routine this past month and being honest on what you can do to move closer to your goal next month!
My Olympic-length Triathlon goals
I’m keeping track of my endurance to build confidence for my longer races this summer.
Intensity is another key performance metric to make sure I’m pacing myself. The goal for offseason is to limit intensity level and focus on slow and steady training. Over time, I will build my endurance to handle the longer duration races with less strain on my cardiovascular system.
Progress Ring Tracker: The value in the middle represents my completion status goal (average). The blue line represents the actual proportion of my completion status goal achieved in the month of February 2024.
Progress Bar Tracker: These charts represent my average intensity goal for each activity.
Boosting Confidence with Data
Visualizing my data in charts helps me gain a new perspective of my training progress. I think it can be easy to feel discouraged if we don’t feel significant gains after a few weeks of training. Or maybe we might feel overwhelmed by how much we have to achieve in order to meet our goals. I think that’s why many of us tend to over do it and burnout. It takes practice to learn how to gradually work towards our goals.
Over the last month, I’ve focused on staying consistent with my swimming and indoor cycling schedule. However, it’s been challenging to find the energy to go out on long runs. As the end of the month approached, I became nervous about my progress and my level of readiness for my upcoming triathlon season. I’ve had doubts about my swimming and running endurance. Particularly, that familiar fear of getting back into open water has returned - the specific visual of a crowd of other swimmers splashing and waving their arms in my face.
But when I make time to review my progress data in chart-form, I feel a sense of relief because the numbers show me that I’m actually making a little bit of progress since the beginning of the year! My swim pace is getting faster…I’m able to maintain a steady intensity during my cycling interval sessions for a longer period of time…and my running pace is actually improving!
So my training is paying off - phew! I think this is a good segway to talking more about visualizing our success. Transforming those negative and unhelpful visuals into positive visuals of our future experiences. Stay tuned to learn more in next month’s e-newsletter!
Share with me how you have been staying focused on your goals.
Remember, staying focused means maintaining a positive attitude even during times of adversity. It’s not about perfection.
How have you found the motivation to rise from a setback?
I would love to hear from you.