Strengths and Weaknesses

In triathlon they say you have to work on the sport you're least proficient at and remain strong on the ones you're fast at. If you're good at the three disciplines, good for you, you're one of the few who can swim, bike and run strong. For the rest of us there's always this one or two things we really need to improve upon.

On my first ever bike ride - the mtb wasn't mine and look at them badminton shoes :)

I've been doing this swim bike run thing for quite some time now to know my own strengths and weaknesses in endurance sports. It's easy for me to say that in triathlon I am an average swimmer, an average runner and a slow biker. I did work on my cycling but unfortunately I didn't improve much. Caring for my past knee injury prevented me from going hard on my cycling workouts. For an in depth look of my own weaknesses here are some things I've considered.

My first 10K Run - I trained for 4 weeks and finished in 60 minutes

Training - Strength: structured 

Weakness: workouts are short and I tend to have long lay offs every now and then sometimes it could last for a couple of months. 

Acclimation - Strength: I'm accustomed to heat and there were times temperature on the race course gave me reason to quit but I didn't and learned to love it at times.

Weakness: Rain and cold weather is always a problem for me.

Mental Toughness - I admire people who could endure the sport in different places, terrains, time and conditions; something which I can't simply do. I can't sign up for a mountain run not because I'm uncomfortable with trails, I'm more than uncomfortable - afraid is more accurate. Night gives me the creeps as proven in my last Audax ride which led me to pass up on Audax 600.

Execution - Strength: I've been to some races and finished them all, I can also go pretty hard on short distances... who doesn't?

Weakness: Inconsistency and my own porta potty issue - always.

Swim - I'm an average swimmer, on a 1.9K course I could finish in 34 to 39 minutes depending on course conditions.

Bike - By now most of you probably know how slow I could go on the bike so definitely this is my Achilles Heel. My last 90K ride on a very easy course was 3:01.

Run - Depending on the distance I could go from average to horrendous. On standard distance triathlon I'm your average runner always hoping for a 43 to 50 split but anything longer than that and I'm seriously a crawler at times, I had a 2:32 run split where I just couldn't fathom how I finished that one but my last run off the bike was 2:01 though.

Note: Since I started triathlon I swore I would only devote much time in running if ever I become a strong biker. But for some reason I never even reached a point where I could consider myself average in cycling. In hindsight I could have concentrated in running and probably become a better runner by now BLEH!