Rise of the Super Vets

It's easy to tell that the race season is in full swing due to all the discussion about performance, and training protocols. When considering both these topics, I like to remind myself:

• Our brains do best at spotting the differences between philosophies, rather that finding the unifying threads that run through success.
• Our emotional response to others has more to do with ourselves, than the stimuli.
• If I find myself more concerned about the actions of others, than my own actions. I need to take a break and figure out what is driving me to care so much.

Having another person think that my philosophy is right does a lot less for me than living a philosophy that I know to be effective.

We can waste a fair amount of time trying prove each other to be wrong. More often, we're both right!

With that opener - I am going to share some ideas about what I expect is going to happen in our sport over the next five years.

I'll paint a picture:

• The historical explosion of participation in Ironman
• Coaches writing weekly, and publicly, about performance
• Increased competition for Ironman Hawaii and Clearwater slots

What does all this mean?

I can't tell you what it means for you, personally, but I can make some observations about what it means for us, generally.

We are going to have a lot more people racing long and these people are going to be much better informed about how to prepare and race.

With a massive increase in the racing population, the depth of the top 1% of the field is going to tighten considerably.

Boston lets in up to 20,000 athletes, Kona less than 2,000. If you check the average finishing time of 1,000th place in Kona over the last 20 years then you'll see that it's been dropping by more than an hour per decade (11:34 last year). It is safe to say that, on average, the fast are getting faster.

While the development of running might hold clues to our future -- by its nature -- we lose our best runners because they wear out so fast from the necessary training. Triathlon enables us to stretch the damage across decades!

Sure most the athletes that reach the pinnacle burn out but many more simply back off, or change direction:

• Hellriegel and Lance are 40 in 2011
• Luc Van Lierde is the same age as me already
• Tom Evans is older than me and still crushing everyone

While we might have to wait until the 45-49 for some of the above to race amateur... for each big name we can think of... there are many other Super Vets. Have you heard of Frank Vytrisal or Greg Fraine?

No Easy Way,
gordo